Amy Jacques Garvey

Amy Euphemia Jacques was born on the thirty-first of December 1895 in Kingston, Jamaica, the eldest child of George Samuel Jacques and Charlotte Henrietta Jacques. She was raised in a middle-class household and educated at Wolmer's Girls' School. Her father, a formally educated man, encouraged her from childhood to read newspapers, periodicals, and the dictionary, cultivating the wide-ranging mind that would later distinguish her writing.

In 1917 she migrated to the United States, and in 1918, after hearing Marcus Garvey speak, she joined the Universal Negro Improvement Association. She rose to serve as Garvey's private secretary and office manager, and in 1922 the two were married. During Garvey's imprisonment in the Atlanta penitentiary from 1925 to 1927, she became his principal lieutenant, sustaining the movement and carrying his cause before the public.

As associate editor of the UNIA newspaper the Negro World from 1924 to 1927, she created and edited the page "Our Women and What They Think," a pioneering platform for Black women's writing, international news on the status of women, and profiles of women of achievement. She compiled and published the two volumes of The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923 and 1925), preserving the intellectual record of Garveyism.

In her later decades she remained a tireless Pan-Africanist, presenting A Memorandum Correlative of Africa, West Indies and the Americas (1944), helping to shape the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, and authoring Garvey and Garveyism (1963). She died on the twenty-fifth of July 1973 in Kingston. May the sister who kept the flame of a movement and lifted the voices of Black women be honored always.