How to Celebrate the Life of Marcus Garvey

During the first quarter of the 20th century, Marcus Garvey led the largest organized movement in black history. The views he championed - black pride, economic self-sufficiency, African independence - were not original. What set Garvey apart was his incomparable talent for making people listen.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Biographies Of Marcus Garvey
• Reggae CDs
• Plane Tickets To Jamaica

1. Take a trip to Jamaica, where Garvey was born - at St. Ann's Bay on August 17, 1887 - and where he remains a popular hero.
2. Listen to Jamaican reggae music, which is based on the country's age-old oral tradition. Notice that many of the lyrics invoke Garvey as they speak of spiritual exile and the historic experience of black dispossession.
3. Learn about Black Nationalism in Garvey's own words: read "Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons."
4. Explore Garvey's life and times online at Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project. (See isop.ucla.edu/mgpp.)
5. Honor Garvey's memory by supporting your local public library. He was an avid reader from early childhood and spent his life spreading the gospel of literacy and education.
6. Celebrate Kwanzaa next December and, when you hang the symbolic red, black and green Bendera flag, drink a toast to Garvey, who created it.
7. Invest wisely. Garvey assured his followers that "wealth is strength, wealth is power, wealth is influence, wealth is justice, is liberty, is real human rights."

Tips & Warnings

• Marcus Garvey is best remembered as the father of the "back-to-Africa" movement, based on his conviction that African-Americans could reclaim the former greatness of their race if they left America, returned to Africa and freed the continent of the colonial powers that ruled it. But his teachings went beyond the Black Nationalism movement. He blended Jamaican aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the American success ethic to create a new gospel of racial pride.
• The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League is still going strong under the leadership of its seventh president, Marcus Garvey, Jr. To learn more about the UNIA, past and present, visit unia-acl.org.