This is a film review of the film African Redemption in the context of the Marcus Garvey Library edited by Dr. Tony Martin.
In a 1935 issue of the Blackman periodical, Marcus Garvey wrote that Paul Robeson went to Hollywood “to make another slanderous picture against the Negro” (Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa 350-1) Garvey was aware of the commercial success of the film Birth of A Nation, and how the genre of film since its early twentieth century inception was used to do what he wrote Robeson was doing which was to promote “Negro inferiority and white superiority.”
Roy T. Anderson and Alison Anderson have co-produced a film that in its narration and its dramatizations does three things: one, it is the first film to completely vindicate the legacy of Marcus Garvey from that of a simple “criminal” to one of a “visionary leader.” Two, this film corrects the the misconceptions about Garvey in print and in film. Three, this film innovates the American film genre by including a narration that engages the neocolonial question that is too often ignored in the modern documentary.
The film begins with a narration by Keith David that defines Pan Africanism which is the belief that people of African descent share not only a common history but a common destiny. Paul H. Williams reads the role of Marcus Garvey himself. The dramatizations of Marcus Garvey as a little boy includes excerpts written by Garvey read by Williams. Most profound in the first five minutes of the film was his “first lesson in race distinction” that comes from an article in the September 1923 issue of the Current History periodical. One of the dramatizations of Garvey’s early life in Kingston shows a teenage Garvey leading a strike and Anderson’s narration said that this strike “further cemented his bond with the working class.” The narration mentions Garvey being mentored by J. Robert Love, editor and printer of the Jamaica Advocate, and how this newspaper inspired Garvey’s editing and printing the commercially successful Negro World newspaper. It was in Kingston, where Garvey was influenced by Love that “the roots of Garveyism begin to emerge” the narration tells us. The Andersons interviewed Costa Rican scholar Quince Duncan who said in this film that after Garvey went to Limon, Costa Rica, that the reaction of the Black elite against Garvey “was very strong.”
The Andersons’ narration of this question engages more directly than any other the central questions that Garvey through his writing was most concerned with. In Costa Rica, the narration tells us that “the brutal working conditions of the Caribbean migrant workers, whom he tries to organize, are another rude awakening.”
In England, Duse Ali, “helped to sharpen Garvey’s focus on Black nationhood.” The dramatization at this point in the film jumps at least a decade to Garvey’s 1923 imprisonment and has Garvey in a jail cell writing on a piece of paper. The film viewer sees what he writes which is his influences in London, which included Ali and how the reading of Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery motivated him to “help to make” the “Black man’s nation.” The Andersons’ narration that mentions Love, Ali, corrects Stanley Nelson’s 2001 documentary of Marcus Garvey Look For Me in the Whirlwind that assigns the influence on Garvey to a white American preacher Billy Sunday, claiming that Garvey used his preaching style to draw followers. This film shows that Garvey’s influences were more consciously Pan African than the preaching style of Billy Sunday.
The narration mentions that on Garvey’s first return from England to Jamaica he travels with a man from “Basutoland” surrounded by South Africa, but the narration does not mention the lesson this man taught Garvey: “He related to me such horrible and pitiable tales that my heart bled within me” (Marcus Garvey, Hero, p.27).
And the tale was the “horror” of colonialism: the same English who colonized Jamaica in the Caribbean also colonized Basutoland on the African continent, and Garvey used this tale of “horror” to read, write, and edit and print newspapers that would inform his audiences of this “horror” and motivate them to demolish it.
When he returns to Jamaica the film mentions that he founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the historian Rupert Lewis mentions that Amy Ashwood beat him in a debate at East Queen Street Baptist Church. This environment of debating and oratory was one that the film compares to present day churches in Kingston which video of the preaching styles that Garvey showed. Dr. Julius Garvey, the son of Marcus Garvey mentioned that Garvey traveled for the specific purpose of establishing an “industrial school” modeled after Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. While Greg Carr said Garvey sought “help” from Booker T. Washington and Washington “agreed” to help him, the letter in the film that Washington signed actually stated to Garvey that “I regret that I am not able to make a contribution to your work.”
