“Where is the grave of Amy Ashwood Garvey? A Jamaica Observer Editorial”

This is an opinion editorial recently published in the Jamaica Gleaner where I argue that Amy Ashwood Garvey should be a national hero of Jamaica and that her grave should be identified and her tombstone found. Two days after this was published online, I was sent an email from a writer who located her gravesite. Thanks to Professor Rupert Lewis who inspired this editorial and thanks to the Jamaica Observer for publishing it.

It is written that the grave of Amy Ashwood Garvey is somewhere in Kingston’s Calvary Cemetery. It needs to be found so a tombstone can be placed on it. She co-founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 with Marcus Mosiah Garvey, whom she married on Christmas Day 1919 in New York. Although historian Tony Martin wrote on page 47 in his 2007 book Amy Ashwood Garvey that Marcus Garvey terminated their marriage three months later, historian Lionel Yard wrote on page 208 in his 1990 book Biography of Amy Ashwood Garvey that a New York judge ruled that Garvey was never officially divorced from Amy Ashwood Garvey.

Martin wrote that Amy Ashwood Garvey was buried in Calvary Cemetery on May 11, 1969 after a funeral service at Holy Cross Church in Half-Way-Tree, attended by Michael Manley. Fifty years later, after I earned my PhD in African American Studies at Temple University, I completed my fifth play based on these two books about Amy Ashwood Garvey. After finishing this play I reached out to Garvey scholar Rupert Lewis and asked of the tombstone of Amy Ashwood Garvey. He replied that Roman Catholic Church Deacon Peter Espeut has been working on identifying the grave of Amy Ashwood Garvey. Rupert Lewis suggested I write an op-ed in support of finding this grave, here we are.

Amy Ashwood Garvey’s grave should be identified and marked with a tombstone because of her immense contribution to Jamaican and world humanity.

It was Amy Ashwood Garvey who introduced Amy Jacques to Marcus Garvey. In 1922, Marcus Garvey would later marry Amy Jacques, who would edit and print The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Marcus Garvey’s relationship with Amy Jacques lasted until his death; however, his relationship with Amy Ashwood Garvey was the foundation. It was Ashwood Garvey’s editorship of the Negro World newspaper that led to Earl Little and Louisa Norton meeting in Montreal to eventually conceive Malcolm X.

A reading and a production of my fifth play, The Original Mrs Garvey, reveals the historical significance of Amy Ashwood’s unique contributions to the anti-colonial Garvey movement in the Caribbean and in Africa. She lectured across the Caribbean and West Africa, playing an instrumental role in unifying the black and Indian population in Guyana. She played an instrumental role in trying to unify Kwame Nkrumah and his vocal dissident J B Danquah, whom she had met in London. She encouraged Jamaican citizens to gain a radical political education and run for political office — like J A G Smith against former Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante. She also encouraged sex education for the Jamaican masses decades before it would be introduced in Cuban schools after their 1959 revolution. In 1946 she traced her paternal Ashanti heritage to her grandmother’s birthplace in then Gold Coast, now Ghana.

Every individual in Jamaica needs to know and study the story of Amy Ashwood Garvey. Books about her need to be reprinted and sold in physical or electronic copies across the nation. Studying her life will lead to a deeper understanding and a personal appreciation for the resilience of African people overcoming chattel slavery, Jim Crow discrimination, and neocolonialism.

I believe that Amy Ashwood Garvey should actually be recognised as a national hero for her contribution to the worldwide anti-colonial movement across the Caribbean and Africa — started by herself and her first husband, Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Her writings on women leadership in Africa anticipate the writings of US writers Toni Cade Bambara and Alice Walker, as well as the philanthropy of Oprah Winfrey in South Africa. Her life and her writings need to be taught as part of the Jamaican educational curriculum for generations to learn from and emulate. We can begin by locating her grave and marking it with a tombstone. -RF.

Seeing Tasan: A Review of Claude McKay’s ‘Amiable with Big Teeth’

Today is the birthday of Claude McKay and I just completed his novel “Amiable with Big Teeth,” and it was the first novel in years that COMPELLED me to finish it, and I wonder why. I realized why, and I want to share why. I am not motivated to finish most novels that I am asked to read. However I was motivated to finish this novel because the way McKay wrote his Pablo Peixota character moved me like no other character I’ve read. I wanted Pablo and his organization to succeed.

In this novel, McKay shows the natural life-and-death progression of Black-run organizations in the West trying to connect with Africa but getting hampered or stopped by Western philanthropy and propaganda. McKay’s Pablo Peixota is chair of the Hands to Ethiopia organization. As the reader, you want the organization to succeed. It is hosting the envoy from Ethiopia named Lij Alamaya. Alamaya’s job is to deliver a letter from the Ethiopian emperor to Peixota. In the Introduction written by Jean-Christophe Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards, the president of Dutton, John McCrae who had the option to first publish this novel, said that the novel was “so bad and poor” (xl).

Viking declined to publish Hurston’s Barracoon. And Dutton also declined to published McKay’s Amiable. Dutton thought it was “bad” because the novel is such a strong indictment of Western philanthropy. In the end, like Paule Marshall’s character Harriet Amron, the white philanthropist dies because of their own arrogance and the chaos they created.

