Marcus Garvey Quotes

The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.

If you haven't confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden...

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.

God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.

We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is our only ruler; sovereign.

Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.

great principles, great ideals know no nationality.

You at this time can only be destroyed by yourselves, from within and not from without. You have reached the point where the victory is to be won from within and can only be lost from within.

to be once defeated is to find cause for an everlasting struggle to reach the top.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.

Do not remove the kinks from your hair - remove them from your brain.

THEY NEVER TAUGHT MARCUS GARVEY IN OUR SCHOOL CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS IS THEIR GOLDEN RULE

we were like crabs in a barrel, that none would allow the other to climb over, but on any such attempt all would continue to pull back into the barrel the one crab that would make the effort to climb out.

Be not discouraged black women of the world, but push forward, regardless of the lack of appreciation shown you.

With confidence, you have won before you have started.

If I die in Atlanta my work shall then only begin, but I shall live, in the physical or spiritual to see the day of Africa’s glory.

We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.

The Negro will have to build his own industry, art, sciences, literature, and culture before the world will stop to consider him.

Men, there is much to live for, and there is much to die for. The man, the race of nation that is not prepared to risk life itself for the possession of an ideal, shall lose that ideal. If you, I repeat, must be free, you yourselves must strike the blow.

There is no strength but that which is destructive, because man has lost his virtues, and only respects force, which he himself cannot counteract.

To have built up a new organization, which was not purely political, among Negroes in America was a wonderful feat, for the Negro politician does not allow any other kind of organization within his race to thrive.

Let no voice but your own speak to you from the depths. Let no influence but your own raise you in time of peace and time of war. Hear all, but attend only that which concerns you.

was the crying voice from the grave that said, ‘Garvey, we have suffered for 250 years for your day and for your time; we expect something from you at this hour.’”16

Having had the wrong education as a start in his racial career, the Negro has become his own greatest enemy. Most of the trouble I have had in advancing the cause of the race has come from Negroes. Booker Washington aptly described the race in one of his lectures by stating that we were like crabs in a barrel, that none would allow the other to climb over, but on any such attempt all would continue to pull back into the barrel the one crab that would make the effort to climb out. Yet, those of us with vision cannot desert the race, leaving it to suffer and die.

The race needs workers at this time, not plagiarists, sopists and mere imitators; but men and women who are able to create, to originate and improve, and thus make an independent racial contribution to the world and civilisation.

whipped. It annoys me to be defeated; hence to me, to be once defeated is to find cause for an everlasting struggle to reach the top.

Some of us seem to accept the fatalist position, the fatalist attitude, that God accorded to us a certain position and condition, and therefore there is no need trying to be otherwise. The moment you accept such an attitude, the moment you accept such an opinion, the moment you harbor such an idea, you hurl an insult at the great God who created you, because you question Him for His love, you question Him for His mercy.

On Slavery: The saddest slap in the face is we have NO monument, no real statues or memorials, no special day of Atonement or Remembrance (NOT ONE), no thanks for 400+ years of free labor, forced servitude across the Trans-Atlantic, ass beatings, buying ourselves and families out of slavery, rape and plunder...but everyone else has monuments, special museums, and even movies. This is what America thinks of black people, so-called black president and all, who has been largely silent on this subject...we'll even celebrate Leprechauns, Easter Bunnies, and Secretary's Day before we acknowledge our history.

be defeated; hence to me, to be once defeated is to find cause for an everlasting struggle to reach the top.

Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.

As Marcus Garvey would say, “Rise up you mighty people, onward and upward to victory.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. (incorrectly attributed to Marcus Garvey)

There should be a Stage IV of black identity—Unmitigated Blackness. I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed. It’s Donald Goines, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Alfre Woodard, and the serious black actor. It’s Tiparillos, chitterlings, and a night in jail. It’s the crossover dribble and wearing house shoes outside. It’s “whereas” and “things of that nature.” It’s our beautiful hands and our fucked-up feet. Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations. Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living. Sitting

Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead.

Every student of political science, every student of political economy, every student of economics knows that the race can only be saved through a solid industrial foundation; that the race can only be saved through political independence. Take away industry from a race, take away political freedom from a race and you have a slave race.

Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for, with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life.

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.

We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.

One God, One Aim, One Destiny. (Motto of the UNIA)

Black orators, more eloquent than Genet, had informed white Americans for three centuries that our living conditions were intolerable. David Walker in 1830 and Frederick Douglass in 1850 had revealed the anguish and pain of life for blacks in the United States. Martin Delaney and Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey and Dr. DuBois, and Martin King and Malcolm X had explained with anger, passion and persuasion that we were living precariously on the ledge of life, and that if we fell, the entire structure, which had prohibited us living room, might crumble as well. So in 1960, white Americans should have known all they needed to know about black Americans.

I keep thinking about Marcus Garvey and what he says about black people knowing themselves. It's clear that if the so-called Negro goes to school, he earns a degree for knowing the white man, but not for knowing himself. All he learns about himself is slavery. Slavery is not a history of a man; it's a misfortune of a race of people. The black man needs to know the dignity of our race. The only way he will get this knowledge is to take it for himself.

Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From “Superman” to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world. I would check off these books on the library order form and never expect to get them until they came. Leaning against my wall in the cell, sitting on the floor, on my bed, or at my table, I read.

If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you have started.

Pay no attention to the man who criticizes unless he is doing something better than what he criticizes

Pay no attention to the man who criticizes unless he is doing something better than what he criticizes.

Africans are raising the cry of “AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS”, those at home and those abroad.

The world today is indebted to us for the benefits of civilization. They stole our arts and sciences from Africa. Then why should we be ashamed of ourselves?

Marcus Garvey reached the height of his power with more than seven hundred UNIA branches in thirty-eight states.

Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.

Ideals of liberty , freedom and righteousness do not prosper in the 20th century excepts they coincide with oil, rubber, gold, diamond, coal, iron, sugar, coffee, and such other minerals and products desired by the privileged, capitalists and leaders who control the system of government.

How could anyone mistake Mom for white? Mom was a proud black woman, the proudest I knew. She hated us having to take welfare food, hated accepting anything we needed but did not earn. We had a picture of Marcus Garvey on the living-room wall, talking about going back to Africa, talking about the power of blackness and the strength of the Negro heart. I couldn’t imagine looking at Mom and not seeing that.

the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.

Somebody said (but if it were not said, then I say it now), that " the laws of our civilization have but one interpretation for the poor and ignorant and for those of wealth and power, there are many interpretations, hence the poor are generally convicted on the one, while the rich are freed on the many interpretations.

Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder no just the bodies of humans but the body of Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.

A people without knowledge of their past, is like a tree without roots". Marcus Mosiah Garvey

Climb ye the heights of liberty and cease not in well doing until you have planted the banner of the Red, the Black and the Green on the hilltops of Africa.

Hail! United States of Africa-free! Country of the brave black man's liberty; State of greater nationhood thou hast won, A new life for the race is just begun.

Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.

Who to tell what tomorrow will bring forth? Did they not laugh at Moses, Christ and Mohammed? Was there not a Carthage, Greece and Rome? We see and have changes every day, so pray, work, be steadfast and be not dismayed.

The golden glory of love’s light Has never dawned on my way My path has always led through night To some deserted by way But though life’s greatest joy I miss There lies a greater strength than this I have been worthy of it.29

For five years the Universal Negro Improvement Association has been advocating the cause of Africa for the Africans-that is, that the Negro peoples of the world should concentrate upon the object of building up for themselves a great nation in Africa.

It is hoped that when the time comes for American and West Indian Africans to settle in Africa, they will realize their responsibility and their duty. It will not be to go to Africa for the purpose of exercising an over-lordship over the natives, but it shall be the purpose of the Universal Negro Improvement Association[ii] to have established in Africa that brotherly cooperation which make the interest of the African native and the American and West Indian African one and the same, that is to say, we shall enter into a common partnership to build up Africa in the interest of our race.

She seemed nice, but she was most likely one of those American women whose knowledge of Africa was based largely on movies and National Geographic and thirdhand information from someone who knew someone who had been to somewhere on the continent, usually Kenya or South Africa. Whenever Jende met such women (at Liomi’s school; at Marcus Garvey Park; in the livery cab he used to drive), they often said something like, oh my God, I saw this really crazy show about such-and-such in Africa. Or, my cousin/friend/neighbor used to date an African man, and he was a really nice guy. Or, even worse, if they asked him where in Africa he was from and he said Cameroon, they proceeded to tell him that a friend’s daughter once went to Tanzania or Uganda. This comment used to irk him until Winston gave him the perfect response: Tell them your friend’s uncle lives in Toronto. Which was what he now did every time someone mentioned some other African country in response to him saying he was from Cameroon. Oh yeah, he would say in response to something said about Senegal, I watched a show the other day about San Antonio. Or, one day I hope to visit Montreal. Or, I hear Miami is a nice city. And every time he did this, he cracked up inside as the Americans’ faces scrunched up in confusion because they couldn’t understand what Toronto/San Antonio/Montreal/Miami had to do with New York.

The power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything—even the Dream, especially the Dream—really is. Sitting in that car I thought of Dr. Jones’s predictions of national doom. I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.

But Garvey equated the black desire for a Caucasian look with mental slavery. Now was the time, he argued, to ‘take the kinks out of your mind, instead of out of your hair’.14

Before we took our leave of Jamaica, I was presented with the Marcus Garvey Lifetime Achievement Award by the creator and organizer of the festival, Sheryl Lee Ralph, a very talented actress and singer.

In that spring of 1925, a posse of hooded Klansmen on horseback rode up to the house of Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a Baptist preacher who led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Nebraska Klan had swelled to an all-time high, 45,000 members, with a women’s brigade and a Ku Klux Kiddies as well. The marauders waved torches and smashed windows at the house. They demanded that the preacher come out and face the mob. His pregnant wife, Louise, with three small children at her side, said her husband was not home. Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X.

