Garvey Scholar to Launch Book on Amy Ashwood

Renown Garvey scholar, Professor Tony Martin, will tomorrow (May 8) launch his latest book, ‘Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-Africanist, Feminist and Mrs. Marcus Garvey,’ which tells the story of the first wife of the Jamaican National Hero.
The launch, which will be held at Liberty Hall, downtown Kingston at 6:00 p.m., forms part of the academic programme for the 39th annual conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH), which is being hosted by the University of the West Indies’ (UWI) Department of History and Archaeology.
The conference commenced on May 6 with an opening ceremony at the Undercroft at UWI, and will continue for four days at the Jamaica Conference Centre, before culminating with a field trip for participants at the Seville, Heritage Park in St. Ann on May 11.
Speaking to JIS News, Head of the Department of History and Archaeology at UWI, Dr. Swithin Wilmot, said that through his book, Professor Martin was sharing the work of Amy Ashwood in the Garvey movement to a larger audience.
“The fruits of his research on Amy Ashwood and, for that matter, the two Amys (wives of Garvey) are not insignificant to the Garvey movement,” he noted.
“We probably know more about Amy Jacques. She is the widow and so on, but Amy Ashwood was a powerful woman in her own right, who was very important to the formation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in its early days in Jamaica,” Dr. Wilmot stated. He added that her story is testament to the very important role women played in the Garvey movement.
Professor Tony Martin has authored and edited 12 books, including one of the definitive studies of the Garvey Movement titled, ‘Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association’ which was published in 1976.