Garvey and Garveyism

Kingston, Jamaica: [United Printers Ltd.], 1963. First edition. Near Fine/Very Good. A Near Fine copy in Very Good dust jacket. Publisher's brown cloth boards titled in silver. Spine a bit cocked, and some slight bumping to corners. Small contemporary ink ownership signature to top of title-page. Dust jacket with some wear to head and tail of spine and to corners, toning to spine, and some scuffing to back panel. A very appealing copy of an important record of the Black nationalist movement by a prominent intellectual and feminist.

In Garvey and Garveyism, Amy Jacques Garvey (1895 - 1973) records the life and philosophy of her late husband, Marcus Garvey (1887 - 1940), a Pan-African and Black nationalist activist best remembered as the founder and first President of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Jacques Garvey was a dedicated compiler of her husband's work, serving for years as his secretary, and the survival of Garvey's biography, writings, and activist philosophies are due in large part to her efforts to record his work. She had previously compiled and published the two-volume The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey in 1923 and 1925, but, by the 1960s, Garvey's influence had waned in Jamaica and she couldn't find a publisher for Garvey and Garveyism; instead, Jacques Garvey undertook the effort to publish the work herself, further demonstrating her commitment to both preserving Garvey's ideas and recording the history of the Black nationalist movement.

Though Jacques Garvey's legacy has often been overshadowed by that of her husband, she was, in her own right, "an independent Pan African intellectual of stellar proportions" (Taylor). Jacques Garvey began her activist career with UNIA in Harlem in 1919 and would eventually become the organization's de facto leader, though she first served as the secretary to Garvey and contributed her writing to the UNIA's newspaper the Negro World. "As a political journalist, Jacques Garvey unfailingly wrote about the shortcomings of Jim Crow America, while simultaneously presenting the UNIA as a viable alternative, creating a refined discourse of race in the United States. Her editorials on the woman's page of...the Negro World destabilized masculinist discourse, offering a glimpse into the range and scope of feminism possible during the 1920s and a model of women as political beings who could change the world. In fact, Jacques Garvey's writings were a key component of early Black feminism" (Taylor).

Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, pp. 1-5. Near Fine in Very Good dust jacket.