Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey

For those of us who are fans of African-American History, usually there's a point in time when the lightbulb goes off. At a certain, specific time, something is read that gives one an overpowering sense of one's self. This phenomenon is usually tied to the fact that the vast majority of things that we have been taught about Africa are lies, that Africa has a rich History, full of so many accomplishments that it boggles the mind. We realize that the Western canon of History has purposefully misled us to believe that Africa has no cultural past, with no major achievements. It's not until we get a-hold of truth-respecting books like "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," " Black Athena" or "Stolen Legacy," that we truly understand that all of the stereotypes attached to Black people, many of them resulting from an implicit assumption that Africa has no past, are all based upon lies. It's at that moment, the individual becomes possessed with an almost transcendent sense of self-esteem, a feeling of wholeness that one has never known before. It occurs to you that you have been holding back a wave of negative thoughts about you, that you had no part in creating, but that are all based upon lies. No other feeling in the World can top this one. Having $100 million dollars won't do it. Being engaged to the most beautiful woman in the World won't do it. Having your wildest dreams come true won't do it. It's like being struck with a positive lightening bolt of electricity-like self-esteem. This feeling of wholeness, positive, life-affirming God driven self-esteem is the ultimate feeling in life because it returns one to one's God-like state of authenticity. This brings us to Marcus Garvey, the grass-roots organizer, the most powerful Black grass-roots leader in History, who had an abundance of the feeling to which I am referring. It was his understanding of African History, both in terms of its past, and his confident, strength-supported faith that there is nothing on Earth that Black people are not capable of accomplishing that shot him into the stratosphere of Black adulation and respect. Though many in his audience probably could not have found the words to express it, they instinctively and intuitively “grasped” at a deep-soul level so much of the soulful electricity that Garvey was trying to transmit. The spiritual accomplishment that Garvey achieved on an individual basis, the harnessing of a genuine and profound love of his authentic African self, he spent much of his life trying to infect and inject into the whole Black race. I would argue that the overpowering, tidal wave-type self-esteem that Garvey exuded is EXACTLY the type of essential soul food that is needed within the Pan-African World today. One of the people who “grasped” this was a traveling Black preacher from Michigan, a guy named Earl Little, who pushed the Garvey agenda as vehemently as anyone, traveling all over the country during the late 1920's and early 1930's to push The Garvey Movement agenda. In his travels, Earl Little often took along his little son, a boy named Malcolm Little, who would eventually grow up to drop the “Little” last name and replace it with an “X.” Though it was way into the future, eventually Malcolm X would intuitively grasp his same African essence that Garvey had, through his study of African and African-American History, and from that time until his death Malcolm would become an intense, absolutely-out-of-his mind zealot and promoter of African History and the resulting World-view that he was studying. Malcolm became, in microcosm, as an individual, the type of Africa-loyal person that Garvey was trying to create in the macrocosm of the whole Black World. Garvey would have rejoiced to have seen a plethora of Black people with the intense interest, promotion and zeal that Malcolm had for his people, and his inspired love of everything African, to include its people, History and Culture. And what exactly comprised Garvey's agenda? Garvey arrived to the U.S from Jamaica prior to 1920, as a penniless traveler, trying to create an organization and make a name for himself. He settled in the biggest Black community in the United States, by taking up residence in Harlem, NY. Starting as a step-ladder, street corner speaker, Garvey was able to use his extraordinary gift of speech to eventually create a powerful organization. First, and foremost, Garvey told us we must begin with self. We are to love our black skin, and all of our physical features, to include our hair, reveling in the kinkiness of it. Straight hair does not define human hair. We are to love our noses, that might be a little wider than other humans, our lips that are thicker by nature and any and every other parts of our bodies, from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet. We are to love these things about ourselves at a very, very profound level, mainly because all of them came to us from God. This is what Garvey taught, and in teaching these things in the 1920's, he was foreshadowing what would become the essence of the “The Black Power Movement” some 40 odd years later. Garvey felt it imperative that African-descended people, from all over the World, should unite behind our common cause. As part of this, Garvey judged America as so racist that he started a “Back To Africa” campaign, aimed at convincing Black folks that America was such a rotten, racist country that Black people should pack up our stuff and go back to the Motherland of Africa. Since he felt that this could not happen right away, in the meantime he urged Black people to unite among ourselves, to create Back businesses to employ our people, to create social institutions to support us. In effect, Garvey was making clear that we needed to do for ourselves what America would not. But more