In keeping with our commitment to continually honor the revolutionaries and Liberators before us, we share with you the fiery speech below from Marcus Garvey. In this speech delivered before his 1925 imprisonment, he discusses and exemplifies the role of true leadership for people of African descent.
If we consider the fact that the racial climate then was ten thousand times more atrocious, more violent, more insidious than it is now, then we can come close to imagining what it must’ve been like for these heroes of our Liberation journey to oppose the dominant forces of white pathology.
Please listen to the audio below followed by the full transcript:
TRANSCRIPT:
When I am dead, wrap the mantle of the red, the black and the green around me, for in the new life I shall RISE UP with God’s grace and blessings to lead the millions of the heights in the triumph, that you well know!
Look for me in a whirlwind or a storm! Look for me all around you! For with God’s grace, I shall come back with countless millions of Black men and women who have died in America, those who have died in the West Indies, and those who have died in Africa, to aid you in the fight for liberty, freedom and life!
Any leadership that teaches you to depend upon another race is a leadership that will enslave you.
Any leadership that teaches you to depend upon another race is a leadership that will enslave you.
They gave leadership to our foreparents and that leadership made them slaves.
But we have decided to find a leadership of our own… to make ourselves free men. Our great scholars have advanced through the colleges and universities, have thrown away the blackened record.
Babylon did it.
Assyria did.
France under Napoleon did it.
Germany under Prince Von Bismarck did it.
England under…
America under George Washington did it.
AFRICA WITH 400 MILLION BLACK PEOPLE CAN DO IT.
If you cannot do it, if you are not prepared to do it, then you will DIE!
You race of cowards!
You race of imbeciles!
You race of good for nothings!
If you cannot do what other men have done, what other nations have done, what other races have done, THEN YOU HAD BETTER DIE!
Can we do it?
We can do it?
We shall do it.
We’ll pray to God for vision and for leadership. And he has given us a universal vision… a vision that will not limit our possibilities to America,… a vision that will not limit our possibilities to the West Indies,.. but a vision that says there must be a free and redeemed Africa.
Christ the crucified.
Christ the despised.
We appeal to you to help, for succor, for leadership.
When you endeavored to carry your burden up the heights of Calvary…
When white men spurned you,…
when white men scorned you,…
when white men spat upon you,…
when white men pierced your side…
out of which blood and water gushed forth, it was a BLACK MAN, in the name of Simon the Cyrenian, who took your cross and bore it up the heights of Calvary.
And now that we are bearing our burden as being so heavy, we just ask that you just help us on up the heights.
Oh yes, the cause is grand, the cause is glory. Surely will shall not turn back. Oh sail on! Sail on! Sail on! Oh Mighty Ship of State, “Sail on!”. Sail on until the flag of the red, the black and the green is perched upon the hilltops of Africa.
Because the time has come for the Black man to forget his hero worship of other races, and to create and emulate heroes of his own. We must canonize our own Saints, create our own Martyrs, and elevate to positions of fame and honor Black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.
Sojourner Truth is worthy of a place of sainthood alongside of Joan of Arc. Crispus Attucks and George William Gordon are entitled to the halo of martyrdom with no less glory than the Martyrs of any other race. Toussaint L’Ouverture’s brilliancy as a soldier or a statesman outshine that of any other people, hence, he’s entitled to the highest place as a hero among men.
Because Africa’s created millions and countless millions of Black men and women, in war and peace, whose luster and bravery outshine that of any other people. So why not see good and perfection in ourselves?
We must inspire a literature and promulgate a doctrine of our own without ANY APOLOGIES to the powers that be. That right is ours from God. Let sentiments and cross opinions go to the winds. We are entitled to our own opinion, and are not obligated to or bound by the opinions of others.
If others laugh at you, return the laughter to them. If they mimic you, return the compliment with equal force. Because they have no more right to dishonor, discredit you in manhood than you have in dealing with them. Honor them when they honor you. Disrespect and disregard them when they vilely treat you.
Their arrogance is but skin deep… an assumption that has no foundation in morals or in law.
They have sprung from the same family tree of obscurity as we have.
Their history is as rude in its primitiveness as ours.
Their ancestors were running wild and living in trees of branches like monkeys, as ours.
They made human sacrifices, ate the flesh of their own dead and wild meat from beasts for centuries, even as they have accused us of doing.
Their cannibalism is more prolonged than ours.
When we were embracing the banks of the Nile, they were still drinking blood out of the skulls of their conquered dead.
After our civilization had reached a new day of progress, they were still living in holes with bats, rats and other insects and animals.
After we had already unfathomed the mystery of the stars and reduced the heavenly constellations to minute and regular calculus, they were still backwoodsmen, living in ignorance and in blatant darkness.
The world 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?
Their modern improvements (are but duplicates of a grander civilization that we reflected thousands of years ago, without the advantage of what is buried and still hidden), to be reflected and resurrected by our generation and our posterity.
Why should we be discouraged if somebody laughs at us today? Who is to tell what tomorrow will bring forth? Did they not laugh at Christ, Moses, Muhammad? Was there not a Carthage, Greece and Rome? So we see and have changes every day, so pray, work, be steadfast and be not dismayed.
Because as the Jew is held together by his religion, the white race is, by the assumption and the unwritten law of superiority, the Mongolian by the precious tie of blood, likewise the Black man must unite in one grand racial hierarchy. Our union must know no clime, no nationality. But let us all hold together in every country, in every clime, making a racial empire upon which the sun shall never set.
Let no voice but your own speak to you from the depths. Let no influence but your own rouse you in time of peace and time of war. Hear all, but attend only to that which concerns you. Your allegiance shall be to your God, your race, your country.
Remember that the Jew in his political and economic urge is always first a Jew. The white man is first a white man under ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. So you can do no less, BE BLACK, BUY BLACK, THINK BLACK, AND ALL ELSE WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF!
Let no one inoculate you with evil doctrines to suit his own conveniences. Charity begins at home. So first to thyself be true, and thou canst not then be false to no man.
Because God and Nature first made us what we are, and out of our own creative genius, we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let God and the sky be our limit, and eternity our measurement.
There is no height to which you cannot climb without the active intelligence of your own mind. Mind creates, and as much as we desire in nature, we can have through the creation of our own minds. And today being scientifically the weaker race, you shall treat others only as they treat you.
But in your homes and everywhere possible you must teach the higher development of science to your children, and make sure… and make sure that we have a race of scientists par excellence. For in religion and science lies our only hope to withstand the evil designs of modern materialism.
Never forget your God. Remember that we live, work, and pray for a binding racial hierarchy, whose only natural, spiritual and political limits shall be God and Africa, at home and abroad.
With one… With God’s dearest blessings, I leave you for a while. One love.