Collage of Amy Ashwood Garvey by Black Women Radicals.

By Karla Méndez

Nydia A. Swaby examines and celebrates the life of Amy Ashwood Garvey, a Pan-Africanist activist who co-founded Negro World and the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

The name Garvey is commonly associated with Marcus Garvey and his second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey. But to do so is to overlook the existence, contributions to Black feminism, and the struggle for racial equality and Black liberation of Amy Ashwood Garvey. Born on January 10th, 1897 in Port Antonio, Jamaica to Michael Delbert Ashwood, a businessman, and Muadrina Thompson, Ashwood Garvey spent most of her youth in Panama before returning to Jamaica in 1904. As a child, her great-grandmother shared memories of being trafficked across the Atlantic, from Ghana to Jamaica, helping Ashwood Garvey develop an understanding of her family lineage and heritage. These stories were an entry point to her desire and passion for activism. Though Ashwood Garvey co-founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the newspaper Negro World with Marcus Garvey, became one of the first directors for the Black Star Line and was also the secretary, their divorce and his subsequent marriage to Amy Jacques Garvey resulted in her erasure from the history of these organizations.

After her divorce, Ashwood Garvey moved back to London in 1934, continuing her work. She opened the Florence Mills Social Club, a space that was part restaurant, part jazz club, and part social center for Black individuals devoted to Pan-Africanism. In 1945, Garvey became involved in the organizing of the first session of the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England. She was one of two women presenters and she seized that opportunity to speak out on the need for independence from colonial rule and the issues that Jamaican women deal with. In 1953, she helped establish the Afro-Women’s Center, later renamed the Afro-People’s Center. In Ashwood Garvey’s words, it was a place for the “spiritual, social, and political advancement of women.’ Over the next 15 years, Garvey traveled to Liberia, Ghana, Juaben, New York City, Jamaica, and England, amongst other places, to set up organizations and hold talks aimed at creating a transnational network of Black individuals working toward Pan-African solidarity.

Since her passing on May 3, 1969, scholarship on Ashwood Garvey’s life has become more prevalent, as scholars seek to learn and share more about her contributions to Black feminism in the United Kingdom., the Caribbean, and the U.S. This is exactly what scholar, artist, and curator Nydia A. Swaby sought to do so with her book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, published by Lawrence Wishart as a part of the publisher’s Radical Black Women book series. Swaby takes the reader on her journey constructing a biography of Garvey, utilizing an archive of the correspondence, writings, and photographs she left behind.

In this interview, writer Karla Méndez speaks to Swaby about writing the book, engaging with Garvey’s life, the practice of archival work and its inherent and crucial relationship to Black feminism.

Please note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Portrait of Nydia Swaby. Photo courtesy of Nydia Swaby.

Karla Mendez (KM): Archives allow us to gain insight into not just into the individuals who are the focus, but also the lived experience of the group(s) to which they belong. I wanted to ask how you believe we can utilize Garvey’s archive as a blueprint for future records of Black women?

Nydia Swaby (NS): That’s a really good question. There’s a couple of lessons I would take from them. In the book, I viewed Amy Ashwood Garvey as someone who understood the significant politics of her life and the landscape in which she operated. She had an understanding of herself and how her politics were connected to these different but overlapping transnational, Pan-African, feminist struggles. One of the things I have found interesting as an interpoint in her life, particularly as someone who never completed a biography about herself, is that there are little fragments in which she talks about herself.

I have found it helpful to engage the kinds of things that she collected, observed, and wrote about other projects and people. And also, the way in which she wrote in her letters about her politics, her passions, her relationships, her internal world. I started to think of her as leaving fragments of her life and leaving elements of a story to be told of her life through a practice of collecting, documentation and letter writing. I thought a lot about us as potential archivists of our own lives in the politics of the moment that we move in and we’re a part of.

This particularly resonates when I think about the work of Yula Burin and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski on the Lambeth Women’s Project, an important Black feminist space that was forced into closure in 2012. The members of the project documented and kept evidence of everything that happened there, both the good and the bad. They knew that even though they were living in that moment and advocating for that space to be saved, there was a sense of awareness that in the future someone might be writing about what happened to one of the last Black feminist spaces in London and that they would have the documentation of what happened, which was crucial to the work of Burin and Sowinski. Lambeth developed a Black feminist archival consciousness as a result of this forced closure and believed in the necessity of having a potential space where Black Herstory archives could be contained.

