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NOTE

“Black is beautiful.”

“I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.”

WAS MARCUS GARVEY (1887–1940) a unifier or a divider? Depending on whom you asked, the responses were wide-ranging.

W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar and activist, called Garvey, “the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid a wreath at Garvey’s shrine in 1965 and said he “was the first man of color to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny. And make the Negro feel he was somebody.”

In 2008, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author and journalist, described Garvey as the “patron saint” of the Black nationalist movement.

Wilson J. Moses, a scholar of African American studies, expressed concern in 1972 about “that uncritical adulation of him that leads to the practice of red baiting and to the divisive rhetoric of ‘Blacker-than-thou’” within African American political circles and that Garvey was wrongly seen as a “man of the people” because he had “enjoyed cultural, economic, and educational advantages few of his Black contemporaries were priviledged [sic] as to know.”

In 1937, three years before his death, Garvey, one of the most controversial figures in the history of race relations, assembled his most trusted organizers from the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), at its peak the largest international mass movement in the history of African peoples and whose motto was “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!” He was looking to pass on the life lessons he had learned. For one month, he instructed this elite student body, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, on twenty-two lessons, with topics ranging from universal knowledge and how to get it to leadership, character, God, and the social system. Garvey’s lessons were known as “the Course of African Philosophy.”

Agitator? Hero? Criminal? Prophet?

Read Message to the People to help you decide.