ABSTRACT

This letter was sent by Marcus Garvey to Robert Russa Moton, Booker T. Washington's successor at Tuskegee, on February 29, 1916, from Jamaica shortly before Garvey's first trip to the United States. The attachment outlines Garvey's assessment of the racial situation in Jamaica. Interestingly, many of the issues that Garvey would later raise in the United States were anticipated in the difficulties he reported in Jamaica. This letter can be found in the Robert Russa Moton Papers, Hollis Burke Frissell Library, Tuskegee Institute; it was also printed in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 7 vols., ed. by Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) 1: 177-83 (hereafter cited as MG&UNIA Papers). The original contained a number of hand-written corrections; these have been incorporated into the text.