When, in 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen, great-grandson of King Saheka Selassie of Shoa, was made Emperor of Ethiopia and proclaimed Negusa Negast (King of Kings), Jamaica's slum-dwellers and rural poor, for whom Garvey had been something of a gallant oracle, regarded this event as the fulfillment of a prophecy of deliverance. Indeed, Ethiopia had symbolized all of Africa for the slave-descended Jamaicans since as far back as 1784, when American Baptist minister George Liele founded the Ethiopian Baptist Church on the island. These "Garveyites" were awed by newspaper and newsreel accounts of the pomp of Selassie's coronation in Addis Ababa and took note of the sybolism in the choice of his formal title, Haile Selassie being an honorific meaning "Power of the Holy Trinity." Selassie, they knew, claimed to be directly descended from King Solomon, so they reasoned that he must be the long-awaited savior of the planet's far-flung African peoples.

In Africa, Selassie was hailed as the greatest of modern monarchs and a symbol of the continent's vast potential. In the United States, residents of Harlem jammed movie houses to watch the newsreel footage of his coronation. And in the Caribbean, as elsewhere in the West, the advent of Selassie's reign was taken as shining proof for all downtrodden people of color that, as the back-to-Africa Garveyites and the firebrands of the syncretistic Rastafarian cult had foretold, the day of Deliverance was at hand.

To the Garveyites, Haile Selassie I was a hero without peer. To the Rastafarians he was the Living God of Abraham and Isaac, He Whose Name Should Not Be Spoken.

Garvey's prophecy for an African King was the seed for Jamaican Rastafari. Garvey, who had been born in St. Ann in 1887 and founded the United Negro Improvement Association, spoke to an audience at Madison Square Garden in New York of "Ethiopia, land of our fathers," and proclaimed that 'negroes' believed in "the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God." Most significantly, he is often cited as the first to announce "Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King; He shall be the Redeemer." (Later there was some debate about this: was it Garvey who said these words? An associate of his, the Reverend James Morris Webb, the author of A Black Man will be the Coming Universal King, Provey by Biblical History, had spoken to the same effect at a meeting in 1924.) The "Look to Africa . . ." statement is customarily cited as the spark that galvanized Garveyites into founding the sect that came to be known as Rastafarianism (so called because "Ras Tafari" was Selassie's given name.)

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