Amy Ashwood Garvey

Amy Ashwood (formerly Amy Ashwood Garvey; 10 January 1897 – 3 May 1969), renamed Akosua Boahemaa, was a Jamaican Pan-Africanist activist. She was a director of the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation, and along with her former husband Marcus Garvey she founded the Negro World newspaper.

Early years Amy Ashwood was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, on 10 January 1897, the only daughter of the three children of businessman Michael Delbert Ashwood and his wife, Maudriana Thompson. Taken to Panama as an infant, she returned in 1904 to Jamaica, and attended the Westwood High School for Girls in Trelawny, with whom she founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. The UNIA was the most influential anti-colonial organization in Jamaica up until 1938. Its legacy lies in giving women an opportunity to be leaders and influence in the public sphere. At the age of 17, while in UNIA, Amy Ashwood wrote romantic letters to Marcus, in which she said: "Our joint love for Africa and our concern for the welfare of our race urged us to immediate action." She organized a women's section of the UNIA, and in 1918, she moved to the United States, where she worked as Garvey's aide and as Secretary of the UNIA's New York City branch. In 1919, she was made secretary of the Black Star Line and became one of its first directors.

Marriage to Marcus Garvey She met Marcus Garvey in 1914 and they married on 25 December 1919, but the marriage quickly broke down (there were accusations of infidelity on both sides), ending in divorce in 1922. There followed lawsuits and counter-suits for annulment, divorce, alimony and bigamy. Garvey divorced Ashwood in Missouri in 1922 and quickly married Amy Jacques, Ashwood's former roommate and maid of honour. Marcus Garvey accused Ashwood of theft, alcoholism and laziness. Amy Ashwood reportedly never accepted the divorce and contended to the end of her days that she was the "real" Mrs. Garvey. Amy continued her work as a pan-Africanist, politician, and cultural feminist in the US, Jamaica and England throughout the rest of her life.

Move to London Ashwood arrived in London 1932 and continued her endeavors as a Pan-African heroine. Decades earlier, in 1914, Ashwood assisted her husband Marcus Garvey with founding the Negro World, its purpose being to connect African-American people across continents, and founded a popular local night club. She later supported Solanke's West African Students' Union,

1934–44: London, Jamaica, and New York In 1934, she returned to London, and with Manning, opened the Florence Mills Social Club a jazz club on Carnaby Street, which became a gathering spot for supporters of Pan-Africanism. She helped to establish the International African Friends of Abyssinia with C. L. R. James, the International African Service Bureau with figures like George Padmore, Chris Braithwaite and Jomo Kenyatta, and the London Afro-Women's Centre.

She spent some time in 1939 in New York, then went to Jamaica, where she and other prominent people formed the short-lived J. A. G. Smith Political Party. During World War II Ashwood founded a domestic science institute for girls in Jamaica.

In 1944, she again returned to New York, where she joined the West Indies National Council and the Council on African Affairs, and also campaigned for Adam Clayton Powell Jr. In 1946, Ashwood moved to Liberia for three years, where she began a relationship with the country's president, William Tubman. While there she researched the conditions for women in Nigeria and she gave talks to women's groups. In the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, Ashwood co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. In 1959, she chaired an enquiry into race relations following the murder of Kelso Cochrane in London in May that year. The Asante people are commonly known to Jamaicans as the freedom fighters that fought against slavery and oppression. The national heroine Nanny of the Maroons is also an Asante queen. Many Jamaicans, even non-maroons, can also make accounts of having family of Asante descent.

Ashwood then embarked on a Caribbean tour in 1953. She visited Antigua, Aruba, Barbados, British Guiana, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname. In Barbados, she presided over the formation of the Barbados Women's Alliance.

She returned to Liberia in 1960, but was back in London four years later, and spent the next three years mostly in Jamaica and Trinidad. In 1967–68 she toured the United States. She was buried on Sunday, 11 May 1969, in Kingston's Calvary cemetery.