The American Experience - Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind

Great documentary on Marcus Garvey's achievements and downfalls. Garvey created the largest black movement and organization in US history. Marcus Garvey was committed to expanding and growing the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Marcus Garvey was a visionary with a dream of redeeming Africa and decolonizing the continent. The documentary is ninety minutes long and shows everything from his creation of the black star line, yet it also shows Garvey being convicted of mail fraud. Marcus Garvey was bold, intelligent, and practical. Marcus Garvey wanted to unite black people worldwide and gets blacks to practice group economics. I would recommend this documentary to anyone interested in the story of Marcus Garvey.

This documentary is central to understand Marcus Garvey and his life. The son of an ex-slave, he was educated in Jamaica by this father in a very harsh way creating or transmitting his Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome to his son, particularly for instance by making the child spend a night at the bottom of an open grave. Marcus Garvey then lived at the end of the 19th century an experience that is implied as negative in the documentary but thus vision is retrospective imposition. He left school at the age of fourteen, which was a privileged situation when you know that education beyond twelve was for a minority of children in Europe, and beyond fourteen, which meant secondary education was only for a very small elite. I doubt very much all children in the USA in 1901 went to school much longer after the age of fourteen, especially in rural areas and urban ghettos, except the social elite that went to college.Privileged again, Marcus Garvey became a printer apprentice and soon a qualified printer and then the editor of his own newspaper. In other words he was a member of the educated elite of the island, of the world even at the time. And it is as an elite person he is going to succeed and then fail. He is going to be able to capture the changing trend in the world that started in the USA with the migration of millions of black people from the South to work in the war industry in the North and North East because of the First World War. That will cause the “race war” in East Saint Louis in 1917, an urban riot of the black population defeated by a white backlash during which everything was permitted for the white participants in the race war and no questions asked. The result was an undetermined number of hundreds of black victims as compared to 31 whites.That’s how Garvey becomes what he is known for. He roots in Harlem his Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1914 in Jamaica, and develops it in the black population of the USA, urban population first and then rural population. Success is immediate and it also spreads in the West Indies and Africa. Within two years he has the most important black organization ever in existence in the world. And in 1920 he can organize a one month International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in August with a mass meeting of 25,000 people in Harlem and a 100,000 people parade in New York. His force is then clear. He has organized the black population with headquarters in Liberty Hall, a newspaper, the Negro World, the Negro Factories Corporation, the Black Legion in military uniforms, the Black Cross organizing nurses in their all white uniforms, etc. For the first time ever one man and one organization was bringing the Blacks together and organizing them for a frontal battle to conquer their rights and freedom.Strangely enough it is this success that will cause his fall. He is a very authoritarian person, very antidemocratic too, and he selects his associates according to the level of loyalty they demonstrate and not according to their competence (loyalty being then only one parameter among quite a number of technical, educational and economic criteria). That brings to the leading positions people who should never have been there, social climbers, incompetent parasites, impulsive and uncontrollable people, and one infiltrator from J. Edgar Hoover who gets on the tracks of Marcus Garvey as soon as 1919. This infiltrated informer will enable J. Edgar Hoover to plan and coordinate his various efforts to trap Marcus Garvey in 1922. It is the economic incompetence of Garvey’s collaborators who bring down his various companies, and particularly the Black Star Line, his maritime venture. He will be arrested and then convicted and sentenced to five years in federal prison for a ridiculous crime: mail fraud because he used the US postal service to distribute a call for money that included a false piece of information that was considered as misleading people into funding a doomed commercial and irregular project.He will spend about 3 years in prison in Atlanta before being pardoned and deported by President Hoover in 1927 essentially for medical reasons to avoid his dying in prison which would have been embarrassing in the presidential campaign in 1928. The end of his life is rather banal, though the myth is slowly growing, particularly due to his being promoted to the status of apostle or even shepherd, prophet or messiah, not to speak of his nickname, the Black Moses, by the rastafari movement that started developing in the 1920s and 1930sq with the crowning of Ras Tafari in 1930 as Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. The documentary is totally silent about this myth building procedure. I would say that this silence is avoiding a very embarrassing side of the movement at the time with the production of religious documents and texts, like the Holy Piby that turned the Bible and the Christian religion into a rastafari religion with an entirely black cast and in which the white Adam, Eve, Abraham, Isaac, and a few others are white and the traitors who whitewashed the originally black religion that is brought to its peak of power with the black Jesus, the Black Virgin, his mother, the black Solomon, and the black Noah, with only one discordant note when one of these texts speaks of Noah’s son Ham, his crime (seeing his drunk father naked and calling his two brothers in to gloat) and Noah’s curse on Ham’s youngest son Canaan, the original point of the black race. This religion advocate absolute race purity and Black supremacy, like Marcus Garvey by the way.Rather than being embarrassed by these elements and the part Garvey played in them, even if marginal, silence is the easier way out.Nevertheless, interesting documentary that shows how Marcus Garvey represented the first important upsurge of black identity and political action after the First World War. This will be severely brought down and will have to wait for the next upsurge moment after the Second World War with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. If Marcus Garvey had been able to solve his Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome, he might have been able to develop a real black economy and to help American blacks to solve their own Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome some fifty years earlier. But I guess Marcus Garvey is the proof that this Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome is a lot more resilient than a simple headache. That’s probably why it is still active in many black people today in the USA.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This DVD produced by PBC is an excellent treasure for those who are interested in understanding the historical events in the development of Black American culture. This documentary of the American experience exemplifies the best of investigation of the birth of movements which affected Black life and provides answers for questions still being raised today. E.g., when White America wonder why Blacks and law enforcement doesn't appear to be successful in developing a positive relationship, this documentary provides insight when it discusses the thoughts of the late FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, antagonist attitude toward Blacks and their selective leadership. Hoover's hatred of Martin King is seen in his hatred of Marcus Garvey. Hoover's personal belief toward Blacks was discussed and his attitude is reflected in law enforcement across the Nation to this day. This video is quite valuable as an edition to an individual's search for the truth of why things are the way they are. I highly recommend without reservation this PBS series for anyone's library who is interested in learning the historical movements in Black American Culture.

