ABSTRACT
As she prepared for a television interview in 1968, Amy Jacques Garvey identified herself for the program’s host as the “widow of Marcus Garvey-Jamaica’s First National Hero” and as the “author of four books on the life of this remarkable man.”2 From the time she met and married Black Nationalist Marcus Mosiah Garvey until she died in 1973, Jacques Garvey carried that mantra of companion, wife, and “main propagandist”3 for the Garvey Movement. Her role as Garvey’s wife, and later, his widow, surpassed all others in her view. She, therefore, dedicated her life to advancing her husband’s views while Garvey served as head of a movement that sought to repatriate blacks to Africa, while he was in prison for alleged mail fraud from 1925 to 1927, and after his death in 1940.4
Although Jacques Garvey has received acclaim for her works about Marcus Garvey and as a racial activist, her career as a journalist rarely is acknowledged. Nevertheless, during the 1920s, Jacques Garvey served as an associate editor and women’s page editor of The Negro World, the weekly newspaper her husband published. From February 1924 through November 1927, Jacques Garvey wrote some one hundred fifty editorials and articles for The Negro World. The editorials were the means through which she advocated the Garvey Movement’s philosophy of black self-help, race pride, nationalism, black repatriation to Africa, and the dire effects of what she saw as white exploitation of weaker nations. Jacques Garvey also spoke throughout the United States to champion Garveyism and to crusade for her husband’s release from prison.
