Black Moses Seh: More Quotes from Marcus Mosiah Garvey

Today is Marcus Mosiah Garvey's 125th Earthday.  Blessed Earthstrong Black Marcus, my Prophet. As relevant now as he was then. Don't say that you understand, until yuh hear the man.

"This propaganda of dis-associating Western Negroes from Africa is not a new one. For many years white propagandists have been printing tons of literature to impress scattered Ethiopia, especially that portion within their civilization, with the idea that Africa is a despised place, inhabited by savages, and cannibals, where no civilized human being should go, especially black civilized human beings. This propaganda is promulgated for the cause that is being realized today. That cause is COLONIAL EXPANSION for the white nations of the world."
~ Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey,

 

"I stand before you this afternoon as a proud black man, honored to be a black man, who would be nothing else in God's creation but a black man."~ 1928

"If I die in Atlanta my work shall then only begin, but I shall live, in the physical or spiritual to see the day of Africa's glory. When I am dead wrap the mantle of the Red, Black and Green around me, for in the new life I shall rise with God's grace and blessing to lead the  millions up the heights of triumph with the colors that you well know. Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for, with God's grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life."

~ in a letter from prison, 1925

"Before we can properly help the people, we have to destroy the old education... that teaches them that somebody is keeping them back and that God has forgotten them and that they can't rise because of their color.. we can only build... with faith in ourselves and with self-reliance, believing in our own possibilities, that we can rise to the highest in God's creation."

"Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden."

"Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself."

"Among some of the organized methods used to control the world is the thing known and called PROPAGANDA. Propaganda has done more to defeat the good intentions of races and nations than even open warfare. Propaganda is a method or medium used by organized peoples to convert others against their will. We of the Negro race are suffering more than any other race in the world from propaganda... propaganda to destroy our hopes, our ambitions and our confidence in self." 

"Rise up Black Men, and take your stand. Reach up black men and women and pull all nature’s knowledge to you. Turn ye around and make a conquest of everything North and South, East and West. And then we you have wrought well, you will have merited God's blessing, you will become God's chosen people and naturally you'll become leaders of the world."

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Great Quotes by Black Leaders About The Right and Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey

 Marcus Garvey statue, San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Of all literature I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.”

~Kwame Nkrumah

"It has warmed us that so many of our brothers from across the seas are with us. We take their presence here as a manifestation of the keen interest in our struggle for a free Africa. We must never forget that they are a part of us. These sons and daughters of Africa were taken away from our shores and, despite the centuries which have separated us, they have not forgotten their ancestral links. Many of them made no small contribution to the cause of freedom, A name that springs immediately to mind in this connection is Marcus Garvey. Long before many of us were even conscious of our own degradation, Marcus Garvey fought for African national and racial equality."

~Kwame Nkrumah

Malcolm X

"Everytime you see another nation on the African continent become independent, you know that Marcus Garvey is alive. It was Marcus Garvey's philosophy of Pan-Africanism that initiated the entire Freedom Movement which brought about the independence of African (and Caribbean) nations."
~Malcolm X

"When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home...brandishing their shotguns and rifles the shouted for my father to come out...The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because 'the good Christian White people' were not going to stand for my father's spreading among the 'good' Negroes of Omaha with the 'Back-to-Africa' preachings of Marcus Garvey."

~Malcolm X

"Marcus Garvey was one of the first advocates of Black Power, and is still today the greatest spokesman ever to have been produced by the movement of Black Consciousness...He spoke to all Africans on the earth, whether they lived in Africa, South America, the West Indies or North America, and he made Blacks aware of their strength when united."

~Dr. Walter Rodney

"They didn’t want Garvey to speak in New Orleans. We had a delegation to go to the mayor, and the next night, they allowed him to come. And we all was armed. Everybody had bags of ammunition, too. So when Garvey came in, we applauded, and the police were lined man to man along the line of each bench. So Mr. Garvey said, 'My friends, I want to apologize for not speaking to you last night. But the reason I didn’t was because the mayor of the city of New Orleans committed himself to act as a stooge for the police department to prevent me from speaking.' And the police jumped up and said, 'I’ll run you in.' When he did this, everybody jumped up on the benches and pulled out their guns and just held the guns up in the air and said, 'Speak, Garvey, speak!' And Garvey said, 'As I was saying,' and he went on and repeated what he had said before, and the police filed out the hall like little puppy dogs with their tails behind them. So that was radical enough."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

~Queen Mother Audley Moore

"...the first man, on a mass scale to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny.”

~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jomo Kenyatta

"In 1921, Kenyan Nationalists, unable to read, would gather round a reader of Garvey's newspaper, The Negro World, and to listen to an article two or three times. Then they would run through the forest carefully to repeat the whole, which they had memorized, to Africans hungry for some doctrine which lifted them from the servile consciousness in which Africans lived."

~Jomo Kenyatta

"Marcus Garvey is a prophet..."

