Vicki Garvin audio and moving image collection

circa 1980-2007

Victoria "Vicki" Garvin (December 18, 1915 - June 11, 2007) was a trade union leader, Black radical intellectual, Pan-Africanist, and activist.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Garvin held executive positions at the United Office and Professional Workers of America, and the New York City chapter of the National Negro Labor Council. During this time, Garvin befriended, mentored, and collaborated with Malcolm X while they worked as Black leftist organizers in Harlem.

American history and Africana studies scholars Erik S. McDuffie and Komozi Woodard have argued that Garvin's activism likely influenced Malcolm X's radical politics. From 1963 to 1964, Garvin worked with other Black American intellectuals in Ghana. Together with poet Maya Angelou and community leader Alice Windom, they formed the Malcolm X Committee to welcome and introduce Malcolm X to diplomats during his 1964 visit.

Garvin taught English and African American history in Shanghai, China, from 1964 to 1970. When she returned to the US, she served as director of the Tri-City Citizen's Union, area leader for community interaction at the Center for Community Health Systems of Columbia University, and editor at the New China, a newspaper published in China by the non-profit US-China Peoples Friendship Association.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Garvin remained engaged in activism through her support for organizations such as Black Workers for Justice, the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP), and Sisters Against South African Apartheid (SASAA). She died in 2007.