Not unlike his great predecessor Toussaint Louverture, the Afro-Caribbean prophet now lies exiled in dreary Europe, bound by personal debts and political missteps to match Toussaint’s more literal chains. Garvey himself is being hushed and harangued by anti-colonial voices, like Isaac Wallace-Johnson of Sierra Leone, who first learned Africa’s freedom song at his knee. Garvey’s international organization is now on its last legs, being plundered by opportunistic leaders, and poached by pseudo-Garveyite rivals. And drawing, too, the wrath of Western capitalist governments, the rancorous abuse of would-be Communist liberators, and the jealousy of established, petty-bourgeois race leadership.Īdvance fifteen years from the movement’s 1920 International Convention, with its tens of thousands of attendees, its great institutions and pageantry, its embryonic all-African government. Yet this same anonymous visionary, of despised race and with few formal credentials, would in a few short years send electrifying waves through the imperialist world, his propaganda blowing a storm-cloud of anti-colonial revolt over the sea of Africa’s toiling masses. Garvey himself was of humble origin – a printer and former timekeeper with the United Fruit Company, with little more than his brief tenure with the Africa Times and Orient Review, and a failed attempt at the Tuskegee model in Jamaica, to recommend his leadership and world outlook. In the welter of last century’s first imperialist war, Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association rose from modest beginnings in a cramped Harlem bedroom, to become a movement counting millions of members and associates throughout the colonial world. The nation should not be an affair run by a big boss." If the leader drives me I want him to know that at the same time I am driving him. People are no longer a herd and do not need to be driven. With Studs Terkel (1970) "In order to avoid pitfalls a persistent battle has to be waged to prevent the party from becoming a compliant instrument in the hands of a leader… The driver of people no longer exists today. And that is what Garvey did, despite the mistakes that he made, that is to his great credit." When Garvey was finished, everybody knew there was a Black question: both white people knew and Black people all over the world knew. Du Bois made it an intellectual discussion, posed the question, Garvey made it a popular question. So both of them, although they may have had conflict, they played a political role. When Du Bois was finished, Garvey began, so to speak, and Garvey made Black emancipation something popular, which it had never been before. But his chief concern was to appeal to and get in contact with intellectuals, historians, organizers, etc. Du Bois – a man with a range of scholarship, practical activity, and ambition for the development of humanity which is not exceeded by anybody in the twentieth century. 13 min read "I believe the intellectual origin of the Black movement must rest with Dr.
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