Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives
Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897-1969) is often referred to as the first wife of Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey and the co-founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). But references to her life and activism independent of Garvey and Garveyism have increased in recent years. Ashwood Garvey has featured in a growing number of academic books and journal articles, on history websites and blogs. She has been the subject of posts on social media and at least one art installation.
These works have shown that Amy Ashwood Garvey was a prominent Pan-African feminist who attended the 1945 Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, England, where she called for a resolution attending to the specific needs of Black and African women. She was well-travelled, embarking on historic tours of West Africa and the Caribbean, where she helped to spread the tenets of Pan-Africanism. During her travels in Ghana, where she was formally recognized as Ashanti and adopted the name Yaa Boahimaa in a lineage ceremony, Ashwood Garvey wore kente, a practice she continued for the rest of her life. She was a good friend of Communist activist and journalist Claudia Jones and also called London home.
Ashwood Garvey ran a popular restaurant and social club in London’s Soho neighborhood that was frequented by the likes of Pan-African leaders Jomo Kenyetta, George Padmore, and CLR James. Local and international Black celebrities often visited the club, among them jazz musician Fats Waller and Olympic athlete Jesse Owens. Ashwood Garvey also ran a boarding house at her home in Ladbroke Grove that became a community center and networking hub for African and Caribbean migrants to Britain.
Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives (Lawrence Wishart, Summer 2022) will add to what we know about Ashwood Garvey by reflecting upon what the conditions of her archive tell us about her life and activism. This is not a biography but a study of a Black radical feminist whose archive, life, and activism reflects the kinds of difficulties I have faced in undertaking Black feminist research, namely limited funds and access to resources.
Ashwood Garvey’s travels and projects often relied on the financial support of her friends and benefactors. Yet despite her many connections, money was always tight. Ashwood Garvey abandoned her home in London for financial reasons, leaving behind a trove of personal papers that were later recovered by her friend and first biographer Caribbean studies scholar Lionel Yard. Fragments of Ashwood Garvey’s archive are held by Yard’s family in Brooklyn, New York and in several repositories, across several collections in the Caribbean, the United States, and the United Kingdom. There could also be material in Liberia and Ghana, given the time she spent in both locations and the people she visited while there.
Without funding to support research at different archives in multiple locations, I have had to rely on the research of others, which has fostered new collaborations and ways of reading Ashwood Garvey’s archive. So rather than present a traditional biography, I engage Black feminist epistemologies and auto/ethnography, critical theories of archival power and form, creative writing and arts-based research methods to examine and contextualize archival fragments of her life and activism. I use the dispersed and fragmentary nature of Ashwood Garvey’s archive and how I have accessed material to ask questions about the future of Black feminist archives and archival research.
Visual narratives related to this work, which forms part of my ongoing visual think piece, Becoming with Archive: Blackness, Gender, Diaspora, include ‘A Living Archive for Amy Ashwood Garvey’ and ‘Pan-Africanist, Feminist and Mrs. Marcus Garvey #1’