_____Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-born Black nationalist leader whose Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the most prominent Black Power organization of the 1920s. Although himself a Roman Catholic, Garvey encouraged his followers to imagine Jesus as Black and to organize their own church. To emphasize that the new church was neither Catholic nor Protestant, the name "Orthodox" was adopted and the filioque (a phrase added to the Latin version of the Nicene creed in the early Middle Ages but rejected by the Orthodox) was dropped.

_____The African Orthodox Church entered into negotiations with the Russian Metropolia (now the OCA) for formal recognition as an Orthodox jurisdiction. Unfortunately, these negotiations broke down: the Metropolia demanded an unacceptable degree of administrative control, while the Garveyites wanted to promulgate whatever doctrines they chose. Eventually, the African Orthodox bishop was consecrated by the "American Catholics", a group which had rejected the authority of the Pope but was otherwise similar to the Roman Church.

_____The Garveyite Church had thousands of members on three continents, and was a symbol of anti-colonialism in Kenya and Uganda. The African Orthodox in those countries quickly broke off relations with the New York church and instead became part of the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria and fully Orthodox. The same process repeated in Ghana more recently, where Fr. Kwami Labe, a graduate of St. Vladimir's Seminary in New York, has been building a strong Orthodox community on the foundations laid by the Garveyites. (I am distressed, however, that many now-canonical African Orthodox often seem almost ashamed of their "heretical" origins, and try to distance themselves from the earlier movement.)
Today the African Orthodox Church as such is largely defunct, although the parish of St. John Coltrane (!) in San Francisco remains quite active.