Marcus the Macro Man

Ok, so Marcus Garvey didn’t have microaggressions in his vocabulary. Nobody did back then. Furthermore, macro was Garvey’s thing, not micro. Garvey didn’t do anything on a small scale.

Garvey believed in BIGness: he BIGGED himself up with BIG feathered hats, BIG epaulettes on his tailored military-styled uniform, and BIG titles like President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). When it came to things we might consider microaggressions today, Marcus Garvey saw them as a BIG deal because he sensed their cumulative effects on our minds.

Jamaica’s first national hero believed in defyin’ the everyday lyin’ and signifyin’ that’s done to keep oppressed people down. We’ll read some glimpses of Garvey’s macroreactions to microaggressions in his own words below, as recorded in Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy (Martino Fine Books, 2021).[i]

But first – who was Marcus Garvey?

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. was born August 17, 1887, in Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. His father, Marcus, Sr., was a stonemason who invested heavily in self-education by building a large home library. Marcus, Jr. also spent much of his time in this mental fitness center. Marcus’s mother, Sarah, was a farmer and domestic worker who spoke love and high expectations into her son. Sarah believed Marcus, Jr. would be a Moses-type figure during his lifetime.

BIGGER than Jamaica

After learning the printing trade and starting his own newspaper as a teenager, Marcus traveled throughout the Caribbean, Central America, England, and the United States. Everywhere he went, Garvey saw the impoverished and degrading conditions of the Black working class and felt the need for an international approach to liberate Black people from poverty and oppression.

In 1918, Marcus and Amy Ashwood Garvey (wife) founded the magazine, Negro World, as a tool to unify and uplift Black people. Published from the UNIA headquarters in New York, this weekly journal had a circulation of 200,000 and was distributed to over 40 countries. A wide variety of writers and genres were represented in its pages, including pieces by Zora Neale Hurston and Carter G. Woodson.

Garvey’s movement outlasted him and influenced the lives of leaders like Rosa Parks and Malcolm X through their parents and grandparents. Garvey’s philosophy still reverberates around the globe through reggae music, since many Rastas consider him to be a prophet.

Feed your mind, the rest will follow

The freedom and empowerment Garvey preached must work from the inside out, as was paraphrased and popularized in “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”

Since economic and political freedom must begin with mental emancipation, Garvey explained that, “One must never stop reading… The idea is that personal experience is not enough for a human to get all the useful knowledge of life, because the individual life is too short, so we must feed on the experience of others” (3).

Garvey counseled that we should spend our spare money on books and our spare time in the library. After others have gone to bed and before they get up, we should be studying to get ahead in life. Garvey’s personal benchmark was to read 4 hours a day.

What should we study?

In a word: everything.

“From a good line of poetry, you may get the inspiration for the career of a lifetime. Many a great man and woman was first inspired by some attractive line or verse of poetry” (3).

“It is wise to study a couple of subjects at a time… a little geography, a little psychology, a little ethics, a little theology, a little philosophy, a little mathematics, a little science” (9).

“You must searchingly scan everything you read, particularly history, to see what you can pick out for the good of the race” (11).

“Read everything you can get written by Negroes and their ancestry, going back six thousand years.” (11)

“Remember, God gave you a mouth and a voice and you must use them for good results. Secure from the any book seller, a copy of a good book on elocution and study it” (33).

“Read a chapter of the Bible every day, Old and New Testaments. The greatest wisdom of the age is to be found in the Scriptures” (9).

Chew thoroughly – don’t gulp!

Marcus Garvey warned that we should “not swallow wholly the educational system of any other group” (70).

Garvey counseled the reader to “challenge the thought of any book or other literature that dishonors or discredits you in any particular way,” because “an error not corrected ultimately becomes a fact” (95).

Garvey advised his audience to “interpret anthropology to suit yourself… Never yield to the statement of your inferiority” (12).

Garvey further encouraged Black people to “write your own interpretation of the scriptures and history and teach them as far as the interpretation of others affects your race” (95).

Why read with such cynicism?

According to Garvey, “The press, cinema, pulpit, schoolroom are all propaganda agencies for one thing or the other” (92).

“The artist is also a propagandist. . . The pictures of the Madonna and Christ and of the angels are painted portraying a white race, so as to inflict upon the rest of the world the belief that God, the angels and the Holy Family are all white, as well as Adam and Eve… and… to impress upon the world the belief that all that is black is evil” (p. 93).

What should we do with anti-Black propaganda?

Garvey said to “treat them as trash” and replace that which gives license to microaggressions with “your own newspapers, your own sculptors, your own pulpits. . . your own books and show your own motion pictures” (93).

Garvey insisted on “meeting propaganda with propaganda, the hatchet with the hatchet, the stick with the stick and the stone with the stone” (95).

One Love

Garvey had his faults, but his militancy was motivated by love for God and his downtrodden image bearers. This love was inspired by a gospel that has been misrepresented by the oppressors, yet is being revived and reformed, reclaimed and reframed by the oppressed.

“Win the world to you with a smile, with the hearty shake of the hand, with a glad welcome. It costs very little. It costs less than an ugly stare or the fixed hand of unwelcome. . . When people have recovered from their bad conditions, their gratitude becomes the pillar on which the church rests” (111).

“The greatest thing that Christ taught was love. Love thy neighbor as thyself; do unto others as you would have them do unto you… Support this philosophy and never change until God manifest himself to the contrary… The mission of Christ… was to redeem man from sin and place him back on the pinnacle of goodness as God intended” (38).

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[i] All Marcus Garvey quotes come from Message to the People, with the page number in parentheses.