(3) Garyevism's education program. Garvey stressed the importance of education beginning from the position that white educational values had completely contaminated the Black mind. In this Garvey was right. For one of the first and most lasting forms of slavery, is in fact "mental slavery." Garvey saw that it was fundamentally important to re-educate the Black man using Black history and African heritage as the building blocks. To this end Garvey formed the Liberty University, a vocational training school in Virginia which was modeled after Washington's Tuskegee Institute. This school was part of a wider program of ongoing education that the UNIA launched to combat the years of white conditioning of Black minds.
“It is remarkable to contemplate the deception of man, as practiced upon his brothers. The human race has degenerated into a select group of liars and thieves, who practice their profession and carry out their depredations through the media of high-sounding philosophies. Chief among the deceivers who parade as sanctified moralists and reformers are some of the leading statesmen of the white race. The white man has given us morals from his head, and lies from his heart.”
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was a giant of his time. No Black leader has so completely dominated the Black liberation struggle since his time. The sad thing is that the ideology and philosophy that bears his name are not used as a major tool today by present-day Black leaders. But history is full of the successes of Garveyism.
The African National Congress (ANC) began as a Garveyite Organization and many of its guiding principles today have been developed using the tenets of Garveyism. Malcolm X's father was a Garveyite who was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, and the famous Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, was also a Garveyite. They understood the necessity to "go armed in a world of wolves."
Finally, a word about Garvey and Garveyism’s legacy. Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s movement was the largest mass-movement of Black people ever assembled in the United States. This movement was ahead of all Black organizations of its day - and of ours - in the all-sided totality of cultural, political, economic, and spiritual liberation for Black people to which it aspired, and at least within its own ranks began to achieve. So great was this total impact of Garveyism that it has been described a ‘a Black civic religion’. In addition, one of the movement’s greatest strengths was its positive internationalism. The Garveyite movement saw that Black people - like the Jews - constituted a single planetary people who had been forcibly removed from their homeland, sold into slavery, and scattered into a ‘Black Diaspora’.
Today, Garvey's contribution to the Black liberation movement stands out as a monumental work of sacrifice and dedication. The great pity is that as the Black Diaspora suffers at the hands of international reaction in the form of white supremacists here in the United States and neo-Nazi skinheads in Europe, Black leaders are failing to go armed among the wolves. For the world of wolves have become much more sophisticated, but the same problems which confronted Garvey over half a century ago, still plague the Black community and race today.
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