Marcus Garvey: Free at Last

Marcus Garvey: Free at Last

Marcus Garvey was one of Joe Biden’s last minute pardons. Garvey is a towering historical figure who preached black independence and self-help and is largely overlooked in white-authored textbooks. This brief bio is from Milton Sernett’s “African American Religious History.”

“Garvey came to the United States from Jamaica in 1916, a year after the death of Booker T. Washington. (He was born in Jamaica in 1887). W. E. B. DuBois and others in the NAACP who subscribed to the notion of “the talented tenth” had not inspired the black masses. Garvey did. His “Back to Africa” movement included the Black Star Line, steamships intended to make triangular voyages between New York City, the West Indies, and Africa. But this scheme failed, and Garvey was arrested in 1923 on charges of mail fraud. He had many critics, some of whom imputed to him the aim of creating a black Ku Klux Klan. Others accused him of being a supreme egotist, while DuBois and the NAACP warred with his separatist philosophy. Convicted in 1925, Garvey remained in prison (in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary) until President Coolidge commuted his sentence in 1927 and had him deported to Jamaica. He died in 1940 in London, and was largely forgotten until the revival of interest in black nationalism during the 1960s”.

Martin Luther King, Jr said of Garvey “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.” Eric Holder said Garvey “raised the hopes of Black people at a particularly difficult time in America and was deemed a threat by the racist establishment – including J. Edgar Hoover. The power of his words, actions and beliefs have endured and inspired generations that followed. As a black man — as a proud American — I am deeply indebted to the work of this great man.” 

Garvey saw no future for blacks in America and wanted blacks to emigrate to Liberia which was founded as a refuge for free American blacks in 1822 and became a nation in 1847. However, despite Garvey’s best efforts, blacks preferred staying in America perhaps because they were Americans not Africans.

Garvey’s prophesy about the fate of blacks in America as reflected in his own words proved to be false – thank goodness. Sernett’s book in its chapter “Garvey tells his own story” has the following last paragraph:

“White men who have struggled for and built up their countries and theirown civilizations are not disposed to hand them over to the Negro, or any other race, without let or hindrance. It would be unreasonable to expect this. Hence any vain assumption on the part of the Negro to imagine that he will one day become President of the Nation, Governor of the State, or Mayor of the City in the countries of white men, is like waiting on the devil and his angels to take up their residence in the Realm on high and direct there the affairs of Paradise.”

Well of course blacks have become “President of the Nation, Governor of the State, or Mayor of the City in the countries of white men.” This quote is at the root of my disagreement with many prominent blacks. I once remarked in a gathering of black intellectuals that one of my passions was to tour Civil War battlefields. I would take a GPS reading of important locations on the battlefield and stand there to let the importance of place roll over me. I would then go to the Union cemetery and thank those soldiers for their sacrifice in making me free. The reaction from the other blacks would typically be to scoff, saying that the white Union soldier did not die to free blacks and was probably a racist. I said that it did not matter. What mattered was that we became free because of their sacrifice.

I then said that in that same vein, whites had to give up some of their power so that blacks (and women) could have power. It was white men who emancipated blacks. It was white men who gave women the vote. It was white men who voided separate but equal, mandated the integration of schools, passed voter rights laws, enacted Public Accommodations and granted all the equal rights under the law to blacks and women. I then encountered a barrage of arguments that white men did not cede power willingly and were forced to give up their power. Of course, this is ridiculous. Forced by whom? Certainly they could have resisted by force if necessary any uprisings on the part of blacks. Maybe an effort to deny sexual favors by white women could have had a marginal but doubtful effect. Perhaps pressure from their mothers might have carried some weight but in the end it was white men who ultimately made the decision to cede some of their power. What motivated them? I think it was the uniqueness of the American experience and adherence to the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Amen.

BTW, remember the Fifth Dimension’s “Declaration” from the great album “Portrait”? It was the Declaration of Independence put to song. It was released in 1970 and was banned from the radio and from Armed Forces radio as being subversive!