MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE
DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS
GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER
EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: STEPHANIE CASTILLO SAMOY
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of a standard edition. The text contains racial, ethnic, and cultural references of the era in which it was written and may be deemed offensive by today’s standards. A new introductory note has been specially prepared for this volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Garvey, Marcus, 1887–1940, author.
Title: Message to the people : the course of African philosophy / Marcus Garvey. Other titles: Course of African philosophy
Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2020. | Series: Dover Thrift Editions | Includes index. | Summary: “In September 1937, three years before his death, Marcus Garvey, one of the most controversial figures in the history of race relations, assembled his most trusted organizers, from his Universal Negro Improvement Association, at its peak the largest international mass movement in the history of African peoples. He was looking to pass on the life lessons he had learned. For one month he instructed this elite student body, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, on twenty-two lessons with topics ranging from universal knowledge and how to get it, to leadership, character, God, and the social system. Garvey’s lessons were known as the Course of African Philosophy and offer a fascinating distillation of a great leader’s wisdom”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019052574 | ISBN 9780486842790 (pbk) | ISBN 0486842797 (pbk)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Race identity—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | African Americans—Education—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Self-actualization (Psychology)—Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Classification: LCC E185.625 .G37 2020 | DDC 305.896/073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052574
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
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NOTE
“Black is beautiful.”
“I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.”
WAS MARCUS GARVEY (1887–1940) a unifier or a divider? Depending on whom you asked, the responses were wide-ranging.
W.E.B. Du Bois, scholar and activist, called Garvey, “the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid a wreath at Garvey’s shrine in 1965 and said he “was the first man of color to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny. And make the Negro feel he was somebody.”
In 2008, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author and journalist, described Garvey as the “patron saint” of the Black nationalist movement.
Wilson J. Moses, a scholar of African American studies, expressed concern in 1972 about “that uncritical adulation of him that leads to the practice of red baiting and to the divisive rhetoric of ‘Blacker-than-thou’” within African American political circles and that Garvey was wrongly seen as a “man of the people” because he had “enjoyed cultural, economic, and educational advantages few of his Black contemporaries were priviledged [sic] as to know.”
In 1937, three years before his death, Garvey, one of the most controversial figures in the history of race relations, assembled his most trusted organizers from the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), at its peak the largest international mass movement in the history of African peoples and whose motto was “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!” He was looking to pass on the life lessons he had learned. For one month, he instructed this elite student body, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, on twenty-two lessons, with topics ranging from universal knowledge and how to get it to leadership, character, God, and the social system. Garvey’s lessons were known as “the Course of African Philosophy.”
Agitator? Hero? Criminal? Prophet?
Read Message to the People to help you decide.
CONTENTS
Oath of the School of African Philosophy
Lesson 1Intelligence, Education, Universal Knowledge and How to Get It
Lesson 3Aims and Objects of the U.N.I.A.
Lesson 12The Purpose of Institutions
Lesson 18Commercial and Industrial Transactions