This is Marcus Mosiah Garvey in 1921, giving a speech about the cause he dedicated his

life to. The recording is a little hard to understand. After all, it is a century old,

but he's saying that the gravest threat to the Negro people is disunity. And for any

young listeners, Negro in this context is not a derogatory term.

If you believe the Negro has a soul, he said, if you believe the Negro is a man, then you

must acknowledge that what other men have done, Negroes can do. Garvey was putting out

the call for people to join his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

At that point, the UNIA and Garvey's Pan-Africanist movement was the largest movement of black

people the world had ever seen. At a time when Jim Crow was the law of the land here in the

US, and when white colonial powers were ravaging the continent of Africa, Marcus Garvey

preached a philosophy of black self-reliance and Africa for the Africans. Garvey's influence

has held sway for generations.

Harlem Renaissance poets like Claude McKay owe a debt of gratitude to Marcus Garvey.

Like men, we'll face the murderers cowardly pack, press to the wall, dying but fighting

back.

Martin Luther King Jr. called Garvey quote, the first man on a mass scale and level to

give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was

somebody.

Even though Marcus Garvey has been dead for 80 years, the UNIA's red, black and green

flag, red for the blood shared by Africans, black for the people, and green for the future

and wealth of Africa, is still synonymous with black self-determination and is rhetoric

as echoed in movements for racial justice and African pride for decades.

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