Marcus Garvey is the greatest and most successful black leader in the history of the modern world and created a movement at least five times larger than any before or since. Yet, less than 25 percent of African Americans and 1 percent of everyone else can tell you anything about him.
He would have been 123 on Aug. 17, 2010. A small group of people has vowed not to forget who he was and what he tried to do. The Marcus Garvey Birthday Celebration is intended to be an annual affair, said the Rev. Harriet Walden, known for her work with Mothers for Police Accountability and the Central Area book club that she hosts with Eric Stark every first and third Tuesday of the month at the Garfield Community Center (2323 E. Cherry St).
The Aug. 17 event will feature a panel discussion on the life and times of Marcus Garvey, "A Man for All Seasons," from 6 to 8 p.m. at 3621 33rd Ave. S., Suite C-6. The next day, on Aug. 18, there will be a unique experience with Marcus Garvey Way Stations, where each station will provide an opportunity for children and young adults to read "I Am" statements written by Garvey. (Call Walden at 206-380-1710 for further updates.)
Why is this man so important to African Americans and every other American? He saw the racial landscape clearly and realized that the newly freed black man needed to become economically self-sufficient or he would bring down himself and America.
As he wrote in the Black Man magazine in 1938 - after prison, deportation and international harassment - "When races and individuals take bold steps toward their own emancipation, they must be willing to stand and fall by their own right, and so the Negro, on his economic expression, should develop sufficient spirit and self-reliance to be able in the end to fall back entirely on his own resources. "
He didn't just talk about it; he built a worldwide movement to get the job done. And America and all of the colonial European powers wanted him stopped.
In 1914, Garvey left Jamaica and settled in Harlem, N.Y., and its vibrant international community. Garvey seemed to have gotten his organization going between 1916 and 1918, and membership flourished. By 1920, the Universal Negro Improvement Association had more than 1,100 branches in more than 40 countries, including in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa.
Garvey boasted that 3 million people had joined his organization in three years, and in nine years, he had clearly built the largest organization for people of African descent in the history of the Western Hemisphere. His newspaper, the Negro World, was the most widely circulated black publication in the world.
His battle with W.E. B. Dubois and other black bourgeois leaders helped lead to his demise, along with an ambitious agenda of building factories and starting the first and last black-owned shipping line.
Garvey and Booker T. Washington (who influenced Garvey's ideology) believed in developing the race from the bottom up: Teach them skills and give them the tools for their survival first, and they will eventually develop what it takes to take advantage of other opportunities.
Dubois and others believed that the race should be led by its talented 10 percent in a top-down leadership format. They would negotiate for the race and be the guiding light. Some of these leaders must have worked with a young federal agent named J. Edgar Hoover, whose first assignment was to build a bogus charge of mail fraud that led to Garvey's jail sentence in 1923. In 1927, he was released by President Calvin Coolidge and deported back to Jamaica, and the heyday of the movement was over.
But Garvey had already transformed the thinking of millions of blacks in America, Africa and the Caribbean. The black nationalist movements in Africa that led to independent nations, the Nation of Islam in America, the Rastafarian movement and a new social awareness in Jamaica and the surrounding Islands were all tied to Garvey and Garveyism.
In the end, even Dubois paid a final tribute to Garvey by leaving America and settling in Ghana (its flag has a black star as a tribute to the Black Star shipping line), where he died.
In 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, made a trip to Jamaica and laid a wreath on Garvey's grave. In a speech, King said Garvey "was the first man of color to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny. And make the Negro feel he was somebody."
It's Garvey's birthday, and I will be there to sing a birthday song and take a bow toward Jamaica, where Garvey was eventually recognized and buried as a national hero after his death in 1940. His unwavering belief in black people made us believe in ourselves as individuals and as a race for the first time.
See you on Aug. 17. It'll be time to light some candles.
Charlie James has been an African-American community activist/writer for more than 35 years.[[In-content Ad]]
