Like any and every African who has ever dared stand up for African dignity, Marcus Mosiah Garvey has been ridiculed with efforts to assassinate his image on a consistent basis for the last 100 years. Even antagonisms directed at him by other Pan-African giants like C.L.R. James and George Padmore are being used as evidence that Garvey was not to be respected.
We are politically sophisticated enough to understand that everything is dialectical, meaning there are different variables engaging in different levels of conflicts in every material interaction taking place within the universe. In other words, its quite possible for James and Padmore to heckle Garvey, as they often did when hearing him speak on street corners while its equally possible that Garvey made a significant contribution to African people's forward progress.
Of course, we cannot speak of Marcus Garvey without acknowledging the contributions of Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacque Garvey. Without both of these courageous women, the accomplishments of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), particularly during the 1920s, could not have been possible.
Despite the dribblings of our enemies against those who did their absolute best to represent our struggle with integrity and commitment, we continue to honor the work of the UNIA and its 100+ year commitment to uniting Africa and African people everywhere. The only crime Garvey was guilty of was believing that we could achieve Pan-African unity without challenging the hegemony of the capitalist system e.g. Garvey thought we could buy our independence from the capitalist system. And, this naivete, which is dominant in many areas of the African world today, is a problem that we must scientifically address.
The UNIA's Black Star Line shipping business was but one clear example of where they fell short. Believing that the key to our solution was creating a "Black" shipping line that could challenge the corporate dominance of product shipping around the world, Garvey purchased three ships with the intent of using them to facilitate economic trade among Africans throughout the planet. The mistakes Garvey made in this approach were manifested many times. The people he bought the ships from did everything in their power to make him believe he was buying ships that were in much better shape than they actually were. Garvey and his people's inexperience in the matter contributed to them buying ships that were ill prepared to sail in open waters. In fact, one of the ships sank almost immediately upon being purchased. There was very little due diligence performed in the process of buying these ships and much of the rush to complete these transactions was encouraged by the people around Garvey, many of which viewed the UNIA as a vehicle for their personal advancement and not an organizational mechanism for African liberation.
Key to the problem with the ships was the lack of understanding of the capitalist shipping model. The UNIA, despite its presence in 33 countries, didn't have the capacity to challenge existing capitalist entities that used shipping lines to move every product you use today that is made in another country (China for example). Garvey's people didn't understand basic capitalist principles that required the ability to make shipping with them cost effective for manufacturers who had no concerns about justice and liberation. Only profits.
The other issue that feeds into the challenges of the ships is that the UNIA did not possess any type of comprehensive political education program. Therefore, much of the organizational chatter about Africa was simply rhetorical and not based in any solid foundation that the millions of members were required to study and understand critically. As a result of this idealistic interpretation of Africa and the actual role Africa should play in our liberation around the world, limited concrete organizing on the ground work was waged to this end within the UNIA. The weakness of this was even the practical relationships that the UNIA struggled to form were sentimental and not based in a strong ideological foundation of Pan-African principles. For example, Garvey sought to establish a working relationship with Liberian President Charles King who was president of Liberia throughout all of the 1920s. In the course of this work, Garvey was able to secure a promise from King that if Garvey could deliver science trained experts to Liberia, that country could parlay its massive rubber plantations into some sort of Pan-African entity that would own and control rubber production in Africa. The problem is Garvey was naive about class struggle. He and his people didn't see the interference by U.S. imperialism coming. And, they had no response when imperialism convinced the King government in Liberia to abandon its principled agreement with the UNIA to instead commit to a 100 year contract with Firestone Rubber, effectively selling off Liberia's rubber wealth to capitalism while completely cutting off the Garvey movement from its subjective, yet idealistic, goals of rubber equaling power for African people.
