Mar 01, 2012 - Sale 2271

Sale 2271 - Lot 316

Price Realized: $ 480
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(GARVEY, MARCUS.) Constitution and Book of Laws, Made for the Government of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Inc, and the African Communities League Inc., of the World. 40 pages. 12mo, original printed pale blue wrappers, stapled. An exceptional copy. New York, 1920
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Additional Details

the first edition of the u.n.i.a. constitution, following a 1918 version (not located, and perhaps not "published"). OCLC locates only two copies of the present printing. A second, "amended" version of the Constitution appeared in 1921. On July 20, 1914, Marcus Garvey, at the age of twenty-eight, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in his native Jamaica. His co-founder was Amy Ashwood, who would later become his first wife. Amy Jacques (her bridesmaid) replaced Ashwood in 1922. The U.N.I.A. was originally conceived as a benevolent or fraternal reform association dedicated to racial uplift and the establishment of educational and industrial opportunities for blacks, taking Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute as a model. However, Garvey's U.N.I.A. had little success in Jamaica. Garvey relocated in the United States in 1916, making New York's Harlem the movement's headquarters. The Harlem branch started with 17 members meeting in a dingy basement. But by the spring of 1918, Garvey's strong advocacy of black economic and political independence had taken hold, and U.N.I.A. branches and divisions were springing up in cities and towns across the country, and then in different parts of the world. By 1920 Garvey claimed nearly a thousand local divisions in the United States, the Caribbean, Central America, Canada and Africa. This booklet ends with a prayer written by John E. Bruce ("Bruce Grit"), Race man and member of the negro academy.