Leonard Jeffries said that Garvey “brought the African consciousness” to Harlem. Rupert Lewis provides greater context to Garvey’s exchange with the traveler from Basutoland when he said that Garvey saw the world as one of white domination. This provides foreground for how Garveyism attracted returning Black soldiers returning from the first World War who were dissatisfied with social conditions. The narration stated clearly that “Garvey was the first to preach forcefully and unabashedly that Black people had the right to interpret their own reality and control their own destiny.” Tony Martin writes in his book Caribbean History that “some of the West India Regiment veterans, because of Garvey’s Pan African sentiments were able to turn their knowledge of Africa to a more positive purpose” (Martin Caribbean History, p.257).
Garvey influenced not only U.S. soldiers but soldiers from the West Indies.
Carolyn Cooper mentions the luminaries from the Harlem Renaissance that the Garvey movement brought to prominence. This film then identifies several including Zora Neale Hurston. Tony Martin’s book Literary Garveyism shows how Garvey’s Negro World newspaper was the first to publish the work of Zora Neale Hurston in 1922. However, unlike the Andersons’ film, Kristy Anderson’s 2007 film on Hurston, Jump at the Sun, completely ignores the influence of Garvey on Hurston’s career as a writer and instead begins her time in Harlem in 1925 with the Opportunity periodical, instead of 1922 when Garvey’s newspaper published her poems.
The narration mentions Garvey’s detractors in the United States and said that “those who pursued an integrationist agenda argued that his movement was both racist and reactionary.” Tony Martin was the first scholar of Marcus Garvey to document this movement in terms of an “integrationist” philosophy as opposed to a “nationalist” philosophy. He describes this most thoroughly in the eleventh chapter in his book Race First titled The Integrationist Onslaught.
Carol Anderson voices the concern that many “integrationists” had about Garvey’s philosophy and practice, that Garvey’s vision “may not work,” however this term needed a full unpacking, because her point begs whether the preferred way of living for “integrationists” is working. Tony Martin wrote at the end of his eleventh chapter entitled “The Integrationist Onslaught,” that one of Garvey’s detractors, W.E.B. Du Bois, “increasingly came to realize that for all his effort, for all the effort of the N.A.A.C.P. [since 1919], integration was making little headway”(309). To Carol Anderson’s point, the “integrationist” philosophy since Garvey’s arrest has shown not to work.
The narration tells us that Amy Ashwood arrives in New York by October of 1918 and becomes general secretary of the newly formed U.N.I.A. The Andersons’ narration tells us that George Tyler was hired to kill Garvey, as Tony Martin writes in Race First, however this detail of Tyler being hired to kill Garvey is omitted from most scholarship on Garvey, including the book Black Moses written by E. David Cronon who simply called Tyler an “insane former employee” and disconnected him from the state’s early attempt to hire assassins against him (Black Moses 44). Colin Grant in his book Negro With A Hat does not mention Tyler’s role as a hired assassin. This film corrects the narrative about who George Tyler was, once and for all.
The narration tells us about Marcus Garvey’s marriage to Amy Ashwood in December 1919 that quickly dissolved within three months when Garvey filed for divorce. It tells us about Garvey’s second marriage to Amy Jacques who became Garvey’s personal secretary. Amy Jacques would advance the teaching of Garveyism long after her husband’s death in 1940, as did Amy Ashwood. The film tells us that on August 1, 1920, he addressed a record crowd, Rupert Lewis says 25,000 at Madison Square Garden, at his organization’s international convention. The film’s interview with Charles Rangel said that this 1920 convention in Madison Square Garden was a group of people who said “I’m black, I’m proud, going to Africa? Count me in!” This downplays the greater purpose of the convention. Tony Martin wrote that the phrase “back to Africa” greatly displeased Garvey. Based on his speeches and writings, Garvey would not want any U.N.I.A. member going to Africa. His work proves that he only wanted “pioneers capable of making a contribution to African development,” which was not the majority of U.N.I.A. members born and raised in the West, nor of non-U.N.I.A. members (Race First 121). After Rangel a dramatization shows Garvey writing a letter behind bars stating that the government had hired spies to infiltrate his organization and inform for the federal government. Jeffrey Perry is author of a 2021 biography of Hubert Harrison, who was one of the spies who informed against the Garvey movement while being paid by Garvey directly for his skillful editing of the Negro World newspaper.
