Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey

Discover the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey

‘Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable’ Guardian

At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. Hailed as both the ‘black Moses’ and merely ‘a Negro with a hat’, he masterminded the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, began the Universal Negro Improvement Association and captivated audiences with his powerful speeches and audacious ‘Back to Africa’ programme. But he was to end his life in penury, ignominy and friendless exile, after serving jail time in both the US and Jamaica.

With masterful skill, wit and compassion, Colin Grant chronicles Garvey’s extraordinary life, the failed business ventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death. This is the dramatic cautionary tale of a man who articulated the submerged thoughts of an awakening people.

‘Engrossing…Writing in a concise, expressive style…drawing on gargantuan research …Grant show’s Garvey’s heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity and his paradoxes’ Independent on Sunday

A brisk and well-researched biography... A splendidly colourful book

Gripping and sympathetic...monumental...Grant writes with the quiet authority of a historian who has done a colossal amount of research... and knows the smells and tastes of this period as if he had lived through it. He is slow to pass judgement, but when he does so, the verdict carries real weight... His history reads like a first-rate novel... Grant's book is a fine and valuable monument to [Garvey's] memory

Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable

In this superb new biography, Colin Grant portrays Garvey as a showman-ideologue [and] is to be congratulated on this scholarly, well-written account

Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research...Grant meticulously chronicles Garvey's eventful odyssey and sheds light on his revolutionary thinking and formidable public speaking...he shows Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity, his paradoxes

Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey

Colin's other Books:

I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be

Homecoming

Bageye at the Wheel