Marcus Garvey: Life & Lessons Jacket Text

Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons forms an apostrophe to the life and teachings of the now legendary black leader, hailed in his time and after as a "Black Moses" who popularized the idea of "Black is Beautiful." Its publication commemorates the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Jamaican who rose from obscurity to become one of the twentieth century's most influential voices.

A popular companion to the scholarly edition of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvment Association Papers, this volume is a collection of autobiographical and philosophical works produced by Garvey in the period from his imprisonment in Atlanta to his death in London in 1940. It complements The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, compiled in the mid-1920s, providing a chronicle of African redemption as it unfolded in the 1930s.

It includes Garvey's seminal statements of racial uplift; "African Fundamentalism"; "Governing the Ideal State," an essay on political morality; and the epic poem, "The Tragedy of White Injustice." It also contains Garvey's autobiography, originally published in serial form in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1930. The influence of the oral tradition in black culture is demonstrated in imaginative dialogues written for The Black Man in 1935, and in the lessons form the UNIA's School of African Philosophy, orginally delivered by Garvey as a series of talks in Toronto in 1937 and later privately circulated among followers.