Marcus Mosiah Garvey - "75 years after his death, we are still not very near in realizing the dream he had for his race, the Black Race."
Self-Help News
Editorial
It would seem that world events of the twenty first century are giving greater, stronger, higher resurrected tones to the teaching of an Afrikan Icon who returned to Our Afrikan Ancestors seventy five years ago.
Garvey, an Afrikan, born outside of Afrika, linked Afrika and her Diaspora naturally. There is potentially a cultural and nationalistic Afrikan fire storm of global proportion heading our way.
Global Afrikan awareness will not be extinguished easily, while Garvey’s obvious truths bubble in our consciousness and resonate in our ears.
Afrika and Afrikans, those at home and those abroad, must unite, in order to gain benefits of basic economies of scales, which unity of states affords, avoiding unnecessary and unaffordable duplications, unproductive and destructive balkanizations.
Valerie Dixon, in a birthday anniversary tribute to Marcus Garvey, continues to sounding the bell of awareness, as so many are doing during August, Garvey’s birth month, reminding us that a particular Afrikan Icon lived among us. He left solid legacy from which we should benefit. And if it was a ‘Moses’ some of us are still waiting to ‘save’ us, he came during the 19th century and left during the 20th century. He left blue prints behind to affect changes in our lives, when we are able to bring ourselves to start believing fully in our own strengths and exceptional intellectual, creative powers, and other natural abilities. We must recognize these, as Garvey did. Others will not necessarily remind us of them. That may not be within their interests.
Self-Help must be the key – “To Share, to Warn, to Encourage and to Protect, in times of plenty and times of scarcity, rejecting mendacity, larceny and slothfulness”. SWEP essential self-help principles are there for the taking and applying to retrieve our individual and collective self-respect, dignity and more.
We are our own saviors. As such, we determine our own sacrifices in order to bring about real and collective changes among us for the greater good.
Until we accept this fundamental and critical notion, we are likely to remain on the byways, looking and waiting for saviors, while others pass us by from generations to generations.
Editorial Collective
Self-Help News – “Giving Voice to the Voiceless”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRIBUTE TO MARCUS GARVEY ON HIS BIRTHDAY ANNIVERSARY
By VALERIE DIXON
In paying tribute to our first national hero, the Right Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey, it should have been easy to only highlight his glowing achievements, but one has to learn to take the bitter with the sweet. To say that Marcus Garvey was and still is an enigma, is to say it lightly because 75 years after his death, we are still not very near in realizing the dream he had for his race, the Black Race.
It would have been his dream that after fifty odd years of Independence, the Black leaders in the former European colonies of Africa and the Diaspora would be so full of pride and love for themselves and their mostly black brothers and sisters, that these former colonies would have become places of choice to live, work, raise families and do business. To underscore the wasting of a dream, Jamaica, the land of your birth, has made world headline-news that it is one of the most indebted countries on the planet.
This tribute should be a joyous one to write, as you would be wished a “Happy Birthday” as your earthly remains should be resting in peace. Your many accomplishments and achievements are now overshadowed by the reality that the more things change, is the more they remain the same.
You were embroiled in a bitter conflict in Jamaica between 1914 and 1916, when you fought bitterly to do two things- (1), to unite the Negro masses and (2), to educate the mostly brown ruling class and a small elite band of a black-skinned intelligentsia, to appreciate their responsibility towards helping to uplift the downtrodden poor black proletariat, also known as “the grassroots”, the “masses” and in today’s parlance “the massive”.
You left Jamaica in 1916 and arrived in America and it seemed that destiny was to take you as the ‘Chosen One’ and plunge you into a situation similar to what you had left in Jamaica. Your main purpose was to meet with Booker T. Washington, who was obviously your role model, to learn more about his technical education programme at Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and his philosophy to free the minds of the black people. Garvey and Washington shared a common belief that those who are black and of higher intelligence must exercise forbearance with the illiterate and help them see the right.
It was obviously his destiny and mission in life, because Garvey’s arrival in America in 1916 was also timely in another sense, as explained in the Introduction to the 2nd edition of the book Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, compiled by his 2nd wife Amy Jacques Garvey. The existence of large concentrations of an urbanized and disillusioned Negro proletariat in the ghettoes of the Northern United States provided material for his militant nationalism.
In paying tribute to Garvey, it would not be fair to say, as some of his detractors would like to imply, that it was his pride and his ego that tripped him up and caused his downfall. It would also not be fair to say that it was Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that brought about Garvey’s demise and death at the young age of forty.
In his short life span, Garvey achieved and accomplished so much, that his main enemies were the black people who were in the organization that he founded, to achieve the very things that would take the black race out of their untenable despair. The black men, who should have been watching his back, hijacked the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) while he was in prison; they robbed him and the so-called black intelligentsia laughed at his UNIA and brought it into disrepute- so thick was their jealousy and envy. I am ashamed to admit this as we pay respect to you on your anniversary, but this same mind-set still exists today in the 21st century.
