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Marcus Garvey: A Black "Moses"
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Marcus Moziah Garvey (1887-1940) migrated to the USA
from his native Jamaica at the age of 29, in 1916. Within a few short
years he had become the idol of the black masses of the USA, the Caribbean
and Latin America. Branches of his "Universal Negro Improvement
Association’ (UNIA) were found in every major city in the USA, in
the Caribbean Islands, in Central America, and even across the Atlantic in
the British and French colonies of West Africa. A dynamic orator and
fluent writer, Garvey was also a master of pageantry. But his charisma
alone cannot explain the remarkable response he obtained from Black
America. The attraction can be found in his policies; for Marcus Garvey
was one of the first Black racial nationalists.
Like many of today’s nationalists, Garvey was first
of all attracted to the Leftwing. He worked in close alliance with the
Communists and Socialists in the Afro-American Liberty League. However,
Garvey did not confine his activities to social and economic grievances.
He also understood and gave expression to the spiritual needs of American
Blacks in their striving for racial recognition. After centuries of being
in America, blacks felt identity-less removed from their African homeland
and culture. They had become totally removed from their ancestral roots.
Gradually Garvey placed more and more emphasis on the struggle for racial
self-respect.
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At a magnificent UNIA conference in New York in 1920, the
delegates unanimously appointed themselves representatives of Africa even though
there was not one genuinely African name amongst the 122 signatories to the
declaration. Before the delegates dispersed, Garvey permitted them to elect him
Provisional President of Africa. Over the years, Garvey cheerfully appointed
Knights and Ladies of Africa from amongst his most loyal followers. When the
League of Nations was discussing the future of Germany’s African colonies
after the First World War, Garvey proposed that instead of the colonies being
granted self-government, the mandate to govern them should be granted to the
UNIA.
However, after the 1920 convention, Garvey began to move
further and further towards racialism. The Left-wing "African Blood
Brotherhood was barred from the UNIA. Around this time, he began to formulate
more nationalistic, rather than internationalistic ideas. The basic point
difference between Garvey and the Black left was whether or not the UNIA should
cooperate with multi-racial working class organizations. Garvey’s racialist,
separatist ideas were finally developed when he wrote, in 1923, "Hitherto
the other Negro movements in America (with the exception of the Tuskegee effort
of Booker T. Washington) sought to teach the Negro to aspire to social equality
with the whites, meaning thereby the right to inter-marry and fraternize in
every social way. Still some Negro organizations continue to preach this race
destroying doctrine added to a program of political agitation and
aggression."
"The time is opportune to regulate the relationship
between both races. Let the Negro have a country of his own. Help him to return
to his original home, Africa, and there give him the opportunity to climb from
the lowest to the highest positions in a state of his own."
"We of the UNIA cede to the white man the right to doing
as he pleases in his own country, and that is why we believe in not making any
trouble when he says that 'America is a White man’s country.’"
In 1922 Garvey paid a visit to the Imperial Wizard of the Ku
Klux Klan in Georgia. The white racialists were natural allies for Garvey. Their
open White racialism helped to develop the race consciousness of American Blacks
and to stimulate interest in the UNIA-sponsored movement for repatriation to
Africa.
In a message dated October 28, 1925, Garvey introduced a
speaker from the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America (the northern KKK counterpart),
whom he had invited to speak at Liberty Hall:
"Mr. Plowell and his organizations sympathize with us
even as we sympathize with them. I feel and believe that we should work together
for the purpose of bringing about the ideal sought-the purification of the
races, their autonomous separation and the unbridled freedom of self-development
and self-expression."
Garvey not only rejected the idea of political alliance with
White leftists, preferring an understanding with White racialists to achieve
segregation; he also rejected the idea of an alliance between White and Black
workers, preferring an understanding with White employers.
However, the big business establishment was not keen on
allowing Garvey to propagate his racialist ideal. In 1925 he was arrested on a
trumped-up charge and sentenced to five years imprisonment. Garvey’s reaction
was to move even further to the extreme. He moved to a position of Black
Nationalist socialism-"Capitalism is necessary to the progress of the
world…but there should be a limit to the individual or corporate use or
control of it. All control, use and investment of money should be the
prerogative of the state with the concurrent authority of the people."
Although Garvey was subsequently branded as a bourgeois nationalist by his
leftist enemies, in practice UNIA never drew support from more than a handful of
wealthy Blacks, since they were in turn dependent on capital divided by Jewish
bankers and investors.
After his prison term, Garvey was deported in 1927, to
Jamaica, where he endeavored to resurrect the UNIA. In his absence the American
branches of the UNIA were soon divided into rival factions, and he was soon
deprived of it as a principle source of funds. He did manage to start a
newspaper, The Blackman, and he also entered local municipal politics. The
New Jamaican, which he started, superceded The Blackman, a daily paper, in
1932. As always, his literary out put was prolific, he edited and wrote both
newspapers by himself.
By 1933 his career was entering its final eclipse. His
presses were seized by creditors and Garvey himself had to immigrate to England.
In London, he once again resurrects The Blackman, now on a monthly basis. He
undertook several speaking tours in Canada and South America. It was a heroic
but hopeless last stand. His fortunes continued to decline, his magazine folded
yet again, and his health was ailing. His family had to return to Jamaica. When
he died, neglected and deserted on June 10, 1940, there was only a small circle
of admirers at Bethnal Green Cemetery to mourn his passing.
Symbolically, Garvey’s remains were neither interred nor
cremated. Instead they were placed in a temporary vault to facilitate their
eventual removal to Jamaica. Garvey's remains are there to this day and deserve
respect by his fellow black brothers and sisters for whom he fought so hard.
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