[1] 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.
[4][5] Taken to Panama as an infant, she returned in 1904 to Jamaica, and attended the Westwood High School for Girls in Trelawny,[3] where she met Marcus Garvey,[6][7] with whom she founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914.
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.
[10] 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.
Amy Ashwood reportedly never accepted the divorce and contended to the end of her days that she was the "real" Mrs.
[11] Amy continued her work as a pan-Africanist, politician, and cultural feminist in the US, Jamaica and England throughout the rest of her life.
[13] She later supported Solanke's West African Students' Union,[7] but in 1924 she returned to New York, where she produced comedies with her companion, Sam Manning, a Trinidadian calypso singer who was one of the world's pioneering black recording artists.
[17] During World War II Ashwood founded a domestic science institute for girls in Jamaica.
[18] In 1946, Ashwood moved to Liberia for three years, where she began a relationship with the country's president, William Tubman.
[19] In the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, Ashwood co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
In 1946, Barrister Kese took Mrs Garvey to Juaben leading to the verification of her Granny Dabas' account and would later adopt the name Akosua Boahemaa.
She visited Antigua, Aruba, Barbados, British Guiana, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname.