Amy Jacques Garvey, the Kingston-born journalist and Pan-African organiser, is dated 1895–1973 in the National Library of Jamaica’s catalogue. The Observer (24 December 2006) printed a longer school path than later features: St Patrick’s on Windward Road, Deaconess High School (now St Hugh’s), “and then Wolmer’s Girls School.” The Gleaner (28 February 2021) called her “an astute scholar very early on, performing well at Wolmer’s Girls’ School, before moving to New York.” The Gleaner again (7 January 2023) wrote that, “Educated at Wolmer’s High School for Girls,” she did “a short working experience with a law firm in Kingston” — the Observer names the solicitor as T.R. McMillan — “before moving.”

In the United States in the late 1910s (Gleaner 2021: 1917; Observer 2006: 1918) she went to a UNIA meeting at Liberty Hall, met Marcus Garvey, and took a job. That paper lists her as secretary to the Negro Factories Corporation, office manager, Garvey’s personal secretary, and associate editor of Negro World, where she ran a women’s page including “Our Women and What They Think.” She became Garvey’s second wife. They had two sons, Marcus Jnr and Julius.

Her most durable editorial work, the Observer said, was The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, volumes I and II, issued between 1923 and 1926. Decades later she wrote Garvey and Garveyism; when no publisher would take it she printed and sold the book herself. She died in 1973. Two years before, the Institute of Jamaica awarded her the Gold Musgrave Medal. The Governor-General’s Wolmer’s Day proclamation, as the Gleaner printed it on 22 May 2019, named her among the school’s journalist, publisher and activist alumni.

Sources

Sources: Jamaica Observer, Amy Jacques Garvey: a lifelong association with the UNIA, 24 December 2006; Jamaica Gleaner, Messenger of the message, 28 February 2021; Jamaica Gleaner, Struggle for Black freedom continues, 7 January 2023; National Library of Jamaica catalogue, 1895–1973.