EMPRESS INK: "Our Women & What They Think"
Issue #13
August 13th, 2006

REMEMBERING MARCUS MOSIAH GARVEY
by Valerie Dixon

Some time ago I was with a group of persons who were talking about Marcus Garvey. Someone asked the question why is it that middle-class Black people just cannot love Marcus Garvey, even though we are all in agreement that he was an exceptional and great man. The organization that he founded in 1919, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) has its address in a dilapidated building on Duke Street, almost forgotten by middle class black Jamaicans. We thank the faithful few who have kept the name of his organization alive. These people can be described as 'grass roots' people and they get little or no respect from the middle class intelligentsia who claim to be great scholars of Marcus Garvey. A lady from the group, who was raised in uppa Sin Andru (Upper St. Andrew), said she remembered as a child, hearing her grandmother and her friends sing a song about a man who had big thick lips and a big broad nose. It wasn't until she became an adult and heard about Marcus Garvey that she realized the song was about the ridiculing of Marcus Garvey. Therein lies the answer as to why we just cannot love Marcus Mosiah Garvey. He was too Black and even in the year 2004, many of us still cannot come to grips with being too Black and identifying with anything too Black and we hate the word 'Negro'.

To lend support to what I am saying let me quote one of Marcus Garvey's contemporaries, Robert Bagnall an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who in an abusive epithet described Marcus as follows "He is of unmixed stock, has protruding jaws and heavy jowls, with small bright pig-like eyes and a rather bull-dog face". Marcus Garvey regarded people like Bagnall as hating the Negro blood of their foremothers and who endeavour to build up a society based on shades of colour and not on achievement and worth.

What is it that makes some people's skin deeply coloured while some people have little or very little of this colouring? It is melanin and if one is observant one will see that the people who live where the sun is hottest are usually very black in colour. The melanin is supposed to protect them from the ultra-violet rays of the sun which can cause skin cancer. Higher Intelligence or God or whatever one may wish to call the Creator never makes a mistake. Yet the entire race of Black people have allowed mainly white males like Willie Lynch to brain-wash and dope them into thinking that the Creator made a mistake by creating Black people and that the colouring under their skin makes them inferior. Marcus Garvey saw through the folly of this kind of thinking.

Marcus Garvey was utterly despised by some Negro intellectuals and the rising Black bourgeoisie both in Jamaica and North America. The Negro elites have always shied away from mass movements and they were particularly repulsed by the UNIA which they regarded as a 'grass-root' mass movement, strictly for the poor and uneducated. This man was a threat to their striving to gain acceptance and assimilation into the dominant White culture.

In remembering Marcus Mosiah Garvey, it must be admitted that he lacked honest and competent business associates. His Black Star Line Enterprise was therefore doomed to failure. Marcus Garvey raised substantial sums of money, but his associates, who were supposed to be well-educated, bought four worthless ships for his Company, a Company that was managed again by well-educated associates who were more cunning, than they were scrupulous.

Garvey took a gamble and he lost. He thought that the men around him were men with high levels of consciousness and that they also understood the plight of the Negro race. He thought they were committed to rescuing the Black race from what the late Pandit Nehru once called the "horrible and infinite tragedy of Africa in the modern world." One wonders what Nehru would call Africa today.

Marcus Garvey failed not because of himself, but because of the forces that worked externally to him, particularly in his vast business enterprises. In spite of this, his stature as a great leader and teacher has grown steadily throughout the world and many have taken time to study this complex man objectively. Garvey's "crime" was that he sought to instill in his followers, who were mainly the poor and oppressed Black people, a sense of pride in their race and patriotism to their African heritage. This idea was propagated by other West Indian and North American Negroes, but it was the personality of Marcus Mosiah Garvey and his movement the UNIA that popularized the idea among the masses.

Marcus Garvey must have been an extraordinary man. His wife Amy Jacques Garvey said he was "one of those men and women who have emerged from their environment and so far out-distanced their contemporaries in thought and action, that in their day they were apt to be called mad, dangerous or fools." She said also that "Garvey was obsessed by the conviction that Africans at home and abroad should be given an opportunity in life to develop themselves to the highest."

It is this strong faith and conviction that Garvey had that made him tower over his contemporaries. Marcus Garvey is embodied in this quotation from Paul Twitchell, a Spiritual Leader and Teacher who said in his book - Letters To Gail Vol. 2 - that "Any man who sets out to make his idea accepted in a society, must have great and enduring faith in his own judgment and skills and a large amount of contempt for the opinions of his fellows." It seems fair to say that most great men and women who set out to make their idea(s) accepted in society struggled long and suffered many failures and were ridiculed, ignored and persecuted before they could have their self-set goals achieved - many times these goals were never achieved in their life-time.

Often times we see that the men of mental activity or the so-called intelligentsia, are generally those who will go along with the social customs and accept things as they are and only try to improve their personal positions within the society. But we remember Garvey as a man of spiritual activity who touched truth and was full of ideas on how to improve the lives of Black people both at home and abroad. It is said that "Ideas are the most powerful weapons of all and truth causes conflict to storm in the heart of man, tearing him in every which direction." (Paul Twitchell - Letters to Gail Vol. 2)

EMPRESS INK Vol.1