Garvey founded the UNIA to promote racial pride, economic self-sufficiency, and eventual repatriation of the African diaspora to Africa. Within a decade the organization claimed millions of members and sympathizers worldwide, chapters across the Americas, Africa, and Europe, and its own shipping line, the Black Star Line, making it the largest Black mass movement in history to that point.
Marcus Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1914 after years working and traveling through Central America and London, where he had absorbed both the brutal conditions faced by Black laborers and the writings of Pan-Africanist thinkers. On September 3 in Kingston (some sources place the founding meeting slightly differently, but this date is widely cited), he and a small group established the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.
Garvey's message — that Black people should take pride in their African heritage, build independent economic institutions, and ultimately unite Africa under self-rule — resonated far beyond Jamaica. He relocated the movement's headquarters to Harlem in 1916, where it exploded in popularity amid the Great Migration and postwar racial tensions.
The UNIA's newspaper, Negro World, and its Black Star Line steamship company (however financially troubled) became symbols of Black self-determination. Garvey was eventually convicted of mail fraud tied to the shipping venture and deported from the United States in 1927, but his ideas profoundly shaped later movements, from Rastafarianism to the civil rights and Black Power movements, and leaders like Malcolm X's own father were Garveyites.