For the past eight
years, I have been campaigning for the exoneration of Marcus Garvey. Although
some of my petitions have had some success, others have
not yielded the desired results.
The reasons are
varied. Some of my critics have said that Garvey’s message is outdated while
others have said that Garvey’s exoneration is a waste of political capital. In
the words of Mutty Perkins, the irascible Jamaican journalist, both are
examples of “arrant nonsense.”
Africans at home and abroad
face the same existential threat in Garvey’s time as they do now: the erasure
of black lives. In 1914, Garvey rightly diagnosed the threat and offered solutions
to our lack of organization and collective ignorance about our history. Garvey’s
intellect and intuition led him to realization that movements would only be successful
if they could draw on the shared memories of their people while also making public
their grievances against regimes that try to silence their legitimate
complaints. Against the despair that had numbed his people into compliance, the
UNIA created the Pan-African
flag, published a newspaper, founded schools, operated several businesses,
including the Black Star Line, and proclaimed the “Declaration of the Rights of the
Negro Peoples of the World”: The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement
Association.
This is why I am suspending
my current petitions and fully
supporting the UNIA sponsored petition because the UNIA has kept alive
Garvey’s educational and organizational program while also pursuing legal remedies
to alleviate the persecution of Africans at home and abroad.
It is also my hope
that members of the Rastafari community, Nation
of Islam, #BlackLivesMatter, and
other organizations will support this effort. For although there are serious ideological
divisions among these organizations, they share a common goal: the redemption of
Africans at home and abroad.
Please join me by
signing this petition and sharing the petition with at least ten friends. Time
is of the essence.
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