I also think as well how we’re living in a moment where, particularly in the United States, so much of our history held by cultural heritage archival institutions are being whitewashed and erased. I think of us as archivists of our lives who shouldn’t rely on the nation-state to bring in our stories, but rather, how we can preserve and contain our own histories.I can see a through-line between Garvey and her practice of collecting, the images she kept, and what she documented

We all have an individual responsibility to document our lives, our communities and the various ways we can do that. For some, it might be journal writing, collecting images or documents. For me, I love collecting out-of-print feminist texts. I started to view Garvey as someone who may not have had the time to sit or the mental capacity or the wherewithal to write her whole story but how she did leave fragments for us to be able to tell her story. One of the things I tried to do with the book is to limit how much of her story I tell through what I think of as a violent and colonial archive. I don’t deeply engage with FBI reports where they’re surveilling her and Marcus Garvey. I mention that it happens but I don’t want to tell her story through the lens of a white, supremacist machine that was functioning purely to monitor and surveil her. Their interpretations of her life are not of interest to me. I know they exist. I can give credit and mention how they affected her ability to migrate and move, and why she decided to settle in the U.K. But I don’t want to tell her story through those archives. Instead, I’m telling her story through what she chose to keep, and the fragments and traces she left behind. Instead, I’m telling her story through what she chose to keep, and the fragments and traces she left behind.

Amy Ashwood Garvey with two unidentified women on the steps of the Afro Women's Centre. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. *The New York Public Library Digital Collections*. 1950 - 1969.

“... I viewed Amy Ashwood Garvey as someone who understood the significant politics of her life and the landscape in which she operated. She had an understanding of herself and how her politics were connected to these different but overlapping transnational, Pan-African, feminist struggles.”

KM: The fact that she left little pieces behind reminds of a part earlier in the book where you wrote about curating your own archive as you’re existing and experiencing life. Which when I was reading made me think about how, as you mentioned, we are curating our own archive and we have the right and privilege to decide what does and doesn’t get included. But it does also make me question if that hinders the ability of those engaging with that archive to have a full view or understanding if we’re picking and choosing what’s being put into the archive? Or alternatively, if that person is no longer with us and it is being organized by someone else, then it’s left in their hands? What do we have access to and who is in charge of writing the story of that person?

NS: I thought about the Black feminist texts that talk about Black women’s opacity and thinking about what we choose to keep private and what we choose to make public, and why. These are strategies of survival in a racist and sexist context. There are elements of stuff that I do have that Ashwood Garvey would write about in letters to Lionel Yard. But when I read them, I don’t think that Ashwood Garvey would want me to put them in this biographical writing of her life. When I read some of her letters, there are very intimate things she shared with Lionel Yard that, for example, Tony Martin might have used as a way to write about her sexual life and her money problems to tell a negative story about her. I found those things as an entry point to understand her emotional life and her social world, and used that to talk about her as a person that had hopes, dreams, ambitions, and disappointments. I don’t use the exact wording she used to describe the trauma of some of those experiences because I feel this tension between respecting her privacy and telling her story.

I would also say it’s okay for us to curate what we want others to know about us. We live a life where we’re striking a balance between what elements of ourselves we want to project and display, and what we don’t. I see the value in us telling our emotional and embodied responses to being in the archive and being with the work. That feels like a very Black feminist tradition. It felt like one of the ways I could disrupt this idea of the archive as the space for absolute truth and the space where we could extract knowledge and tell stories was to have an ongoing reflection on the process of doing this work. Nothing for me is settled. Sometimes when I read it again, I realize I might say something differently now but I realize that’s because I’ve embodied a new understanding of her.

I went back to the Schomburg Center in 2024 to make sure I had permission for the photographs in the book, and I had a colleague ask me, “You’re still working on Amy Ashwood Garvey?” I thought, there are a lot of stories I could tell about her. I might still be writing about her for the rest of my career. I made a joke that nobody would say anything about the fact that Manning Marable literally spent his whole life working on Malcolm X, and then unfortunately passed away days before this book was published and doesn’t even get it out in the world. I think a lot about how maybe some of the things I’ve written about Amy are not the way I would tell her story in the future. That’s because we embody a relational practice to the work and the person, and our own experiences transform the way in which we interpret that archive. The conclusions that I drew in the context of writing that book are very different from the conclusions I drew when I first started working on Ashwood Garvey in 2009. That’s because of the experience of living in the U.K., becoming a parent, reading much more Black feminist text, and spending time in Ghana.

“We live a life where we’re striking a balance between what elements of ourselves we want to project and display, and what we don’t. I see the value in us telling our emotional and embodied responses to being in the archive and being with the work. That feels like a very Black feminist tradition. It felt like one of the ways I could disrupt this idea of the archive as the space for absolute truth and the space where we could extract knowledge and tell stories was to have an ongoing reflection on the process of doing this work.”

