KINGSTON, Jamaica – Before he became world-famous, Marcus Garvey traveled throughout his native Jamaica. He spread a message of black empowerment in what was then a British colony.
One of the areas he held meetings during the early 1900s was Papine, a working-class community in the capital, Kingston. As a youth in that area, Moses I heard about Garvey’s visits and the meetings he held.
With the Pan African icon’s 138th birthday celebrated on August 17, the singer will release Tribute To A Hero (Marcus Garvey Day). It is a cover of a 1999 song by roots group, The Ethiopians.
“I an’ I waan (want) to fulfill di vision that Marcus set, an di first step is to give him a public holiday. Wi jus’ a rise up do red, black an’ green,” said Moses I.
Those are the colors of the Pan African movement which Garvey launched in 1920 while living in Harlem, New York. He had formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica six years earlier.
Garvey, who died in London in 1940 at age 52, is Jamaica’s first National Hero. Moses I blames the lack of an official Garvey syllabus in Jamaican schools for widescale ignorance about him in his homeland.
“Marcus was di first man who bring black consciousness around di world. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X an’ di Black Panthers come up through dat,” he said.
Garvey was born in St. Ann, a rural parish on Jamaica’s North Coast, which also produced Bob Marley and Burning Spear. A printer by profession, he first came to prominence by keeping meetings in Kingston.
After living in Central America, he returned to Jamaica where he founded the UNIA. Garvey migrated to the US in 2016 and eventually became a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
Imprisoned on dubious mail fraud charges in 1925, he was deported to Jamaica two years later after his sentence was commuted by president Calvin Coolidge.
Garvey was pardoned by president Joe Biden on January 19, one day before he left office.
