Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Discover the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey
'Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable' Guardian
At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. Hailed as both the 'black Moses' and merely 'a Negro with a hat', he masterminded the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, began the Universal Negro Improvement Association and captivated audiences with his powerful speeches and audacious 'Back to Africa' programme. But he was to end his life in penury, ignominy and friendless exile, after serving jail time in both the US and Jamaica.
With masterful skill, wit and compassion, Colin Grant chronicles Garvey's extraordinary life, the failed business ventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death. This is the dramatic cautionary tale of a man who articulated the submerged thoughts of an awakening people.
'Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research ...Grant show's Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity and his paradoxes' Independent on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marcus Garvey, the charismatic organizer of the Back-to-Africa Movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), remains a revered and disparaged figure whose influence on African American history and thought is profound. In this comprehensive biography, BBC radio producer Grant follows Garvey from his childhood and early peregrinations through Central America and England to his ventures in the United States-the phenomenal growth of the UNIA, the tortuous history of the Black Star Line, the collapse of both. Convicted of mail fraud, later deported, Garvey died in London. Garvey biographers have tended to focus on the UNIA, but Grant's book is richly evocative of the times and places in which he lived (pre-World War I Jamaica and England, the Harlem Renaissance) and the people who mentored, admired, and quarreled with him-Grant's attention to the exceptional women in Garvey's life, particularly his wives Amy Ashwood and later Amy Jacques is especially noteworthy. Garvey, the radical journalist and editor (The Negro World), emerges more fully than usual, with all his contradictions present. Dense with detail, but consistently readable, this splendid book is certain to become the definitive biography. Garvey was a dreamer and a doer; Grant captures the fascination of both.