KM: The way that you explained it made me think about how archives, especially for Black women, are a way for us to gain back some sort of autonomy and agency over our stories, and how we want to be written about or how we want to be remembered. So often, other people do it for us and it’s not always in the best light or it has a relationship with colonialism, violence, or trauma, and that’s not all we experience. I like that you mentioned that you had a colleague who commented that you’re still working on her story, which is funny to me because she lived an entire life and to think that a few books on her is enough invalidates what she experienced and what she contributed to Black feminism.

NS: I appreciate you saying that. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way before. I thought why do I have to justify that? I think a great example of someone who has lived a life with another Black woman scholar is Carole Boyce Davies and Claudia Jones. There are ways in which Jones is still picked up in books that Davies writes. Davies told me this story of her mom and her aunt as children went to hear Amy Ashwood Garvey speak and that Garvey has stayed with her since. It made me imagine what Claudia Jones must be for her. She would have learned about Claudia Jones as a young person growing up in Trinidad. I appreciate the idea of being in a life long dialogue or an ongoing dialogue with another Black feminist scholar whose story and politics inform your life so deeply. I don’t think I’m done writing about Amy. In fact, I’m working on a moving image artwork about her because there’s more that I want to tell about her life that I wasn’t able to express in a written format. I wasn’t able to travel to Jamaica, which was one of the things I wanted to do to finish the book. I finally had to say, I could keep delaying this book or I could just write and allow that to be something I tell in a different way. In May, I’m going to spend some time in Jamaica and go to the place she lived towards the end of her life and the area she lived in when she was a child. I want to use the camera and a visual story method to continue that work.

Amy Ashwood Garvey with Paramount Chief of Juaben and family. 1946. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. *The New York Public Library Digital Collections*. Nydia Swaby Website/Archives.

KM: Early in the book, there’s mention of her letters, writings, and other personal material that was left behind in her home and that made me think of how easily an entire history of someone can be wiped away because there’s no attention paid to it. I wanted to hear what you have to say about the stories of Black women that we may have lost along the way and the importance of seeking out these stories.

NS: I think I’ll start by saying something about Amy Ashwood Garvey and then I’ll expand out. When I first started working on her, she would of course be a known name but she wasn’t an essential figure to the story of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) because Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey had virtually erased her. A lot of her legacy had been subsumed under Marcus. I’ve also heard people refer to Sam Manning as the person who started the Florence Mill Social Parlour. She had so many different elements of her work, like sociologist, archivist, restaurateur, and I wanted to bring that to the foreground. But I think at this moment, you’re right. She’s more celebrated and recognized in the present. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I can potentially expand conversations about her story.

In the film, I want to bring through more about the friendships and relationships with other Black women that would have been just as important and formative for the space she created. For example, there is this image of her with two other Black women on the steps of The Afro-People’s Center. Previously, I had used it as a way to talk about the space she created and the importance of it for Black women migrating to the U.K. Now I want to know who those women are in the photo. It helps frame her work as something Amy wasn’t doing in isolation but very intentionally as a part of a transnational Black feminist network. I recently gave a talk at the British Library and another important Black scholar to the U.K., Denise Noble, came up to me at the end and said “My mom told me that when she came to the U.K. she spent some time at this house owned by Amy Garvey. I always thought it was Amy Jacques Garvey but hearing you speak today it made me think it was probably Amy Ashwood Garvey.” It was fascinating. She told me about her mother’s activism and that she was a typist for various publications. She at one point did some typing for the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News. I felt that’s an important part of the story.

For me, writing the book allows me to add to the story of those other people who were living in this space, who have heard stories from family members and were instrumental to this Black diaspora social space that Garvey helped to create. I think this comes back to the idea of being able to continue telling her story. It was amazing to realize that the writing of the book expands the opportunity for me to connect with other people who have heard these stories before, who now through my text know who she was and what this meant. Maybe that’s an entry point for me to continue writing about her, to tell the story through the people who lived, dined, or socialized at these places whose names are not going to be as memorable as someone like Paul Robeson. There are lots of other people who went on to be educators, worked for the NHS or became activists in the Black Panther Party whose names are not going to be part of the mainstream discourse. Those are the stories that I’ll be likely to tell if I keep writing about her. Those based on people who remember her.