Nevertheless, we pay tribute and honour you for being one of the first Pan African Nationals, one who believed in the unity and solidarity with Africans and people of African descent worldwide. Garvey believed until his dying day, that unity is vital for economic, social and political progress and that it is the only vehicle that can improve and uplift all peoples in Africa and the Diaspora,
He deliberately called us Negroes because being the Prophet that he was, he knew the day would come when there would be white people calling themselves Africans and now there are Chinese people calling themselves Africans. When he used the word Negro, we know exactly who he is referring to.
It now gives me great pleasure to itemize some of Garvey’s greatest achievements and accomplishments. They are great because he achieved them at a time when racial prejudice and discrimination were at their zenith in America. He achieved without knowing what a smart-phone was going to be, he had no laptop computer, he had no social media at his disposal and he was able to generate a network that had millions of members all over Africa, her Diaspora and the rest of the world.
At the height of his power, black people began to prosper and there was a town known as Tulsa in Oklahoma, U S A which had the District of Greenwood that was called the Black Wall Street. (Every Black person needs to research this Town and District.) Tulsa was mysteriously burnt to the ground …Hmmm! Today we have black leaders with PhDs from Her Majesty’s Commonwealth universities all over Africa and her Diaspora, who can’t even grow their countries’ economies by even 1% annually.
As an Entrepreneur par excellence, Garvey generated income through his UNIA and provided jobs through the numerous enterprises that were owned. These included a chain of grocery shops and restaurants, a laundry, tailor shop, dressmaking shop, millinery shop selling clothes, fashionable hats, accessories etc. There was a doll factory that made dolls in the images of pretty little black babies. Garvey published his own newspaper and owned the publishing house. There is more – in New York City alone, Garvey owned several buildings and a fleet of trucks. He organized the Black Cross Nurses Unit and a Corps (pronounced as ‘core’) of Black Security Guards. His UNIA operated the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel at 3-13 West 136th Street in New York.
His Black Star Line Shipping Company was to be his Achilles’ tendon (weak spot) and those who prosecuted and persecuted him at home and abroad went straight for it.
In defense of his Black Star Line Company, this is what he said “…The Black Starline as we all know, was but a small attempt or experiment of the race to fit and prepare ourselves for the bigger effort in the direction of racial self reliance and self determination. To say that we have failed because a few black and white unscrupulous persons deceived and robbed us is to admit that the colonialization scheme of America failed, because a few Pilgrim Fathers died at Plymouth. The Black Starline was only part of an honest effort on the part of real Negroes to re-establish themselves as a worthy people, among the other races and nations on earth and but a small contribution in the plan of a free and redeemed Africa for the Negro peoples in the world. I was convicted, not because anyone was defrauded in the temporary failure of the Black Starline, but because I represented a movement for the real Emancipation of my race.”
In this tribute, I must share one of the best ironies of all ironies with you. It is the mother of all ironies. Dr. William E. DuBois, the light-skinned mulatto, who along with other brown skinned and black skinned intellectuals, laughed and ridiculed you to scorn and said they were better than you with your pig -jowls and flat nose; the ones who publicly said that the UNIA was not relevant for them because your organization is for the grass-roots masses and they were ‘intellectuals’ (by the way they are still saying so today in the 21st century as I write). Well Dr. DuBois finally came to his senses and admitted that your Philosophies and Opinions were indeed correct and the only solution to Africa and her Diaspora’s problems. He abandoned his birthplace, the United States of America and adopted Ghana as his new country and spent the rest of his life in Africa. He was given full honours in Ghana and his earthly remains now rest in Africa.
In closing this birthday tribute, I will let this great man who is so undervalued by his own race, have the last say. In 1922 he said “…If the Negro were to live in this Western Hemisphere for another five hundred years, he would still be outnumbered by other races who are prejudiced against him. He cannot resort to the government for protection, for the government will be in the hands of the majority of the people who are prejudiced against him. For the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial progress alone will be hopeless, as they do not help him when he is shot, hanged (lynched), imprisoned, burned, jim-crowed and segregated. The future of the Negro outside of Africa spells ruin and disaster.”
The Prophet speaks more truth when he said “…No Negro, let him be American, European, West Indian or African, shall be truly respected until the race as a whole has emancipated itself, through self-achievement and progress from universal prejudice. To do this, the Negro will have to build his own government, industry, art, science, literature and culture before the world will stop to consider him. Until then, we are but wards of a superior race and civilization and the outcasts of a standard social system.”
Seventy-five years after his death, the Right Excellent Marcus Garvey is still prophetic, because our so-called ‘elite’ black leaders and ‘elite’ black intelligentsia in Africa and the Diaspora, have made us wards of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and wards of the Chinese and all other races, Scholarship Foundations, such as Commonwealth, Rhodes, Fulbright and other organizations and individuals that we present with our begging bowls, for bail-outs and other monetary and social assistance.
Happy Birthday Anniversary Your Excellency – One God, One Aim, One Destiny!
--------
Valerie Dixon is the current Lady President of the UNIA-ACL, Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s founding chapter of 1914, in Kingston, Jamaica, in the Caribbean. She can be reached at Valerie Dixon valerie...@gmail.com
Source: Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey: Compiled by Amy Jacques Garvey; 2nd Edition and Volume 2: Africa for the Africans.