ABSTRACT
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St. Anns Bay, Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children. Garvey traveled through Europe, and settled for a time in London, England, where he met and worked with Egyptian nationalist Dus Mohamed Ali, an admirer of Booker T. Washington and the publisher of the African Times and Orient Review. In 1914, Garvey returned again to Jamaica with the plan of forming an international black organization that would set up an independent state. The ideology of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) combined the various elements of black nationalism, religious, cultural, economic, and geographicinto a distinctive philosophy. Too many of its followers, the UNIA was a surrogate or civil religion, with Garvey a Black Moses, blacks the Chosen People, and Africa the Promised Land. At the same time, the rituals, symbols, and beliefs of the UNIAs civil religion were sufficiently generalized to permit members to remain in their own particular religious denominations.