But I’m not the first person to do that. Tony Martin does that quite powerfully in his book as well. He travels to Jamaica and meets Ms. Ivy Richards, who was the person who donated a lot of Garvey’s items to the National Library in Jamaica. I wouldn’t have found Lionel Yard if it wasn’t for Tony Martin, even though I’m critical of the way in which Tony Martin interprets her life. His rigorous scholarship and being a part of a particular moment in which he could interview her and be intimate friends with her does inform my practice and thinking. How could I apply that as a way of understanding her legacies and how they continue to move through the Black political and social landscape in the U.K. and beyond?

There was a moment when I was in Kumasi and I was using photographs of Amy as an entry point to conversations with people about her life. It got me into the Palace of Juaben and convinced the registrar to bring the man who was the oral historian there for 30 years, and he remembered her coming as a child. That was an incredible moment. He looked at the photo and it was a photo that said ‘Amy Ashwood Garvey and the chief of Juaben and he pointed to the chief and said ‘me papa.’ It allowed me, even however briefly, to tell a story about oral history practices in West Africa. I hope that it will continue to allow me to tell stories about the different people who lived in the space that she created that went on to do a variety of things in the U.K. that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s important because when you look at some of these older periods of articles, the names of the authors aren’t always attributed because they were trying to make it a collaborative project.

KM: What makes Amy Ashwood Garvey a radical Black woman?

NS: Some of the things that Amy advanced for politically I don’t necessarily agree with. When I think about her views on Liberia, through the lens of the present moment, it’s giving settler colonialism. I recognize that one of the key things she was articulating is this intersectional, Black feminist politics in a moment in the U.K. where it was radical. I think about the fact that in a certain moment she evolved the center from being the Afro-Women’s Center to the Afro-People’s Center because she recognized that she wanted to have a space that was gender inclusive. Even though it was called the Afro-People’s Center, it’s important to flag that she had white working class women living there. When you think of migrants to the U.K. in this particular time, you think of Black intellectuals, but she also had sex workers living there. When you think about her building a space where she was thinking about the connections between race and class discrimination, housing precarity, and creating a space where those communities could come together to find housing, for me that feels quite radical. I think about the things she advocated for at the 1945 Pan-African Manchester Congress where she made it a point to talk about working class Black Jamaican women’s experiences, especially as someone who came from a middle class background. She had this sensibility from growing up in Jamaica, her relationship with Marcus Garvey, and from what she read that the kind of liberation of all Black folk includes the most marginalized, which she viewed as darker-skinned Black women.

I would also say intentionally choosing never to marry again [makes her a radical Black woman]. There’s something about reading every time she would meet another incredible lover and when she wrote about the opportunity to marry William Tubman, the president of Liberia, and how everyone would just love it, but she couldn’t imagine being someone’s wife again and being in that helpmate position. To put herself in a lifetime of financial precarity to simply have her independence and not to perform a particular subjectivity for anybody, and to be able to have all the lovers and move in the way she wanted to. Especially at that time where so much of what was being expressed about the most radical thing that Black women could do was be with a very successful Black man and to forge the nuclear, heterosexual Black family as a sign of our progress. To refuse that and still admit that she longed for intimacy and connection, but saw herself as being married to her politics and her community instead, I think of that as quite radical.

“It was important to me to tell Amy Ashwood Garvey’s story without making it primarily about her relationship with Marcus.”

KM: I thought of that as I was reading about her different relationships. It really was quite radical for the time because the expectation was that you would marry and produce children and continue the cycle of domesticity. I love that she was very independent and sometimes that was why the relationship didn’t work, because they couldn’t respect that she was unwilling to give up her independence.

NS: It’s interesting to think about the Black women who ultimately had the most freedom and traveled the most, with the exception of Eslanda Robseon who did a lot of traveling and had her independent projects, were people who decidedly chose to marry and then left that arrangement because they decided that independence, and the freedom to move and choose who you want to be, where you want to live and what things you want to advocate for was more important. I think about this with Amy Jacques Garvey. So much of what Marcus Garvey became known for, she wrote. We have Black feminist historians and scholars who make a point of advocating for that now, but can you imagine what it must have felt like for her at the time that it was being credited to Marcus? We know that she quietly separated from him too. She left him in the U.K. and went to Jamaica with their children, and they didn’t communicate from that point forward. There’s something to be said about that as a radical position.

It was important to me to tell Amy Ashwood Garvey’s story without making it primarily about her relationship with Marcus. I tried to pick that up because it’s an important part of her story, but where I differ from Lionel Yard who does it and talks about the impact of her relationship with Marcus and Tony Martin who does it from the perspective of being a Garveyite and just wants to talk about how she scorned Marcus Garvey, I really wanted to set her up as a Black political thinker, as a Black woman radical in her own right.

Archiving the Life of Amy Ashwood Garvey: An Interview with Nydia A. Swaby