This chapter contends that the education of Marcus Garvey was both grounded in the decades-old discourse of global pan-Africanism and shaped by the ferment of his era. His youthful experiences and experiments in Jamaica, Central America, and Europe—many of which seem to fly in the face of popular understandings of Garvey and Garveyism—suggest much about the diversity of the pan-African tradition out of which he emerged, and hint at the model of politics Garvey ultimately embraced. Proscribing neither radicalism nor conservatism, neither boldness nor caution, neither separatism nor interracial cooperation, the pan-African tradition offered clever and ambitious activists like Marcus Garvey a “potter's clay” that, under the right conditions, might unite a scattered race.