“Look for me in the whirlwind,” Marcus Garvey powerfully asserted in a letter from the Atlanta prison in 1925 following the U.S. government’s political attack on him and his worldwide Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Garvey knew the legacy of his words and the movement for African national unification, liberation and self-government would never die.
Garvey’s legacy is carried on by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and our 40 years of struggle for African independence, more than any other organization today.
It is fitting, therefore, that Chairman Omali Yeshitela will be the keynote speaker at the 2015 annual Marcus Garvey Tribute in Ocho Rios, Jamaica on Sunday, August 16.
The Garvey Tribute, sponsored by Jamaica’s IRIE FM radio station, celebrates Marcus Garvey’s 128th birthday.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, born on August 17, 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, is currently upheld as Jamaica’s greatest national hero. The APSP, however, understands Garvey to be one of the greatest African national heroes of all time for all African people, in Africa and everywhere we have been forcibly dispersed on the Earth.
Garvey’s beloved motto, “Africa for Africans, those at home and those abroad,” is becoming a reality through the work of the African People’s Socialist Party and the worldwide African Socialist International (ASI) that is growing throughout the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean and on the continent of Africa.
No one has ever repeated what Garvey accomplished during the 1920s from his base in Harlem, NY.
APSP work inspired by Marcus Garvey
Garvey built the UNIA into a massive international African organization boasting up to 11 million members around the world.
Garvey’s program centered on a foundation of African self-government, self-determination, political power and economic independence.
Africans around the world sent contributions for the Garvey programs including the Black Star Steamship Line, the Liberty Halls in Harlem and numerous other cities, the UNIA newspaper and a myriad of other self-sufficient economic enterprises from laundries, to recording studios and restaurants.
In 1921 the Garvey movement held the International Convention of the Negro People of the World at New York’s Madison Square Garden, attracting more than 50,000 participants from every part of the globe.
An article in the New York Times, published Aug. 2, 1924 stated, “Marcus Garvey, President General of the African Republic and head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, stood in a gorgeous uniform on a reviewing stand in front of 54 West 135th Street yesterday afternoon surrounded by a glittering staff of sabered satellites and reviewed a parade of 3,500 negro men and women which set a large part of Harlem wild with enthusiasm.”
The white left and the African petty bourgeoisie collaborated with the U.S. government to bring down the Garvey led movement, imprison him and deport him. Garvey died in 1940.
The African People’s Socialist Party is the living organization whose program and work for the past 43 years was inspired by Garvey’s legacy.
With our long-standing independent economic institutions and our worldwide organization based on three continents the Party is the best current example of African self-government.
It is our Party that continues to struggle to win the fight to regain our Africa, our resources, our history and control over our lives under the leadership of the African working class.
Like the Garvey Movement before us, all of our Party’s work is based on the foundation of our Party’s independent economic institutions, including The Burning Spear newspaper, published since 1966, along with The Spear’s online version, UhuruNews.com.
Yeshitela in Jamaica represents Garvey legacy
We have the Uhuru Furniture Stores in Oakland, CA and Philadelphia, PA, open 26 and 21 years respectively. Uhuru Foods and Pies is a popular institution that has been active in the Oakland Bay Area since 1980 and in St. Petersburg, FL since 2005.
The Tyron Lewis Community Gym has been operating in St. Petersburg, FL since 1993.
The Uhuru House centers, with their Akwaaba Halls, were purchased by our Party in Oakland in 1985 and in St. Petersburg in 1991.
Our Party operates Uhuru Radio on line and has recently been awarded the low power FM station, 96.3 on the dial.
Over the years our Party has waged struggle on every front of the colonial oppression afflicting the lives of African people in the U.S. and around the world.
We have fought for Community Control of Housing, Community Control of Education and Community Control of Police.
Every popular campaign and community victory has rested on the base of a revolutionary anti-colonial political economy and the power to govern.
This is what distinguishes our Party from the integrationists and accommodationists who want to be part of America and who believe the movement is everything and the revolution nothing.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s presence in Jamaica on August 16 will be a testimony to the legacy of Garvey carried out by the African People’s Socialist Party as the foundation of a united and liberated Africa and African people worldwide.
