Garvey's Legacy for Blacks Today

Ask anyone about Marcus Garvey, and you’re likely to get a blank stare, or that same stare preceded by something about “Back to Africa.” Arguably the most overlooked and misunderstood black leader of the past century, Garvey led the second-largest organized mass movement of people of African ancestry—exceeded only by the slave trade. He was the father of the Pan-African movement and the grandfather of the civil rights and African nationalist movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the black self-determination efforts of the 1970s. Without Garvey, there would be no Black Panther Party, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X or even Bob Marley. Just as the leaders and activists of the past were able to draw from Garvey’s intellectual and political heritage to improve the condition of black people, we, both black and non-black people of conscience, must also ask ourselves: What can Garvey say to us today?

During Garvey’s heyday in the early 20th century, people believed that races were biologically and culturally distinct entities and that the Negro race was inferior to all other races. he accepted the racial essentialism of his times but unflinchingly took on any and all claims of racial inferiority, calling on all blacks worldwide to dedicate themselves to uplifting their race. This was Garvey’s greatest genius: identifying the similarities between the struggles of the black people on different continents and unifying them in opposition to their common foe of racial oppression.

For the most part, we no longer live in an age of racial essentialism. Explicit racial discrimination has been purged from our nation’s laws, and racist comments have largely disappeared from American public discourse. Now, black people can legally share water fountains, restaurants and even Harvard classes with non-black people. But while de jure segregation and discrimination are in their death throes, their de facto manifestations are as strong as ever worldwide. Collectively, black infants in America, the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa are nearly ten times more likely to die in their first year than their white American and European counterparts. If a black baby manages to survive her first year, the mere fact that she is black makes her more likely to be malnourished, impoverished, incarcerated, raped, infected with AIDS and violently killed. Our world today is not so different from Garvey’s. The downtrodden Negro race is no more, but it has been replaced by a people who still suffer from the same racial inequalities across national and continental boundaries.

Blacks don’t have a monopoly on poverty and suffering, but suffering and poverty have a near-complete monopoly on black folk everywhere. In his famous “Handwriting on the Wall” speech, Garvey declared, “Whether it is Africa, or America or Europe, the world is cold and indifferent to the Negro.” In light of the global community’s refusal to forgive the debts of predominantly black developing nations, to fulfill its promised contributions to fighting AIDS, to meet or even seriously consider the millennium development goals to eradicate poverty and hunger, to intervene in the atrocities of Rwanda or Darfur, or to merely report on the poverty, violence and hunger that is wreaking havoc on black communities everywhere, Garvey’s statement is equally true today. Since non-black people have done little to improve the condition of black people, black people must begin to focus on helping each other. Far too often this Garvey-derived doctrine of inclusive self-help is portrayed as reverse racism. But Garvey did not preach hatred towards any people; his message was one of unity and love amongst black people. In order to achieve any sort of progress, black people need to free themselves from the colonial mentality which asks: “What can black people do for me?” and adopt a nationalist mentality which asks: “What can I do for black people?”

However, to achieve this goal, these American Africans must heed Garvey’s advice and abandon slavish allegiance to political parties which unabashedly exploit anti-black sentiment or fail to deliver on any of their promises made in black churches. Instead, they should pledge allegiance to programs of racial uplift worldwide. Black people should support President Bush in his efforts to save the lives of other black people, including those in Darfur, while vociferously condemning his efforts that hurt them, such as ending affirmative action, withholding money from global AIDS funding and overthrowing the democratically elected government of Haiti. Despite the significant progress that black people have made since the end of slavery and colonization, black people are still collectively oppressed as black people, and the basic premise of modern Pan-Africanism is that black people, especially privileged black people, must collectively respond to this oppression. If we don’t, who will?

In the wake of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remarked, “The sad and terrible conclusion is that no once cared that Jews were being killed. At the time of the most terrible test, friends and benefactors didn’t lift a finger This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust.” After a half-millennium during which the world has created, exacerbated and ignored the global plight of black people, it is time for us to draw a similar lesson. During our most terrible tests—Rwanda, Darfur, the AIDS epidemic, mass incarceration, civil wars, impossible national debts, violence in our ghettoes, educational, economic and political inequalities—friends and benefactors have lifted a finger, not to help, but to point the blame back at us. This is the black lesson of our history and Garvey’s legacy for us today. It is time for Africans all over the world to acknowledge their common oppression, and to commit to ending structural racism on a global level. If we don’t, no one will.

Oludamini D. Ogunnaike ’07 is a psychology concentrator in Lowell House. He is the Political Action Chair of the Harvard African Students Association.