W.A.Wallace, Commissioner for Michigan. “What Is The Marcus Garvey Movement, or the Universal Negro Improvement Association? “ (Detroit, ca. 1922) 4 x 5.5, 4pp. Like most original early imprints of the Garvey Movement, this imprint is rare. We could locate no copy recorded by WorldCat at any American institution.
This invitation “to attend a meeting” - left blank in this copy - explains the principles of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association : “a Union of the black people of the world, better known as Negroes, on one Organization…instilling in all an appreciation of the race with which they are indelibly stamped. Using this solidarity to build up the industrial, economic, civic and political status of the Negro everywhere by concentrating his small means on large enterprises…… through the avenue of a Steamboat Line, thus bringing him in broader and closer contact with the big business controlling forces of the world…To proclaim and insist that Africa be developed for the African and not exploited for the benefit of alien races…"
Marcus Garvey is most often remembered for his ill-fated “Black Star” shipping and passenger line to Africa, which, after selling stock, went out of business, leading to four years imprisonment for mail fraud. But his larger contribution was for the Black nationalist and Pan-African philosophy enunciated in this pamphlet, which probably antedated his legal troubles. Wallace, the author and a key figure in the Garvey movement, was a graduate of Lincoln University, who gave up a thriving bakery business to head the large Chicago division of the UNIA. He resigned in 1921 to become Garvey “Commissioner” for Michigan until 1927, the year Garvey was pardoned and released; Wallace then assumed responsibility for Missouri, Kansas and Illinois. Ten years later, not tainted by Garvey’s decline, he was elected to the Illinois State Senate, heading a wartime state Commission “on the condition of the Urban Colored Population.”