In August 1920, UNIA organized the First International Conference of the Negro Peoples in Harlem. This parade was attended by Gabriel Johnson, the Mayor of Monrovia in Liberia. As part of it, an estimated 25,000 people assembled in Madison Square Gardens. At the conference, UNIA delegates declared Garvey to be the Provisional President of Africa, charged with heading a government-in-exile that could take power in the continent when European colonial rule ended via decolonization. Some of the West Africans attending the event were angered by this, believing it wrong that an Afro-Jamaican, rather than a native African, was taking this role.