Justin Hansford said that the charge against Garvey was “politically motivated by J. Edgar Hoover.” However Perry’s biography shows how it wasn’t just Hoover: it was Hubert Harrison and letters Harrison chose to leak from the U.N.I.A. to his political rivals in Cyril Briggs who published a letter planning a U.N.I.A. delegation to Liberia in Briggs’s newspaper The Crusader. Perry writes that Harrison leaked the letter to Cyril Crichlow who gave it to Briggs (Perry 438). Martin also wrote in his eleventh chapter that the “Garvey Must Go” campaign run by former U.N.I.A. supporters A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen was a politically motivated campaign. This campaign is later addressed in the film.
The narration tells us that when word of Garvey’s 1923 meeting with Edward Young Clarke gets out, Garvey’s enemies sharpen their attacks against him. The Andersons’ narration does a phenomenal job of showing how Garvey’s strategic meeting with Clarke was about precipitating the mass mobilization against the class war in 1923 of the ruling elite versus the masses that has lasted and transformed since the nation’s founding in 1776. This is akin to the class war that Trump’s rhetoric and supporters are exposing in their expressed discontent in the government. At this time in the film, he included Garvey’s words which exposed this class war, when he said said “they have tried to make it appear that we are hostile to other races.” The dramatization of Garvey writing in jail responds to the argument by the integrationists in the “Garvey Must Go” campaign. He says that this claim that the U.N.I.A. is hostile to other races completely false. This part of the film speaks to Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize series, specifically episode 9 called “Power” where Bobby Seale speaks in front of the state capitol building that the Black Panther Party “does not hate white people,” instead “we hate oppression.” The Black Panther Party was founded according to both Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, by the example of the life of Malcolm X, whose parents met at a 1920 convention not in New York but in Montreal. Malcolm X, thinking along the same strategic lines of exposing the class war against the U.S. working class, met with a white supremacist in George Lincoln Rockwell. Like Garvey and Malcolm X, the film interviews Jared Taylor who said Garvey in consciously choosing to meet with Clarke “made a commendable move to find white people…to work together to find some kind of amicable separation.” Immediately after Taylor is Carol Anderson who disagrees: “you don’t make a deal with the devil.” Anderson calls the Klan the “devil” because they “don’t even believe in the humanity of Black people.”
The Andersons’ film raises an important debate between Garvey and the integrationists here that is relevant to the debate about whether the primary oppression in the U.S. is race oppression or class oppression. Martin wrote that Garvey chose to correspond with Clarke and with U.S. Senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, not for the purpose of endorsing their prejudice against Black people but because of the unique opportunity Bilbo’s support of the U.N.I.A. provided for the U.N.I.A. to own land in Africa. The Andersons’ narration repeats Garvey’s statement that the “back-to-Africa” notion was not in fact a central part of his program. More important were the principles he taught through the U.N.I.A. and the company that owned ships, the Black Star Line. These three principles were: nationhood, self-reliance, and race first. The Andersons’ film frames the reasons for the failure of the U.N.I.A. better than any other previous film: “the land…was leased to the Firestone rubber company.” Garvey writes this in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey: “Immediately after [Liberian President] King repudiated the agreements with the U.N.I.A., he gave away…land to Firestone” (384).
Most scholarship misses this aspect because they refuse to discuss the neocolonialism that the Garvey movement exposed. Michael Barnett in this film said that the Liberian government were influenced by what the U.S. had to say, and that “Garvey never foresaw that.” What Garvey never foresaw was his own newspaper editor leaking secret organizational plans to presses that would follow U.S. intelligence directives to discredit the Garvey movement.
