The Facebook blogger AZ Quotes sent this post about Marcus Garvey to my Facebook page. The words impress me as a sobering summation of Garvey's life-experiences. He had concluded that "Intelligence rules the World. Ignorance carries the burden." That Marcus Garvey, a poor immigrant from St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, should write in such terms at the beginning of the twentieth century reveals a unique mind at work.
I found a copy of his book, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, compiled and published in 1923 by Garvey's wife Amy Jacques-Garvey. I read through it and realized Garvey is America's first Black Nationalist. That he was not an American was secondary to him. He thought of "Africa" as a racial concept and on nationhood as the means to recover lost prestige and self-respect.
His immigrant-status takes on a definitive role when you consider that the other Black nationalists descended from slave families. Garvey, although poor, grew up a free citizen. His free-status gives him more intentionality and a greater rein to his thinking about the future. Other Black nationalists, like W.E.B. DuBois limited their thinking to remaining attached to the Whites. No wonder Garvey referred to him as the "White-man's Nigger". As a descendant of slaves, DuBois saw attachment to the Whites as status quo. In fact, Black-Americans are wedded to the Whites via Slavery.
No other Black Nationalist has advocated independence so strongly, based on Garvey's confidence in the Blacks' ability to achieve great things, apart from the Whites. On page 67, he remarks that "Black Millionaires (are) a possibility."
On page 68, he adds, "Why should not Africa give to the world its Black Rockefeller, Rothschild, and Henry Ford? Now is the opportunity . . . the chance for every Negro toward a commercial, industrial standard that will make it comparable with the successful businessmen of other races." And how! Lift the Black business-ethos above its underground, ghetto mentality, its concern with illegal trade in drugs and prostitution.
When Garvey talks like this, I have to wonder whom he is addressing, the Whites or other Blacks like W.E.B. DuBois, who had no interest in nationhood?