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a neighboring white Methodist minister abruptly cut off a childhood friendship his daughter had maintained with Marcus. “It was then,” Garvey wrote, “that I found out for the first time that there was some difference in humanity, and that there were different races, each having its own separate and distinct social life.” The heavyset, bulldoglike teen was apprenticed to a printer—and a burgeoning interest in journalism was born. In 1910, Garvey traveled through Central America, where he was appalled to witness the second-class status occupied by black laborers completing the Panama Canal. “Where was the black man’s country?” Garvey wondered, watching blacks labor for meager wages on the projects of other nations and colonial powers.

A few years later, he read educator Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery—and the book’s philosophy of self-sufficiency hit Garvey with the force of a religious conversion. Garvey took these ideas, merged them with his own form of radical opposition to white authority, and in 1914 transformed them into the platform of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Eventually claiming three-quarters of a million members, UNIA generated a surge of pride among members with its plans to create a shipping empire and a restored pan-African nation—with Marcus Garvey as its uniformed, imperial president.

“Always think yourself a perfect being,” Garvey told followers, “and be satisfied with yourself.” His philosophy of faith-in-self and perpetual self-improvement formed Garvey’s deepest appeal. And, to careful observers, it was firmly rooted in the grand tradition of American metaphysics. “What was deemed a new racial philosophy,” wrote historians Robert A. Hill and Barbara Bair in their Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, “was in fact Garvey’s wholesale application of the dynamics of New Thought to the black condition.… Metaphysics and politics were explicitly linked in Garvey’s mind.”

UNIA newspapers and pamphlets abounded with telltale phrases of the New Thought movement, such as the call for a “universal business consciousness” in Garvey’s Negro World newspaper. Garvey’s Negro Factories Corporation advertised shares of stock by declaring, “Enthusiasm Is One of the Big Keys to Success.” And a front-page headline in Garvey’s Blackman newspaper announced: Let us Give Off Success and It Will Come, adding the indispensable New Thought maxim: As Man Thinks So Is He.

One of the only books that Garvey publicly recommended to followers was Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book, a collection of life lessons by Hubbard, the social-reform journalist admired by Wallace D. Wattles and hero of motivational thinking within New Thought circles. Garvey’s favorite poet was Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the poet laureate of mind power, whose lines he used to conclude a 1915 UNIA rally:

Live for something,—Have a purpose

And that purpose keep in view

Drifting like a helmless vessel

Thou cans’t ne’er to self be true.

While figures like Wallace D. Wattles and Marcus Garvey occupied two completely different worlds, they nonetheless shared a critical trait that alternately retreated and surfaced throughout each man’s career: Their social radicalism rested on a metaphysical component, shrewdly couched in language to which every American, black or white, could instantly relate.

“A Scientific Understanding of God”

Garvey made little direct reference to the source of his ideas. A degree of secrecy and confidentiality characterized almost all of Garvey’s affairs, notes historian Hill, including those of the mind. In a speech he delivered in January 1928 in Kingston, Jamaica, however, Garvey’s New Thought ideas were outlined perhaps more clearly than at any other time in his career. “Get you[rself], as the white man has done, a scientific understanding of God and religion,” he told his listeners, continuing:

What marks the great deal of difference between the Negro and the White man is that the Negro does not understand God and His religion. God places you here in the world on your responsibility as men and women to take out of