~Bob Marley

"I & I will never forget no way/ they sold Marcus Gavey for rice..." -in the song So Much Things to Say

~Bob Marley
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Rodney Speaks: Memorable Quotes, Speeches or Phrases by Walter Rodney

The bomb that exploded in Georgetown, Guyana on June 13, 1980 may have snatched Walter Rodney from the physical, but it couldn't kill the Brother's words. Though they tried to blast away what was deemed a threat to the powers that were, you can't snuff out inspiration. You can't stop words nor songs of freedom. You can't assassinate conversation.

Martyrdom fueled Rodney's voice. Walter cried out about injustice. Walter lectured about social imbalances and inequalities. Walter informed about OUR history.

Walter grounded.

Walter spoke.

Walter speaks.

"By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?"

"I would go further down into West Kingston and I would speak wherever there was a possibility of our getting together. It might be in a sports club, it might be in a schoolroom, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully. (Those of you who come from Jamaica know those gully corners.) They are dark, dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them. I have spoken in what people call ‘dungle’, rubbish dumps, for that is where people live in Jamaica. People live in rubbish dumps. That is where the government puts people to live. Indeed, the government does not even want them to live in rubbish dumps. I do not know where they want them to go, because they bulldoze them off the rubbish dumps and send them God knows where. I have sat on a little oil drum, rusty and in the midst of garbage, and some Black Brothers and I have grounded together.
Now obviously, this, first of all, must have puzzled the Jamaican government*. I must be mad, surely, a man we are giving a job, we are giving status, what is he doing with these guys. [The newspaper] calls them all manner of names… you know: ‘criminals and hooligans’. What is he doing with them? So they are puzzled and then obviously after that suspicion, he must be up to something, as the paper will try to imply. But we spoke, we spoke about a lot of things and it was just the talking that was important, the meeting of black people." 
~ Groundings With My Brothers

*at that time Hugh Shearer was Prime Minister

“I trust that my use of the words such as ‘capitalism’, ‘imperialism’, and ‘neocolonialism’

will not be deemed as a cover for sinister intent. My indulgence in

those terms is aimed at opposing a system which is barbarous and

dehumanizing – the one which snatched me from Africa in chains and deposited

me in far off lands to be a slave beast, then a sub-human colonial subject, and

finally an outlaw in those lands. Under these circumstances, one asks nothing

more but to be allowed to learn from, participate in and be guided by the African

Revolution in this part of the continent; for this Revolution here is aimed at

destroying that monstrous system and replacing it with a just socialist society.”

Rodney in letter in the Nationalist newspaper (Tanzania) 17th December, 1969;

walter rodney poster (Photo credit: nicholaslaughlin)

cited in Issa Shivji, 1980

"I was brought up not very far from here, in a typical range yard in Bent Street.

And there, amidst the poverty, looking back now, I can see in my mind’s eye

ordinary black people who were worth everything, who were human beings who

had strength, who had character. Never mind he may have been a cartman,

never mind the woman may have been taking in washing. When you stop to think

about it, they had character. Some of them were miracle workers, because it’s a

miracle how they used to bring up families on what they earned.And now I

cannot accept that such people must be put to do some dirty political

skullduggery – coming to court, lying, to get another man convicted of murder...

    …as I said before, you start with one thing, you end with another. The system

doesn’t stop at racial discrimination. Because it is a system of class oppression, it

only camouflages its class nature under a racial cover. And in the end, it will

move against anyone irrespective of colour. In the end, they will move even

against their own. Because, don’t believe if you are a member of that party today,

that you will be protected tomorrow from the injustices. Because when a monster

grows, it grows out of control. It eats up even those who created the monster.

And it’s time that our people understood that."

From speech in 1977,campaigning in defence of Arnold Rampersaud who was accused of the murder

of policeman James Henry.

"I try to find some meaning among the mass of the population who are daily performing a miracle, they continue to survive! Kingston is meaner  then when you left it, and when you left it you probably did not know how mean it is… Today, all that matters, is the question of action, determined, informed and scientific action against imperialism and its cohorts. Just as Leonardo Da Vinci is the archetype of Renaissance Man, so Che Guevara is the ideal of Revolutionary Man. All that is required is that one should extract the essence of his life's experiences, rather than attempt to embrace his numerous suggestions concerning guerrilla warfare. The latter course has the serious limitation of being irrelevant to many objective situations (as Che knew).. I doubt whether the situation is explosive, and I doubt whether I will be here long enough to witness the explosion; but as a matter of integrity I must address myself to that question so long as I am here. Otherwise, what will distinguish me from the Philistines?"

"I was doing some paper on the Russian Revolution and it struck me that this Lenin was a person who had a tremendous capacity for intellectualizing and at the same time doing. In my own naïve way, I called this phenomenon ‘a revolutionary intellectual.’ But the professor was very hard on this statement. He said: ‘There is no such thing. One can be an intellectual or one can be a revolutionary. You can’t combine the two. Lenin may at one time have been a revolutionary, at another time an intellectual, but the moment he moves into practical activity he must abandon intellectualism.’This was a most curious argument. I just sensed that something was wrong about it. And I felt that somehow being a revolutionary intellectual might be a goal to which one might aspire, for surely there was no real reason why one should remain in the academic world – that is, remain an intellectual – and at the same time not be revolutionary."

"Lenin as a Revolutionary Intellectual," from Walter Rodney Speaks

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