As we grow more numerous and more determined in demanding our rights in these times when the nation is not fully developed, we will politically arouse the ire and indignation of our fellow citizens of the other race because of our determination to hold political offices that render us politically

and the declaration of Lincoln that “all men are created equal,” and a determination was arrived at that never again would it be possible for a race of slaves to govern a race of masters within these bounds.

for us to encourage the idea that one of these days a Negro will be Postmaster

All of us know that America is as much the Negro’s as the white man’s, but the white man says, “I am going to make this a white man’s country.” The only thing for you to do is to get hold of him, beat him and take it away.

To give the American Negro opportunity for the development of racial rights under the most advantageous circumstances.

competitive with the other people who believe that America is theirs if not now in fact, in spirit.

There was a state of disorganization, and in that state of disorganization certain things happened just by mere chance, and in the chance dozens of black men became Senators, State Senators and Congressmen, and opened up to the eyes of the nation the possibility of the black man governing the white man in these United States of America—the possibility of the black man making laws to govern the white man in these United States of America. The possibility drove them to madness—almost madness—in suddenly rejecting the spirit of the Constitution

In all history you can show me no one instance where a race of slaves ever rose within that nation to govern their masters when their masters outnumbered them as hopelessly as they do now in the United States of America.

General of these United States or that a Negro will be Vice-President of the United States of America or that a Negro will be Secretary of State of the United States of America, is only to encourage a vain hope that will take you from here into eternity without being realized.

The Ku Klux Klan represents the spirit, the feeling, the attitude of every white man in the United States of America. Now, what should be the Negro’s attitude toward such an organization?

Let me tell you this: that the Ku Klux Klan is really the invisible government of the United States of America, and that there are more people identified with the Klan than you think; that there are more people in sympathy with the activities of the Ku Klux Klan than you think, and that there is more sympathy in this country for the Ku Klux Klan than the ordinary literate Negro newspaperman thinks and sees on the surface.

The exposé of the Ku Klux Klan was solely a skillful method of advertising the activities of the Klan at very little cost to the Klan.

found out, therefore, that the Ku Klux Klan was purely a racial organization standing up in the interests of white folks exclusive of the interests of others.

The attitude of the Ku Klux Klan is that America shall be a white man’s country at all hazards, at all costs.

I prefer and have a higher regard for the man who intends to take my life who will warn me and say, “Garvey, I am going to take your life,” so as to give me time to prepare my soul for my God, rather than the man who will pretend to be my friend, and as I turn my back he ushers me into eternity without even giving me a chance to say my Lord’s Prayer.

No, we are interpreting the spirit of every true white American; but we are honest enough to say certain things that others do not care to say.” Now

If I hate you, no law in the world can make me love you. If I am prejudiced against you for reasons, no law, no constitution in the world can make me change my attitude toward you.

Every student of political science, every student of political economy, every student of economics, knows that the race can only be saved through a solid industrial foundation {applause}; that the race can only be saved through political independence.

Situated as we are, in a civilization of prejudice and contempt, it is not for us to inspire and advertise the vices of our people, but, by proper leadership, to form characters that would reflect the highest credit upon us and win the highest opinion of an observant and critical world.

Nearly all the newspapers of the race had entered into a conspiracy to taboo the term “Negro” and popularize the term “colored” as the proper race term. To augment this they also fostered the propaganda of bleaching out black skins to light complexions, and straightening out kinky or curly hair to meet the “standard” of the new “society” that was being promoted. I severely

We need crusaders in journalism who will not seek to enrich themselves off the crimes and ignorance of our race, but men and women who will risk everything for the promotion of racial pride, self-respect, love and integrity. The mistake the race is making is to accept and believe that our unprincipled newspaper editors and publishers are our leaders; some of them are our biggest crooks and defamers.

kind of leadership to represent the true sentiments of the Negro. {Cheers.}

If I can interpret correctly the spirit of Negroes, it is for me to say that Negroes everywhere are determined to be free, determined to be liberated; liberated from lynch law, liberated from mob rule, liberated from segregation, liberated from Jim Crowism, liberated from injustice. That is the spirit of Negroes everywhere. It is not found in any one country because Negroes have been taken advantage of everywhere. It is a universal desire and it is a universal program that seeks to liberate Negroes everywhere.

because man is equal we feel that man has no right to take advantage of man.

we are no longer satisfied to have the vote and not to exercise it in our own behalf.

The new Negro demands a leadership which will establish his right to rule. If it is right for the yellow man to rule, it is also right for the black man to rule. {Cheers.}

The old leadership of Negroes recorded nothing. They have no record of lynch law; they have no record of mob violence; they have no record of injustice; they have no record of segregation; they have no record of brutalizing the Negro; but the New Negro has a record of everything that is done to him {cheers}, and when anything goes on later on, the first thing the Negro is going to do is to present his record, and he is going to ask you what you are going to do about it, and you have to decide clearly and positively before he will lend his hand.

Garvey is giving my people backbones where they had wishbones.”3

we only want a chance.