Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association

7. One Aim! One God! One Destiny!

*SEVEN ONE AIM! ONE GOD! ONE DESTINY! Each race should be proud and stick to its own, And the best of what they are should be shown; This is no shallow song of hate to sing, But over Blacks there should be no white king. Every man on his own foothold should stand, Claiming a nation and a fatherland! White, Yellow, and Black should make their own laws, And force no one-sided justice with flaws. -Marcus Garvey 1 Be as proud of your race today as our fathers were in the days of yore. We have a beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world. -Marcus Garvey 2 *Although Marcus Garvey never set foot on African soil, the basis for his race philosophy was Mrica, the Negro homeland. For out of the moist green depths of the African jungle had come the endless files of hapless Negro slaves, a seemingly inexhaustible labor force to be devoured by the hungry plantations of the Americas. And in spite of the substantial but largely unrecognized contribution of these black slaves to the building of a New World civilization, their life of servitude under white masters had tended to destroy their African culture and to tear down their na170 Copyrighted Material One Aim! One God! One Destiny! 171 tional and personal self-respect. To Garvey it seemed axiomatic that a redemption of the Negroes of the world must come only through a rebuilding of their shattered racial pride and a restoration of a truly Negro culture. Race pride and African nationalism were inextricably woven together in the Garvey philosophy, therefore, and the program of the Universal Negro Improvement Association centered around these two complementary objectives. To understand Marcus Garvey and his extraordinary movement, it is necessary to consider in detail this strong emphasis on racism and African nationalism. Such a study helps not only to illumine the ideas of the man but also to show the basis for his wide appeal. Garvey's unparalleled success in capturing the imagination of masses of Negroes throughout the world can be explained only by recognizing that he put into words-and what magnificent inspiring words they were-what large numbers of his people were thinking. Garveyism as a social movement, reflecting as it did the hopes and aspirations of a substantial section of the Negro world, may best be studied by considering the ideas of its founder and leader, since these contain the key to Garvey's remarkable success. In trying to establish a philosophy of Garveyism, however , it is important to place the movement in the context of general Negro thought in the period immediately following World War I. This was the era of the New Negro reaction to the race riots and frustrated hopes of the war years, and it was an age distinguished by the great artistic and literary activity that has been justly called the Negro Renaissance. Garveyism was for the most part decisively repudiated by the Negro intellectuals and it is thus difficult to give Garvey any credit for the flowering of the Negro Renaissance. Certainly his unceasing efforts to restore a strong sense of pride in things Negro was a march down the Copyrighted Material 172 Black Moses same path as that trod by the New Negroes, however, and the same forces that stimulated the Negro Renaissance helped to create an audience for Garveyism. Garvey's bombastic efforts to whip up an intense black nationalism were a logical counterpart to the more subtle but equally militant contemporary verse of such Negro poets as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. The significance of Garveyism lies in its appeal to the dreams of millions of Negroes throughout the world. The amazingly loyal support given Marcus Garvey by the Negro masses, particularly in the United States and the West Indies, was forthcoming because he told his followers what they most wanted to hear, or, as E. Franklin Frazier has said, he made them "feel like somebody among white people who have said they were nobody." 3 Two decades after Garvey's inglorious departure for Atlanta penitentiary a new Harlem generation still remembered him as the man who "brought to the Negro people for the first time a sense of pride in being black." 4 This is the core of Marcus Garvey's philosophy; around this ideal he centered his life. 1:. Coming at...