HIS LEGENDARY WILL NEVER DIE
Garvey hailed for his passion for Black pride on his 130th birthday
IT IS now 130 years since the birth of Marcus Garvey, and to this day, the national hero is still being hailed and remembered as one of the bravest men of his time.
“A revolutionary,” is how Minister of Entertainment, Sport, Culture and Gender Affairs Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange described Garvey during her address at a floral tribute at the National Heroes Park yesterday, as she spoke of his well-documented contribution to the development of Black consciousness.
“His weapon was education and his mantra was Black pride. He taught us that the way to achieve Black power and Black prosperity was through education, not bullets,” Grange said of the pan-Africanist.
Said to be one of the most influential pan-Africanists, Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887 and rose to prominence through his insistence that the people from Africa had rights that were to be observed and respected.
Incidentally, Garvey had never set foot on African soil.
He founded and developed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into a major international organisation that had, at least, five million members in more than 50 countries in the 1920s.
Head of the UNIA Stephen Golding yesterday called for Garvey’s life and legacy to be celebrated, but urged that his sacrifice be not taken for granted.
“We should not only celebrate, we should be conscious of the sacrifice that Garvey made in order to educate and enlighten us with respect to our plight as descendants of Africans living in the West,” Golding urged.
In my mind, he was the most important man in the history of Jamaica because of his message and the way in which he passed on this message.” – Edward Seaga, former prime minister Garvey was the first man, on a mass scale, to lead and develop a mass movement of Negroes and give millions a sense of dignity and destiny to make the Negro feel he was somebody. – Martin Luther King Jr, civil rights activist