GospelCity Black History Month Salute - Profiles in Courage and Influence

Marcus Garvey
“Up! Up! You mighty race! You can accomplish what you will!”

In 1914, Marcus Garvey the eleventh child born of a family of humble means in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, established the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a movement that inspired people of the global African Diaspora to embrace economic parity and empowerment. It was during the association’s convention held in Harlem, New York, that Garvey revealed his master plan to build an African nation-state.

Marcus Garvey was an unconventional man; some would say a free thinker, who dressed in military regalia – a symbol of his fight against the abysmal conditions black people lived in at the start of the last century. Thousands were attracted to and joined the UNIA, thus enabling Garvey to publish a newspaper, The Negro World, where he showcased the best efforts in Negro communities worldwide to move away from dependence on a system that was failing miserably.

Garvey toured the nation preaching the concept of Black Nationalism. He would ultimately establish 1,100 chapters of the UNIA globally in more than 40 countries. And as a result of this global success, Garvey launched The Black Star Shipping Line, an ambitious business effort he reckoned would fund his back to Africa movement.

Unfortunately, trusted aides betrayed him financially and the U. S. government tried and convicted him of mail fraud, which sent him to a federal prison for five years in Atlanta. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence but deported him back to Jamaica.

After dabbling unsuccessfully in Jamaican politics, Garvey moved to England in 1935 and would die in West Kensington on June 10, 1940.

Frederick Douglass
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”

Called “The Lion of Anacostia,” Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most influential black leader of his time with the ability to bend the ears of presidents, kings and anyone else with the power to make decisions concerning the plight of slaves and even the emancipated.

Born in slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, the product of a union between a slave mother and white man, Douglass was taught how to read by an owner’s wife and in time he would give New Testament reading lessons to other slaves at the risk of his own life. After a series of unmerciful beatings, Douglass made two unsuccessful attempts to escape though in 1838 he would be successful using the identification papers of a free black seaman. Later, British sympathizers paid his owner for his “official” freedom.

Douglass was a lifelong advocate of education as a means of uplifting the race, black suffrage and even counseled Abraham Lincoln on the unfair treatment of black soldiers in the Civil War. And he was outspoken about the purpose of the War Between the States as a war to abolish slavery.

An ordained minister of the Gospel in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, Douglass would publish a newspaper, would hold several government positions in the Anacostia/Washington, D.C. area as well as travel the world extensively as a public speaker. No stranger to controversy in 1884, two years after the death of his wife Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick married Helen Pitts, a white woman who was shunned by her family as he was shunned by his own children who felt the marriage insulted the memory of their longsuffering mother.

On February 20, 1895, Douglass died of a massive heart attack and is buried in Rochester, New York.