Negro World Newspaper

UNIA WORLD CONVENTION ADDITION 1920

On August 17th, 1918, Marcus Garvey founded The Negro World, “a newspaper devoted solely to the interests of the Negro race”.

The Negro World, based in Harlem New York City became the instrument of communication for this revolution. It was a vital artery carrying a stream of consciousness to the minds and souls of Africans throughout the diaspora, at home and abroad.

Within a few years of publication, The Negro World was banned in almost every other country of the world by the ruling European colonial governments of the time. In America shipments of The Negro World were constantly and conventiently lost or destroyed by the government’s postal services as they conspired with foreign offices to keep the paper out of circulation in the black diaspora.

In 1933 The Negro World was discontinued from print,

“Education is the medium by which a people are prepared for the creation of their own particular civilization, and the advancement and glory of their own race.” The Negro World, which could be argued was not a newspaper in the traditional sense.

Besides reporting on current events, the newspaper also ran articles by Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, W. A. Domingo, T. Thomas Fortune, Arthur Schomburg, John E. Bruce, William H. Ferris, Norton G. G. Thomas, Eric Walrond, Hubert H. Harrison and Carter Woodson.

But The Negro World, which enjoyed worldwide circulation and was published in Spanish, French, and English, was not the end of Garvey’s educational ambitions.

In 1926, the UNIA purchased Smallwood-Corey (“Liberty University”) in Claremont, Virginia School and a few years before his untimely death, Garvey founded the School of African Philosophy to train future leaders of the UNIA leaders.