Garvey had the right idea with Liberia. The extensive mineral wealth of Africa should be used to alleviate the suffering of African people while serving as our vehicle to engage in our full liberation. Garvey's mistake was in trusting the neo-colonial puppet regime in Liberia while having no strong mass movement there to hold the government accountable to the interests of the people. This lack of political sophistication was linked to consistent type problems that plagued the Garvey organization and eventually ran it into the ground. The primary thrust of sabotaging the UNIA/Liberia agreement was instigation by the then Department of Justice (now the Federal Bureau of Investigation - FBI - within the U.S.). The FBI was then, and still is today, a principle appendage designed to maintain imperialism throughout this globe. In the 20s, the department was being built by a young man named J. Edgar Hoover who went on the lead that agency for its first 50 years of existence. Hoover's initial trumph, before prohibition and the liquor industry, was his sabotage of the Garvey movement. It would be simple to write off the decline of the UNIA in the 20s to FBI sabotage and certainly that was a major issue. It was the FBI that framed Garvey, eventually deporting him (Garvey was a Jamaican national) in 1927. The FBI, through its own documents freed up by the 1974 Freedom of Information Act, confirmed that they knew Garvey himself was not using the U.S. Post Office to commit fraud, but because they had firm evidence that two of his closest aides were in fact committing such acts, they were able to mount a case that led to Garvey being convicted and deported, thus weakening the UNIA during that era. And, even just the fact that the elimination of one leader always seems to be an effective way to derail an organization is another example of why political education is so important. Cadre parties with strong political education produce mass leaders. This model makes individual assassinations and discrediting campaigns ineffective. As long as we still have so many believing that the problems in our movements are because "we don't have strong leaders" the propaganda war waged against us by our enemies continues to win. The masses of the people are the leaders and we can build that collective model of leadership.
So, no question, as has always been the case, the FBI was engaging in cointelpro during the 20s, long before it targeted socilaist organizations in the 50s and eventually the Black power organizations of the 60s. Still, as revolutionaries who wish to continue our just struggle for forward progress and liberation, we have to also include an analysis that speaks to the role the lack of political education played in permitting all of this sabotage to take place. For far too many Africans, the UNIA was simply a vehicle for them to progress. The UNIA had developed massive resources, especially for an African organization. They had scholarships that they handed out to Africans everywhere enabling our people to achieve college educations. Most of the people seeking these opportunities saw the UNIA as a means to an end for them to benefit without them doing anything to contribute in return. This is a clear example of lack of political education. Had the UNIA had such a process, they could have done much to instill within our community the necessity to see the UNIA as the living, breathing manifestation of our desire to be free. The people would have learned that anything they received from the UNIA came from the struggles of the masses of African people so that scholarship didn't and couldn't belong to any individual. Instead, anyone who took that benefit was obligated to use that benefit for the benefit of the masses of our people. This level of consciousness was sorely lacking within the UNIA. This was confirmed by the sad story told by Amy Jacque Garvey in her book "Garvey and Garveyism" where she detailed that after her husband was deported, and one of her son's needed serious medical care, the doctor she took him too, who only became a doctor because of scholarships he received from the UNIA, refused to treat her son because she didn't have the money to pay him.
Of course, this criticism against the UNIA isn't just indicative of their shortcomings. In fact, this political education question is a challenge for every African organization ever created. Every organization period. Clearly, this lack of political analysis is the reason our organizations struggle so mightily to advance past the most basic of contradictions and issues. Its the reason why so many people interact with our organizations like a revolving door. The level of consciousness within our community is so low that we have no organized mechanisms to hold our people accountable to us. That's why so many people "advance" through the ranks of our social justice organizations just to accumulate personal fame and recognition that they turn into personal opportunities and advancements while doing little to advance the masses of our people who placed them in the position to advance in the first place.
That's why the experiences of the UNIA and Garvey should be so instructive for us today. Its necessary to stop looking at the UNIA and the Black Star Line through rose colored lenses. Any question of corporatizing our liberation must be squarely debated from the foundational point that we cannot expect to use the system that oppresses us to advance us to liberation. No where in history does anyone in power create a system that permits those exploited from power from achieving it by "playing the game." Whomever is pushing that agenda is actually saying they are seeking to find a niche for themselves to advance regardless of our people's suffering.
Also, its instructive for us to realize that enemies of humanity like the FBI are only ever effective because of our willingness to cooperate with them. This is true from the UNIA to the Convention People's Party in Ghana to the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC -it was PAIGC militants to set up Amilcar Cabral to be assassinated in 1973), the assassination of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the sabotage in the Congo, the Black Panther Party, etc. And, in each of these instances it is quite easy to illustrate how our lack of political education was and is a key component in helping our enemies make life more difficult for all of us.
We love the UNIA. We love Marcus and Amy/Amy Garvey. We love the fact that they had millions of members in multiple countries. We relish the reality that they produced their newspaper, the Negro World, in 33 countries in English, Spanish, and French. We love the hundreds of thousands of working members of the UNIA who gave everything they had for their vision of Pan-Africanism which without question built the foundation for the concrete Pan-African work taking place today. We just ask those reading this to think for a second where we could be if we had all of their organizational resources and capacities while having a strong political education program that steels its members in who the true enemy is (capitalism/imperialism and any manifestation of their systemic mechanisms) and what we need to do to defeat them and gain our true liberation (The Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare by Kwame Nkrumah for example).