This film includes an interview with Mariamne Samad and includes a picture of her as a five year old in 1927. She questions the charge of mail fraud and Justin Hansford reveals that a compelling witness in the 1923 trial against Garvey was a Benny Dancy who claimed that “Garvey mailed…an empty envelope that was constructing a scheme to defraud.” Stephen Golding said that J. Edgar Hoover was behind the trumped up charge and that this unfair trial was part of the pattern of attacks against influential Black organizations that would include the Black Panther Party. These attacks were part of what was called COINTELPRO or the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counter intelligence program founded by Hoover to “neutralize” or weaken Black organizations. The film creates a sense that the viewer is imprisoned along with Garvey when we hear a letter he writes asking the reader to notice how much he has sacrificed. In this letter, he asks the reader and, now the viewer, to protect his wife Amy Jacques.
Grant claimed that since his imprisonment that the Garvey movement shriveled however in her 1968 interview with Gil Noble, Amy Ashwood Garvey made clear that the Garvey movement did not shrivel or end but simply transformed to a different incarnation. The film shows that thousands of people wrote to President Coolidge, pressing for him to be released.
The film’s treatment of Garvey’s 1927 return to Jamaica is thorough. The Andersons’ narration said that in Jamaica “turns his attention to the constitutional rights of Black Jamaicans.” Tony Martin details this in the eighth chapter of his book The Pan-African Connection and this chapter is called “Garvey and the Beginnings of Mass-based Party Politics in Jamaica…he forms the country’s first modern political party [the People’s Political Party that would later become Jamaica Progressive League] and launches several more newspapers.” Rupert Lewis’s thirteenth chapter in his book Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion details the attempts by the Jamaican ruling class to stem or weaken the spread of Garveyism.
The Jamaican attorney Michael Lorne details the difficulties Garvey faced from the Jamaican ruling class by voicing their response to Garvey’s arrival specifically through the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper: “I hope he doesn’t think that those antics that he carried on with in America, that he can bring it here!” Both Stanley Nelson’s film and Jeffrey Perry’s biography present Garvey’s time in Jamaica as aimless and unproductive. However Martin’s scholarship and Anderson’s film corrects this misconception. Lorne said that Garvey was charged with contempt of court in Kingston and “sentenced to prison in Spanish Town.” The Andersons film this Spanish Town prison.
The story of Garvey’s release from this prison is recorded in the song by the Reggae group Culture called “Two Sevens Clash” about the clash of the Western and African cultures. The last verse of this song says
Marcus Garvey was inside of Spanish Town district Prison /
And when they were about to take him out / He prophesied and said /
‘As I have passed through this gate,’ / ‘No other prisoner shall enter or get through’ /
And so it is until now
Michael Barnett said that Garvey “lays the foundation for the Rastafari movement.” How the film deals with Garvey after Jamaica is comprehensive. Colin Grant made the point that C.L.R. James and George Padmore heckled Garvey as he spoke, however his time in London was not without his printing his newspaper Black Man magazine that he started in Jamaica. Grant claims that Garvey made a “mistake” in criticizing the actions of Haile Selassie, however his criticism of Selassie is a necessary and logical extension of his criticism of the colored Jamaican leadership since his 1913 article printed in London criticizing colored Jamaican leaders for their loyalty to Downing Street. This article is titled “The British West Indies in the Mirror of Civilization” and is in the book Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa edited by Amy Jacques Garvey and John Henrik Clarke. Barnett said that if Garvey lived to 1941 to see the Ethiopians defeat the Italians, his opinion of Selassie would have changed.
However, Garvey wrote his criticism with the intention of motivating Selassie to expel Italy and Garvey’s journalism succeeded in doing this.
In the July/August 1936 issue of the Black Man magazine, Garvey said that Selassie “had no diplomatic agents among Negroes anywhere and the few that he did appoint were to the courts of white nations and they were chiefly white men or Abyssinians who were married to Italians and had great leanings towards the whites whom they tried to ape” (Garvey qtd in Campbell 75).