than that, Garvey was making the point that Black America should not have expected for the larger American society, i.e., White society, to do these things anyway. As Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association got off of the ground, Garvey was able to capture the imagination of the collective Black World by forming something called “The Black Star Line,” a 100% Universal Improvement Association-owned (and therefore Black Owned) shipping line. He created this line by having Black people from all over the World purchase stock in his company. One has to stand and pause at the magnitude of Garvey's achievement in establishing the Black Star Line. At a time when the collective Black World was being locked out of all facets of American life with the omnipresent racial hatred flaring with the intensity of a Satanic fire, Garvey had the boldness and imagination to create something as huge as the Black ownership of a shipping line. That level of vision, to see both a present and future where anything is possible for Black people, is something that has to be respected, particularly in the context of the times that he did it. One of his most famous quotations is, “Up you mighty race! You can accomplish what you will!” One also has to respect that it was Garvey's organization, the UNIA, that both came up with, and promoted the emblematic and long-lasting red, black and green flag of world-wide African unity, that still remains in effect today. In addition, Garvey was able to get throngs and throngs of Black people to join his organization, establishing branches in the U.S., Central and South America, The Caribbean and Africa, in sum, Black people from all over the World. The comprehensive collective of people who supported him from all over the globe became known as “Garveyites,” and the whole Movement as “The Garvey Movement.” It can be argued that Marcus Garvey may have been the most powerful and influential, international, grass-roots African-descended leader in History. Despite Garvey's push to establish The Black Star line as a legitimate business venture, eventually the fate of it suffered from both internal and external enemies that led to its demise. As Garvey's fame shot into the stratosphere, the FBI began to take notice, and to work to neutralize this man who was trying to unite Africans from all over the globe. He was often outspoken in his critique of what the White nations of the World had done to Africa, and that fact has to be taken into account as to how others would see him negatively. He was seen as a threat and a young employee with the FBI, a man known as J. Edgar Hoover worked against what would become the first of many Black leaders that he would work in opposition to. The focus was on the fact that Garvey was not a U.S. citizen, a fact that was eventually used very much against him as the government brought mail fraud charges against him, stating that his economically failing Black Star Line was using the mails to advertise and raise money and defraud gullible Black people for a venture that he knew was failing. Eventually, Garvey was found guilty and sent to prison in Atlanta. Th President eventually commuted his sentence and he was released, but as a “foreigner,” he was deported back to Jamaica immediately upon being set free. Garvey floundered from the late 1920's upon his release from prison, until his death in 1940. The British government and the U.S. government played a hand in limiting his passports to other countries, thus limiting Garvey's platform, and effectively helping to weaken his message. Since he no longer had the U.S. platform of the biggest Black community in America to propagandize from, his work suffered. In looking at Garvey's career, his ability to speak to the hopes, fears and realities of Black people, is what made him stand out. In several places throughout this book, Black contemporaries struggled to describe Garvey's powers of persuasion and effect as a speaker. He had a certain spiritual, messianic, emotional electricity that made Black people attracted to him like a magnet. It's my opinion, from the descriptions within this book, that Marcus Garvey had a similar effect upon his crowds that Malcolm X would have on a later generation of listeners. Though it's hard to believe, Garvey could possibly have been a more effective speaker than Malcolm X. In telling the Garvey story, I think this book is one of the best that a person can find about Mr. Marcus Garvey. I read the book to get a better understanding of The Garvey Movement, helping me to understand better the early influences of The Garvey Movement, as it would eventually play out in the life of Malcolm X. This book is now one of my favorites, and helps to bring Marcus Garvey back to life in a way that no other book I have read about Garvey has done. This is a great book. PS--I read Grant's work no more than 2 pages at a sitting. This is the only way I could digest this mountain of information, to “eat this elephant-of-a-book-of 455 pages only one spoonful at a time.” It takes Job-like patience to do it this way. This is not the kind of book I could do marathon reading with, breezing through 30 to 50 pages at a sitting. If I had done that, I would have gotten bored and bogged down. I also looked up all words in this book in a dictionary that were unfamiliar to me, and copied them down into a notebook. Though I pride myself on having a very comprehensive reading vocabulary, Grant's verbiage had me looking up and writing down quite a number of words. I am glad that I read the book slowly and to have also looked up all necessary vocabulary words, absorbing much more information doing it this way than any other way. It took me quite some time to read the book, but I am profoundly blessed to have done it my way. I can only hope the level of my reading is reflected in this review.

