[SOUTH FLORIDA] – “Marked Man”, a movie based on Jamaican Pan African leader Marcus Garvey’s life, is in the works. Winston Duke from Tobago, who rose to stardom through his role in the blockbuster Black Panther movie, will play Garvey.
Deadline reports that the project is being funded by Amazon Studios. Marked Man is written by British actor/playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah and will be directed by Nigerian filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu.
Other prospective stars are Jesse Williams and DeWanda Wise.
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore
Duke, whose acting credits also include Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, moved to the United States with his family at age nine.
Based on Colin Grant’s biography Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, Marked Man is set in the early 1920s when Garvey was at the height of his powers and living in Harlem where he was a leader of a cultural renaissance.
It traces the activities of a young black man who joins the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and infiltrates the Universal Negro Improvement Association (which Garvey founded in Jamaica in 1914) and African Communities League.
Garvey was eventually charged with mail fraud in 1923 and sentenced to five years in prison. He was released after serving 33 months in federal penitentiary in Georgia.
Garvey was deported to Jamaica in 1927. He died in London at age 52 in 1940.
In 1969, Jamaica’s government made Marcus Garvey the country’s first national hero.
