The white man held the blacks as slaves,
And bled their souls in living death;
Bishops and priests, and kings themselves,
Preached that the law was right and just;
And so the people worked and died,
And crumbled into material dust.
- From The Poetry of Marcus Mosiah Garvey.
Today, Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Black liberation movement he founded are largely forgotten and only matter-of-factly remembered each year when his birthday comes around. The philosophy and ideology that bears his name remains on the shelf as modern Black leaders get back to business as usual. But Garvey and his movement constituted one of the most important, innovative, and original of all contributions to the struggle for Black and African liberation. Moreover, in the current period of decline in the world economic culture, with its inevitable concomitant revival of issues of class and race, Garvey and his movement can provide powerful inspiration and lessons for both Black and Non-Black members of the world’s oppressed peoples – starting right here in the United States.
Garveyism, the philosophy of Marcus Garvey, one of the most outstanding Black leaders of the 20th century, holds that modern civilization has gone drunk and crazy with power and seeks through injustice, fraud and lies to crush the unfortunate and the downtrodden. Those were words that Garvey used to indict the system of colonial and imperial exploitation that held whole races of people in bondage and captivity. But it was in the American political theater that Garvey commanded center stage. Few Black leaders in United States history have been able to equal Garvey’s contribution to the Black liberation struggle, not only in America, but in the entire Black Diaspora. Today the legacy of Marcus Mosiah Garvey is the sum total of his philosophy, opinions and actions called Garveyism.
“Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people. Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realized the light of their own freedom.”
In 1916 Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) brought his budding Black Nationalist organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to Harlem. He had formed this organization two years before, in 1914, just as the big guns were booming and wholesale slaughter was taking place during the barbarism of the First World War in Europe.
Black people in the US were particularly responsive to Garvey’s vision. They embraced his internationalist theme - the theme that all Black people were members of one mighty race stretching form the Black urban ghettos and sharecroppers shacks of America to the sugar workers of the Caribbean and the tribes people of Africa; they related to his view that all Black oppression flowed from common sources in the European conquest and colonization of Africa and the forcible dispersal and murder of millions of Black Africans by European enslavement; they rallied to his practical program for immediate steps linking the liberation of Black Americans with the liberation of Africa; and they found new dignity and understanding of their place in the world through his conception of Africa as the natural spiritual center and home of Black people.
Garvey was born in 1887 in St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica. Due to the economic hardship that his family faced, he left school at age fourteen and learned the printing and newspaper business. He became interested in politics and soon got involved in projects aimed at helping those on the bottom rungs of Jamaican society. Dissatisfied with his work, he traveled to London in 1912 and stayed in England for two years. During this time he paid close attention to the controversy between Ireland and England concerning Ireland's independence. He was also exposed to the ideas and writings of a group of Black colonial writers that came together in London around the African Times and Orient Review. Nationalism in both Ireland and Africa along with ideas such as race conservation undoubtedly had an impact on Garvey.
UNIA itself was born out of Garvey's experience with racism, discrimination and injustice, both in his homeland of Jamaica, and in other parts of the world where he traveled, and where Blacks were always at the bottom rung of the social, political and economic ladder. But Garveyism, as his philosophy and principles are now known, remains today an ideology largely underutilized and to some extent shunned by those who would lead Blacks to the elusive Promised Land. Nonetheless, Garveyism is a most powerful weapon that preached a Black revolutionary path to achieving Black liberation.
It is however, a measure of the man that Garvey remains even today largely misunderstood in some quarters; regarded as of little importance in others, and little known to an entire generation of Black people. Part of the enigma of Garvey is the fact that he had limited tolerance for those he considered enemies of the Black race, and he was no slow coach when it came to criticizing many Black intellectuals whom he considered to be selling out their race. In fact, I submit that one of the reasons why Garvey was treated the way that he was, was because of his amazing ability to see those who were “playing games” in his day. And his sharp and blunt tongue publicly indicted, exposed, and ridiculed those who were working against his people. Here’s one example of Garvey’s caustic tongue lashing of those “Blacks” that he despised:
“The present day Negro or “Colored” intellectual is no less a liar and a cunning thief than his illustrious teacher. His occidental collegiate training only fits him to be a rogue or a vagabond, and a seeker after the easiest and best by following the line of least resistance. He is lazy, dull and uncreative. His purpose is to deceive the less fortunate of his race, and, by his wiles ride easily into position and wealth at their expense, and thereafter agitate for and seek social equality with the creative and industrious whites. To every rule, however, there is the exception, and in this case it must be applied.”
Firstly Garveyism saw the Black problem as having to do with the cultural, economic and psychological degeneration of the Black race. Garvey believed that Blacks lacked knowledge and pride in their African ancestry and therefore were easy prey to the ravages of white racism. This philosophy gained immense popularity in the early twenties when Garveyism was the most popular form of Pan-Africanism among Caribbean-Americans and African-Americans. It was an ideology that would find wide acceptance among Black leaders in Africa waging an anti-colonialist struggle for independence and freedom.
Garvey’s movement appealed strongly to ordinary Black people. It appealed, that is, to the ‘field Negro’s’ - to the residents of the northern US ghettos, and to the southern class of poor Black farmers and workers. It likewise appealed to the oppressed and impoverished Black people of the third world. Its appeal was less effective with the ‘house Negro’s’ of the Black educated classes. This stratum was generally more attracted to the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the work of activists such as Dr. W.E.B. Dubois.
As a progressive ideology and philosophy one of Garveyism’s greatest appeals to ordinary Black people, an appeal which Black liberation groups of the 1960's were unable to duplicate, lay in fully combining within one organization ‘Black political liberation’ (liberation concerned with institutional change and the struggle for Black social, political, and in the case of Africa anti-imperialist liberation) with "Black cultural liberation’ (liberation concerned with Black identity, Black personal life, and Black contributions in the arts).
For example, the ‘educated’ “Negro” organizations’ tended to spurn the new popular Black cultural forms such as jazz seeing this as one more mark of Black ignorance. They saw musical cultural legitimacy as those standards set up in a Eurocentric context. But Garvey’s organization embraced those very forms that they spurned - jazz was frequently played at U.N.I.A. meetings - as a means of building the new positive Black identity. Moreover, the central "Liberty Hall’ of the movement, located in the Black Neighborhood of Harlem, was closely tied to jazz.
But also central to the teachings of Garveyism is the issue of race. Marcus Garvey felt that the Black man was universally oppressed at the hands of the white power structure and that any program of emancipation would have to be developed around the question of race first. By establishing a clear perspective on the racial question Garveyism outlined a comprehensive program of political, social and economic action aimed at the total liberation of the Black race.
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