Garvey Vs Dubois Essay

Contrary to Dubois who had a more elitist view on Pan-Africanism by selecting an elite few to guide the Pan-African movement, Marcus Garvey believed in using the common person. What made Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) so successful was that he was able to target a specific audience that the NAACP and W.E.B. Dubois failed to reach and that was the working-class Black Americans. The NAACP never really functioned as a mass movement and failed to acquire an African American following since many Blacks felt that those organizations were only filled with uppity, aristocratic blacks whom sole focus was interracial coalition. (Franklin, 2011, pp. 370-371) Therefore when Marcus Garvey developed the UNIA whose main objective was surrounded around developing racial pride and independency for the “average Joe,” he was able to gather a large following. Garvey and the UNIA fixated their efforts on getting Blacks to become politically and economically independent since many of his principles were grounded from Booker T Washgiton ideals.
Garvey’s wish to launch a steamship company to ease international trade between the blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States illuminated the imagination of Pan-Africanism. Possibly Garvey’s utmost accomplishment was the UNIA’s International Conventions of the Negro Peoples of the World. The first of numerous conventions assembled all of August in 1920. Notwithstanding widespread dispute over attendance records, those in attendance were from all across the African world. Moreover, at this first convention the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World was adopted. The establishment of black, green, and red as the “colors of the Negro Race” and titled for the “absolute control of our social establishments with the absence of meddling by any other alien race.” (Garvey,