Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey

"The story of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and tireless black leader who had a meteoric rise and fall in the late 1910s and early '20s, makes for enthralling reading, and Garvey has found an engaging and objective biographer in Colin Grant....Grant's book is not all politics, ideology, money and lawsuits. It is also an engrossing social history....'Negro With a Hat' is an achievement on a scale Garvey might have appreciated." - New York Times Book Review

New in paperback, this groundbreaking biography captures the full sweep and epic dimensions of Marcus Garvey's life, the dazzling triumphs and the dreary exile. As Grant shows, Garvey was a man of contradictions: a self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete and unabashed propagandist, an admirer of Lenin, and a dandy given to elaborate public displays. Above all, he was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry evoked a lost African civilization and fired the imagination of his followers. Negro With a Hat restores Garvey to his place as one of the founders of black nationalism and a key figure of the 20th century.

Colin Grant is an independent historian who works for BBC Radio. The son of Jamaican parents, he lives in London.