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Marcus Garvey Look for
me in the Whirlwind
Reviewed by Molefi Kete Asante
 The
recent television documentary on Marcus Garvey once again shows
that the handling of our national and international heroes can never
be left to those whose desires appear to be to serve the interests
of their paymasters. Stanley Nelson, the producer and director,
and Marcia White, the scriptwriter, for the documentary have done
a grievous harm to the African community at home and abroad by their
portrayal of Garvey. They have not presented Garvey to us, they
have tried to undermine Garvey and their work harks back to the
deliberate attempts by the federal government and some elements
of the African American middle classes to discredit Marcus Garvey
in the 1920s.
A growing number of so-called black
intellectuals and artists believe that the best way forward is to
ride on the backs of their own people. They seek to emasculate the
noblest defenders of our human rights, to disestablish the reputations
of our best thinkers, and to thrown bleach onto the memories of
our most ardent activists for justice. Marcus Garvey, as the central
figure in African history over the past one hundred years, has not
escaped the hammer of misinformation and misrepresentation.
The recent television portrayal
had all the makings of a useful historical documentary. It had the
benefit of Julius Garvey and Marcus Garvey, Jr., the two sons of
Marcus Garvey, Sr., and three leading Marcus Garvey scholars in
Tony Martin of Wellesley, Bobby Hill of UCLA, and Rupert Lewis of
the University of West Indies. However, regardless of the experts,
a documentary is the brainchild of the producer and director. You
can make the necessary editing cuts to create the impression you
want to create. While any film that did not bring in the words of
the Garvey sons or Rupert Lewis or Tony Martin would be considered
anemic and not authoritative, using Bobby Hill, the keeper of the
Garvey papers, as the expert consultant to cast dispersions on Garvey
was meant to invalidate anything said by the other authorities.
The truth of the matter about Garvey
is simple. By the time the Universal Negro Improvement Association
and African Communities League held its huge meeting in August 1920
at Madison Square Garden, Garvey had become a household name among
African people in the Americas. Ten years earlier he had lit the
fires of African self determination and political self assertion
in scores of speeches to thousands of people from the back of a
train in the Limon province of Costa Rica. In the United States,
he had surpassed the leaders of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People in his popularity. By the force of
his personality and character he had demonstrated that the NAACP
missed the real feelings of the African people in America. So when
25,000 people assembled in the huge Madison Square Garden under
the banner of the UNIA and ACL the event brought more attention
to Garvey than ever before. It was the beginning of the FBI’s
attempt to sully his name with African American people. From that
moment forward the United States government and his enemies outside
of the UNIA and ACL would do everything in their power to dishonor
Garvey’s operation. They would plant articles in papers against
him, sow seeds of distrust among members of the organization, create
opportunities for those who wanted to curry favor with the white
establishment to reveal any inside information they had on the organization,
and try to set up the officers for criminal activities. What was
worrisome to the national government was the fact that an African,
without the support of the white media, had ascended to such heights
in the popular imagination of the African American people as to
be able to call together more black people than the white president.
Garvey was the pre-eminent spokesperson of the race and no one in
any other organization could compete with him for the public mind.
What Stanley Nelson has to do in his documentary is to "problematize"
Garvey. This angers me because the only people who believe that
they have to "problematize" their heroes are soulless
people without any sense of historical purpose or reality. Garvey
was not fighting against some fantasy; he was dealing with the everyday
reality of black life. Was he human? Of course, he was human, but
was he guilty of some heinous crime? No! What Garvey was guilty
of was becoming the most courageous African public figure in our
history. This was the crime and the government went out of its way
to create a case against him.
At Madison Square Gardens, Marcus
Garvey was elected president-general of the UNIAACL, the Declaration
of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World was written and disseminated,
the formal leadership structure was proposed and accepted, chapters
were established with commissioners for each chapter, and demands
were made. Among the demands made by the Garvey movement was that
black school children should be taught African history. I certainly
wish Marcia White had taken some Afrocentric classes in African
history. She would not have written the script the way she did.
Perhaps one of Marcus Garvey’s
greatest gifts was his ability to identify the values and the cultural
motifs that resonated with the African people. He produced several
cultural symbols that galvanized the membership. An anthem was created
called the Universal Ethiopian Anthem, a flag of the colors red,
black, and green was made and presented to the members, and small
industries were created as places for workers to make a living.
Furthermore, Garvey dispatched representatives to Liberia to investigate
the possibilities of colonies in West Africa.
The failure of the Black Star Lines
in l921 was an ominous sign but it was the constant criticism of
the African American middle class that led to infighting and disaffections.
This gave the government the opportunity to sow discord among the
leadership. When Garvey was indicted in 1922 the judge was Julian
Mack, who claimed to be a member of the NAACP. Garvey appealed and
in l925 he lost his appeal and was sent to the federal penitentiary
in Atlanta, Georgia. After a strenuous campaign on the part of Amy
Jacques Garvey, who published Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus
Garvey in l923 and 1925, to raise money for legal expenses, he was
released from prison and sent to Jamaica.
The fact that a documentary about
Garvey does not emphasize the conspiracy against the rise of a black
messiah but rather attempts to show that Garvey was some type of
egomaniac goes to demonstrate how far away from the truth Nelson
manages to get. All black leaders who create a mass following will
be called names in a white racist society that profits in keeping
African people from considering their own heroes as heroic. In my
mind, any person who puts his or her life on the line for the sake
of their people must be considered heroic, full stop.
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