When Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1914 he was intent on following Washington's ideas and establishing an industrial institute in Jamaica. Hollis Lynch writes, "Towards this end, Garvey accepted an invitation from his new hero to visit the United States." Washington died in 1915 which prevented Garvey from visiting Tuskegee. This did not stop Garvey from going to the United States. By the 1920s his Universal Negro Improvement Association became "one of the most phenomenal social movements in modern history and his name one of the best known both within and outside the black world." Washington's notion of self-help did not find favour in Jamaica alone. It also became popular in Trinidad and Guyana. Stephen Cobham, a Trinidadian, used it as a central motif in his novel Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White that he wrote in 1907. Cobham, a supporter of Sylvester Williams, the father of Pan Africanism, identified the Trinidad struggle for social and political justice with the African-American struggle for justice and freedom. Apart from the many Caribbean and African Americans he praised in his novel, Cobham identified with Washington's philosophy of self-reliance, racial solidarity and racial uplift. He quotes extracts from Washington's Atlanta Address and argues that blacks ought to live side by side with whites in harmony. Rupert Gray, the major protagonist of the novel, intends to build a Negro Industrial Institute in West Indies, perhaps in Trinidad, that is fashioned after Washington's Tuskegee Institute dedicated to racial uplift and racial pride. At this institute "a day each week will be set aside for Negro literature exclusively." Washington's plan also found favour in the Negro Progress Convention (NPC) of Guyana, the leading proponent of black consciousness in the 1920s, that sough to make Afro-Guyanese realise their responsibilities to themselves and to assist them in working out "their industrial salvation." The NPC also sent two students to study at Tuskegee to make them "exponents of the kind of industrial training necessary to be given to the members of the Negro race to enable them to pull their weight as important factors in the industrial life of the colony." Ideas that were first articulated in the Black Belt of the USA found echoes in the Caribbean, London and Africa as well. They would play a large part in the making of the Africana intellectual/activists.
The article will continue next week