I am a historian by profession. I did my senior thesis on the Garvey movement during my college days.Overall, I thought this was an excellent documentary. The DVD is particularly good as it expounds upon things like Malcolm X's parents' role in the Garvey movement, J. Edgar Hoover's vendetta against Garvey, and it contains two complete speeches from Garvey recorded in 1921, the latter of which states the goals of his UNIA.As for the controversy, one should not expect a serious documentary aimed for adults to show a historical figure as an idealized, angelic being with no human flaws. Let's face it, Garvey had his faults and this documentary deals with that. But it also makes it clear that Garvey made a positive impact on many people from the testimonies of people who actually remembered the Garvey movement. Incidentally, in response to one of the previous posters, this DVD DID mention that Garvey created the Red, Black and Green flag.Next to reading "Black Moses" or "The Philosophy of Marcus Garvey," this is a good introduction for anyone who wants to learn about Marcus Garvey. See this, read Garvey's own writings, and judge for yourself.

The name Marcus Garvey was not new to me, but I did not know the history. I was astonished that he was part of American history, and that he once had so much influence in America. I had no idea he died in the United Kingdom, and that he even had children. Very informative. I bought this DVD after watching Many Rivers To Cross, because Marcus had a brief mention in the film. I think all Americans should be aware of this man, especially black Americans.

This was a gift purchased for someone who had it on the Gift List. With the "thank you" I received, this person also said, "this is my best Christmas ever". There aren't any more sincere and grateful words than that.

Excellent film and price. It helped us keep up with what our son's Harlem Renaissance course at Dickinson College. Had we known it would come media mail, we would have paid more for first class to keep pace with the curriculum.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey is perhaps the most amazing character I've ever come across in the history of the 20th century. A relatively poor man from Jamaica whose single-mindedness and vision built the largest African American organisation in the history of the US or anywhere else for that matter.This man is truly a colossus whose influence was felt right across the globe. The DVD documentary does not just focus on his work in building his political and economic vehicle, the UNIA, in America but also informs of his support for other non-African people's struggles for freedom and liberation in Latin America and Europe (e.g. IRA in Ireland, wow!).After watching this excellent DVD I'm inspired to find out more about this amazing man!