LONDON, June 11 (UP)--Marcus Garvey, West Indian Negro, who once set himself up as "Emperor of the Kingdom of Africa" in New York's Harlem and later appeared before the League of Nations as representative of "the black peoples of the world," died here yesterday. Marcus Garvey was a short, stout, ebony-colored firebrand who styled himself a "world- famous orator." He was a promoter who sold hundreds of thousands of American Negroes on the idea of a nation for themselves, an African empire. He preached racial solidarity, racial enterprise and race segregation. Until some of his promotions landed him in jail, they paid him at least $22,000 a year, and probably much more. Where Father Divine of a later day created "angels" and "archangels" among the colored population of Harlem, Garvey in his time sprinkled the area with princes and princesses, barons, knights, viscounts, earls and dukes, and kept for himself for a time the comparatively humble designation of "Sir Provisional President of Africa." There was no evidence that he had ever set foot on that continent, and the Republic of Liberia was, by announcement of its government, closed to him and his followers. He blamed the British and French Governments for that. His proposed hegira of black men and women back to the continent of their origin remained to the last simply a proposal. Exact information about the origins of Marcus Aurelius Garvey, as he sometimes proudly named himself, was never forthcoming. It appeared, however, that some time about 1880 he was born in Jamaica, B.W.I., which fact made him a British citizen. According to his own story he was the editor of a Catholic newspaper in Jamaica at the age of fifteen, and thereafter edited papers in Jamaica and Costa Rica. He also said that he spent a year traveling through Europe before coming to the United States as the World War was about to begin. His career in this country began as a journalist and lecturer to Negro audiences. It appeared to him that the Negroes in this country were in a state of semi-serfdom and he proposed to do something about it. The first step was the formation, in July, 1914, of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, with an original membership of 15. The next five or six years were his fire-brand period. He made inflammatory attacks upon white people; suggested that for every Negro lynched in the South a white man should be similarly treated by the Negroes in New York. The trickle of dues into his "parent body," as he began to call the U.N.I.A., swelled into a stream, and Garvey began to dream other dreams than race fighting. He had learned that small sums contributed by many persons may reach an impressive total. So he organized the Black Star Steamship Line and the Black Star Steamship Company, to establish a world shipping firm staffed wholly by Negroes. He called a convention of his U.N.I.A. and offered some 5,000 Negroes who attended at Madison Square Garden an opportunity to buy stock at $5 a share. The money rolled in and he bought several ships. One was the Yarmouth, another the Kanawha, which had been the pleasure yacht of the late colonel Henry Huddleston Rogers. The first job the Yarmouth had was to haul a $3,000,000 cargo of liquor from Brooklyn to Cuba for a firm that wanted to get it out of the country before prohibition became effective on Jan. 15, 1920. All that whisky was too much temptation for the crew, who got drunk and put in at Norfolk, where the ship was seized under the prohibition law. A total loss. The black skipper of the Kanawha also had bad luck at Norfolk. On his first voyage he rammed a pier there, his boiler exploded, and the Kanawha, too, became a total loss. Nothing, meanwhile, had happened in Harlem except the multiplication of Garvey's notions. He had organized the African Community League, incorporated at $1,000,000; the Negro Factories Corporation and, on the non-commercial side, the Order of the Nile; the Black Cross Nurses and the Universal African Legion. In February, 1925, three years after he had been arrested on a charge of using the mails to defraud in soliciting funds for one of his ship companies, Garvey went to Atlanta penitentiary, where he stayed until the middle of 1927, when his sentence was commuted, so that he could be deported. Sent back to Jamaica, he tried to carry on with the mission he had inaugurated in the United States. Back within the British Empire, his pleas were less well received, financially, and, after a futile effort to raise funds to rescue Ethiopia from the Italians, he sank into obscurity.