Very good, full of interesting anecdotes and perspectives, really just opened my eyes to a whole new world and struggle I knew nothing about previously. Some subjects I really enjoyed learning about Garvey's travels around Central America and the labor disputes with United Fruit, how Garvey got his start in Harlem and just what Harlem was like immediately prior to the Renaissance, how hard Garvey worked to establish himself and the FBI, the First Red Scare and how/why UNIA was targeted during it.My only issue is that it seemed to languish at times and relied a lot on newspaper snippets almost to the point of being repetitive. It makes sense that Grant would choose to focus so heavily on the early 20s, but that period seemed to dominate almost half the book, which made me feel fatigued at times, or like I wasn't making any progress. All in all a good read and an important history. I read this for an episode of my podcast, Hard Fried History.

I didn’t realize it was going to be a goof read.

Wonderfully written piece of Black history that introduced me to this tragic but important figure. I live in the Caribbean island of St Martin/St Maarten and I've heard rastas especially shout out the name of Marcus Garvey but I didn't know much about him. I'm on chapter 18 after reading an average of a chapter a day and I must say that I adore this book, it has taken me on a voyage in time where a Black man had it much harder than today but some problems still exist in our contemporary lives. The biography is very well made and I just couldn't stop rooting for this man who saw vertiginous highs and heart-breaking lows and never gave in. I recommend wholeheartedly this amazing biography, it's a rich page-turner and a must read for any person, Black or White, who values freedom of the downtrodden. One thing is for sure, he stood up like a man in a world that considered the people of his race subhuman. Ultimately this is a story of that uniquely human trait of resistance and pride in one's self. Marcus Garvey was one of the great men whose presence on Earth changed it forever

I like to consider myself a historian of such.. I love learning history and the reason for things. Like I tell everyone I talk with "Whatever question you have about society, it's a good chance History will provide you the answer, and if not, the Law will."When I picked this book up I knew very minimal about Marcus Garvey. I knew what others told me. But this book sheds alot of light into the man himself. One thing I discovered from reading is that Marcus Garvey never visited Africa. I found it to be very intriguing that he would foster the Pan-Afrikan movement but never visited Africa himself. That shows the true nature of what he believed in.This book tells a lot about Garvey growing up and what he encountered in America by trying to help his people. Only issue, it was a slow burn.. The book is not that easy to read. It took me a very long time to get through this. maybe the writing style..Very informative source of MG, but be warned, it won't be an easy task getting through it.

I learned some much about Marcus Garvey. But also about the period in history and the major players who had an impact on black life in the western world.

Every black people should read that book to understand that our futur depend on us.An immigrant from Jamacain organized millions of black people in the world by his hardwork and his love for his own race.That book has also many references to other people influent in the black community at that time.A well written book and very captivating.

This is an excellent book on the lift of Marcus Garvey. I am happy I bought it. The delivery process was excellent!

An excellent read