The reader is encouraged to see Alamaya deliver the letter, however Alamaya loses the letter. Peixota’s daughter Seraphine retrieves the letter after finding out it was stolen by the chair of Friends of Ethiopia, Maxim Tasan. The novel becomes more suspenseful where the reader wants to see Seraphine retrieve the letter and strengthen the connection between Ethiopia and “Aframericans” as the novel states. Peixota’s allies include the Reverend Zebulon Trawl who prays: “show me the way to defeat the machinations of the strong white ones against thy poor black sheep.”

Seraphine falls in love with Alamaya in way that shows the difficulty of Black parents raising Black children in a white world. McKay writes a full background for Peixota as a former numbers runner-turned-successful businessowner. McKay makes Peixota sympathetic as a Black parent who wants the best learning and career opportunities for their child yet, not a career that assaults the relationship between Aframericans and Ethiopians. When Peixota does not approve of Seraphine’s pursuit of Alamaya, she leaves the house in anger and consciously works for Maxim Tasan, leader of his rival organization that, as McKay shows, tried to undermine Hands to Ethiopia on several fronts.

Tasan said: “now that we have Alamya on our side and he’s going to work with the White Friends, we must see that he doesn’t keep up his contact with Peixota and Dorsey Flagg and their gang” (127). He also tried to prevent the Hands member Dorsey Flagg from accompanying Alamaya on his tour of the States. Tasan’s goal is to essentially stop aid from Peixota’s group, and to have as many people as possible join the “Popular Front” which was popular Communist group that was the arbiter of bourgeois democracy across the world.

He also helped get Peixota framed up. The trial and criminalization of Marcus Garvey looms throughout this novel. As you see how unfairly Western philanthropy, Tasan’s funder, stereotypes Peixota, you can’t help but think of how the same thing happened to Marcus Garvey, who ran the Negro World newspaper, that McKay wrote for before he pursued his solo writing career by 1927.

The narrator later tells us that Alamaya “had quickly perceived that the unfavorable publicity given the man’s arrest was an underhanded attack on the Hands to Ethiopia” (155). However, as McKay revealed in a letter mentioned the Introduction, his character Alamaya was not as strong as he wanted him to be, because he ultimately succumbs to the propaganda, to the machinations.

And after attacking Peixota’s organization, Peixota’s connection to Alamaya, Peixota himself, Tasan goes after Peixota’s daughter Seraphine. The narrator says that Tasan was perfectly satisfied in having Peixota’s daughter (181). Although the criminal case against Peixota was dismissed, the dismissal was ignored by the mainstream media. As James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room, and as Morrison in God Help the Child, McKay wants the reader to question the narrative presented by the mainstream news media. McKay’s reader should see the power of philanthropy in shaping a narrative, even though that narrative is false.

After this break, the story shifts to the machinations of Maxim Tasan. The reader follows him to his death. McKay shows the consequences of Tasan’s effort, albeit successful. Tasan loses his life when he tries to separate Professor Koazhy from his supporters–a group that is reminiscent of the masses who were faithful readers of the Negro World and supporters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. For this, which was part of his pattern of creating chaos and cultural separation, he dies. Although Tasan dies his damage is done. However McKay gives agency most to the group in Harlem who APPLY their knowledge of the anticolonial struggle. -RF.

Finishing my online Course on Marcus Garvey

This month I started teaching an online Zoom course entitled “Course on Marcus Garvey” that featured four committed students. We read Dr. Tony Martin’s book Marcus Garvey, Hero as a primary text.

One of my students, whose father was a Garveyite, had this to say about my course:

This course on Marcus Garvey was very enlightening.  Thank you, Dr. Fraser, for presenting Garvey’s complex ideologies in such a easy to understand way.  Your knowledge and commitment to shedding light on the foundation of Black liberation is invaluable.  I highly recommend this course as a primer for the study of any component of the Black radical response to racism in America and worldwide.  
Sincerely, Saundra Gilliard

You can watch one of the classes here using the password: “3O%36i&@”:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/5tAsDZ3zrGZLaNKS2hzNevRxWaS8aaa82ydIqaAEnRlFn34lTNYREYbyx5Dn48pO

Finishing a Reading Workshop of Toni Morrison’s ‘God Help the Child’

Last week I finished a reading workshop where we spent one week reading twenty pages a week of the novel God Help the Child.

In the first week, we talked about Morrison’s protagonist Bride not being the person she wanted to be.

www.facebook.com/rhone.fraser/videos/10221848161744390/

In the second week, when we read up to page sixty, we talked about Bride’s relationship with her co-worker Brooklyn:

In the third week, we talked about the beginning of Bride’s journey guided by Booker’s admonition: “correct what you can, learn from what you can’t:”

In the fourth week, we talked about exactly how Bride was correcting what she could, and learning from what she couldn’t:

In the fifth week, we talked about Bride’s pursuit of truth:

In the sixth week, we learned about Booker’s back story:

In the seventh week, we learned the result of Bride’s pursuit of Booker:

In the eighth week, we discussed the end of the novel:

In the ninth week, we read the Introduction I wrote to the book Critical Responses about the Black Family in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.

In our tenth week, we read the second half of the Introduction:

In our eleventh and last week, we discussed Jasmin Wilson’s article “Raising the Inner Child: Lessons of Emotional Development in ‘God Help the Child'” and my article “Socialized to Silence: A Close Reading of Booker Starbern and Lula Ann Bridewell in God Help the Child According to Kobi Kambon’s Model of African Self-Consciousness:”