Garvey’s criticism of Selassie was forthright and prophetic, not a mistake, nor a result of his declining influence. The film describes his travel to Montreal in 1937 to teach his Course on African Fundamentalism.
Including footage of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the narration emphasizes Garvey’s message: “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind.” Bob Marley made this message popular in his “Redemption Song,” and at this time, the film interviews Sean Paul, Sister Carol, and the lead singer of Steel Pulse, David Hinds. The narration tells us in Canada Garvey went on a speaking tour and taught his Course. This course is compiled in the book edited by Tony Martin entitled Message to the People.
Probably the most disturbing contradiction of the film was the dramatization of Garvey’s last minutes, sitting in a chair, and learning about the wrong headlines written about him. Grant describes a popular myth that Garvey died in London after reading headlines prematurely declaring his death, specifically George Padmore’s article in the Chicago Defender owned by Robert Abbott. The actor playing Garvey opens his eyes in bug eyed fashion, then faints and feigns death. Several works by and about Garvey revealed this myth. However it is not likely that Garvey actually got a stroke or heart attack reading headlines about him, as he was aware of the hostility of Abbott towards his organization while he was in America. Like his editor-turned-spy Hubert Harrison, Robert Abbott cooperated with what Garvey called in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey the “enemy press,” so it is unlikely that Garvey would be surprised, much less shocked into a stroke, by reading negative headlines by Padmore and Abbott about him. However the dramatization does raise the REALITY of the hostility towards Garvey and the Garvey movement. Mariamne Samad said that her whole world exploded when Garvey died, and that she was going to make sure that his words didn’t die.
The narration tells us that “Garvey’s philosophy and teachings have impacted many social and political movements around the world from the civil rights movement to the independence and nationalistic struggle in Africa and the Caribbean.” The film includes Ilyasah Shabazz discussing Garvey’s impact on her father Malcolm X, and video of Martin Luther King Jr. who said that Garvey laid the foundation for the civil rights movement in the United States. Grant said that we hear Marcus Garvey alive in the music of Jamaica. The artist Chronixxx said that “artists are custodians of the history and culture” and that they have to “keep recording it.” Mutabaruka said we would not know about Garvey except for the Rastafarians.
The end of the film mentioned Dr. Julius Garvey’s petition to then President Obama for a presidential pardon of Marcus Garvey, and he declined “and did not give a reason.”
A Jamaican historian disagreed with the idea of a presidential pardon for Garvey: he argued that the conviction and deportation should stand as a monument to current and future generations to demonstrate what Garvey was able accomplish despite the trumped up charge. Symone Sanders, who worked for the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden said that “we stand on the shoulders of Marcus Garvey.”
The film interviewed Samia Nkrumah who said that the book that had the biggest influence on him is The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
Sir Hilary Beckles said Garvey’s work made the twentieth century the “most democratic” century in history.
Samia Nkrumah said that although Garvey did not physically go to Africa, Garvey is there in many ways, such as in the flag of Ghana.
The only “informercial” part of the narration was the film claiming that “through the efforts of Edward Seaga,” Garvey’s body was shipped back to Jamaica. Tony Martin writes in Amy Ashwood Garvey that it was L. Leslie Alexander who contacted Amy Jacques Garvey then Claudia Jones who contacted Amy Ashwood Garvey to legally ship the body of Marcus Garvey back to Jamaica (Amy Ashwood Garvey 288). Edward Seaga was a cabinet member who worked with Alexander. During Seaga’s leadership, expansion of the drug garrisons in Kingston is almost a repudiation of Garvey’s legacy and a contradiction of Seaga’s own statements in the film about Garvey. The film ends with notable celebrities saying “Up You Mighty Race” including Usain Bolt.
This film should be supplemented with reading the Marcus Garvey Library edited by Tony Martin.
This is first film to completely vindicate the legacy of Marcus Garvey from that of a simple “criminal” to one of a “visionary leader.” This film also corrects the the misconceptions about Garvey in print and in film. This film must be seen by all. The Marcus Garvey Library must be read, studied and taught after watching this film.
Special thanks to Saundra Gilliard for helpful editing of this review.
