Amy Jacques Garvey

“This book offers something that has been very much needed in Garvey scholarship—an accessible reader of Amy Jacques Garvey’s editorials aimed both for the general reader and the college classroom. Parascandola does a service by selecting from a broad range of topics and presenting Jacques Garvey’s editorials in an easily read and intellectually challenging format.”—Barbara Bair, historian at the Library of Congress and associate editor with Robert Hill and others of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers

Amy Jacques Garvey was one of the most prolific women within any Black nationalist group, yet she has largely only been discussed in relationship to her husband, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and as the editor of the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Much of her writing has remained unavailable to the public, lost to the archives, until now. Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings from the Negro World, 1923–1928 seeks to fill this void by making her writings in the Negro World widely available for the first time.

Editor Louis J. Parascandola compiles a wide swath of Jacques Garvey’s work in this groundbreaking collection. Born and educated in Jamaica, Jacques Garvey’s atypical opportunity to receive education at elite Jamaican schools, along with her later jobs as a clerk and secretary, prepared her for future positions as journalist and political administrator. She also possessed the rhetorical skills and independent thinking that would help her challenge Marcus Garvey and the other men in Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). In allowing Jacques Garvey’s work to largely speak for itself, the volume reveals that she concerned herself with a diversity of important and often controversial political and social issues rather than the stereotypical domestic matters expected of most woman’s pages of the time period.

By examining her selected writings in the Negro World, this volume affords its readers a better understanding of Jacques Garvey’s powerful contribution not only to Garveyism but also to the growth of Black radical thought, anti-imperialist ideology, and the rights of third-world women. This timely study sheds new light on Jacques Garvey’s pivotal role as a Black female writer and thinker during the twenties.