Thoughts on The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey

Amy Jacques Garvey: The Veiled Garvey

Ula Taylor’s The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, critically reassesses the life of Marcus Garvey’s second wife to highlight the role of women in crafting the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s ideology of Pan-Africanism and black nationalism. Since black nationalism is often conceived as endeavoring to construct a patriarchal nation with black women relegated to traditional gender roles, Taylor argues that women like Amy Jacques Garvey practiced community feminism that influenced the decidedly male-dominated leadership of the UNIA and Pan-Africanism in other organizations. Furthermore, a biography of Amy Jacques Taylor alleviates the problem of narrating her life’s story only in shadows or periphery of the better-known Marcus Garvey. Indeed, Taylor argues that Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and the Pan-Africanist message would not have spread so widely without the dedication, intellectual prowess, insightful writing, and life-long activism of Jacques Garvey.

Perhaps the most obvious theme of the biography, Taylor emphasizes community feminism and defends calling it feminism. Basically, it encompasses all the actions, caretaking, and activism of black women for the community’s benefit because community feminism counters a macropolitical model that implies there is something inherently "pure" or "essential" to feminist theory. By reorienting black feminism to these community-based activities that uplift the entire black community, Taylor endeavors to reconcile black feminism in the UNIA’s patriarchal structure. However, community feminism within the patriarchal context of the UNIA included male chauvinism, expectations of female subordination in the home and public, and traditional gender roles, making it difficult to reconcile the two views. Black nationalism and feminism can be reconciled, something exemplified by Amy Jacques Garvey’s personal life of resisting male authority, writing a column in Negro World for women, and thrusting herself into public and political spaces, such as the Fifth Pan-African Congress or Jamaican political parties such as the PNP.

In addition to highlighting the instrumental role of Jacques Garvey for the intellectual development and a lot of the organizing for the UNIA’s success, she was also an independent thinker and more leftwing than Garvey. Though often essentializing the African diaspora at times to bolster her claims for a united African diaspora,  she  possessed a more class-conscious and internationally-minded view of Pan-Africanism that deviated from the self-help, pro-capitalist attitudes of the UNIA. She never succumbed to redbaiting, and perhaps because of personal experience with raising children as a woman with limited income, fully defended more socialist-minded governments and policies to benefit workers and support social programs. In postcolonial Africa, for example, Jacques Garvey opposed African capitalism that would perpetuate the oppression of the African working masses and poor. She also opposed capitalist governments of Jamaica that resisted investing in public services and a safety net for Jamaica’s overwhelmingly poor, black majority.

Jacques Garvey went to Africa for the first time in the 1960s, something never done by Marcus Garvey, to see the independent West African nations of Nigeria and Ghana. Invited as a special guest of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Jacques Garvey was clearly connected to Pan-Africanist causes and anti-colonial struggles in a way that suggests a better understanding and approach than her deceased husband. Jacques Her actual involvement and relationship with broader Pan-Africanism, especially after the death of Garvey, was also more expansive, far-flung, and connected to anti-colonial leaders and movements, as well as promoting specific policies and plans such as reading groups and pen pals across the African diaspora and Africa to strengthen racial unity in opposition to white supremacy and colonialism. Her collaboration with other Pan-Africanists such as George Padmore and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as emerging anti-colonial leaders like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya connected her with African diasporic figures her husband had a poor relationship with while also showing closer relationship and alliance with African activists. Instead of the old UNIA narrative of African diasporic blacks redeeming Africa through a paternalistic or condescending notion of blacks from the Americas bringing civilization to Africa, Africans have a key role as allies and participants in the creation of the Pan-African goal.

Taylor also explains that Jacques Garvey never fought for some romantic “Back to Africa” movement in the sense it is usually thought of, but rather an effort to overturn colonialism, white supremacy, and raise the living standards of black people everywhere by giving the race more international power and respect. Her critique of the PNP’s refusal to espouse black power or unity in Jamaican politics, coming from a member of Jamaica’s mixed-race elite, is an example of her use of blackness as resistance politically for leftist social policies and Pan-Africanist causes. Taking this into consideration, Jacques Garvey emerges as a savvy political player, intellectual, and ideologue whose stances, though similar to the UNIA, were more engaged in promoting black unity and power in Jamaica, Africa, and the US from a radical leftist perspective than her late husband.

This much needed biography of Jacques Garvey, useful for uncovering an entire dimension of the life of Marcus Garvey, also displays her own neglected contributions to Pan-Africanist and black nationalist politics. She felt ignored and thrust to the backburner of history herself, but Taylor’s biography revives her many contributions to a form of black nationalism often seen as patriarchal. Instead, a more nuanced view lends credence to the reconciliation of community feminism and black nationalism based on the life of Jacques Garvey, whose intellectual, personal, and independent contributions and leadership to the UNIA, Pan-Africanism, and leftism were essential for the success of anti-colonial struggles and black liberation in the US. Indeed, Jacques Garvey understood the Black Power era’s origins as heavily derived from the UNIA and forms of Pan-Africanism she developed through decades of work. Placed in this broader context, Jacques Garvey’s contributions to black nationalism earn their rightful place in the history of black feminist nationalism as well as showing the interplay of feminism, leftism, Pan-Africanism, and decolonization in the 20^th century.