If you look closely at this cartoon, you will see President Barack Obama standing on the mountaintop of Black achievement in North America, the pinnacle of which was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you look even closer, you should notice one glaring omission: Marcus Garvey.
The irony is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a speech in Kingston, Jamaica stated, "Marcus Garvey was the first man, on a mass scale, to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny ... . He gave us a sense of personhood, a sense of manhood, a sense of somebodiness."
Until we have a clear sense of our history, we will continue to repeat the mistakes. In this case, it is the message of self-reliance and economic empowerment that Marcus Garvey brought to the Black community--a meme that has been forgotten because of Garvey's erasure from our collective consciousness.
It is for this reason, the Marcus Garvey Celebrations Committee (South Florida), Rootz Foundation, and the Institute for Caribbean Studies, have joined to petition President Barack Obama to exonerate Rt. Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey, leader of the first and largest economic justice movement in the USA and the world, and the first named National Hero of Jamaica.
If you would like to join in this cause to recognize the historic contribution of Marcus Garvey, please sign this petition:
https://www.causes.com/campaigns/71936-urge-president-obama-to-exonerate-marcus-garvey
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Graphic: David Fitzsimmons in The Arizona Daily Star: http://azstarnet.com/
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