The Garvey Classroom Podcast

How do you hold your voice steady in a world that keeps trying to quiet you. How do you speak truth when the cost is real. These questions sat at the center of Paul Robeson’s life, and they sit in ours too. Robeson rose from the son of a man who escaped bondage to scholar at Rutgers and Columbia, actor, singer, global advocate, and witness for human dignity. His gift was not only his talent. It wa...

This video speaks to the sense of passivity that Garvey warned us about. He called it “laziness.” A trained habit of surrender. Of waiting and letting others think and decide for us. That creeping belief that our effort will not matter until resignation starts to feel normal. When Garvey said, “You have been so darned lazy, that you’ve allowed the other fellow to run away with the whole world,” he...

I am loving the process of creating these short videos with the aunties who share Garvey Wisdom in twenty-five-second sound bites. Each one feels like a visit to an older relative’s kitchen or porch, where truth is offered plain and steady. They remind me that Garvey’s philosophy was never meant to stay locked in books or speeches. It was meant to live in the rhythm of ordinary conversation, the k...

Over the years working as a middle school teacher, professor at Miami Dade College, and poet in the schools across Dade County, I have seen what the educational system has done to our children, and it is heartbreaking. Many arrive bright and eager to learn but soon begin to doubt the value of their own voices. The lessons reward repetition over reflection. The tests measure obedience, not imaginat...

There is a quiet moment before we speak when doubt arrives first. It asks who we think we are. It reminds us of every time we stumbled or hesitated. Many turn back there. Yet that pause is not the enemy. It is the threshold. Marcus Garvey did not treat speech as decoration. He treated it as power. He taught that liberation begins when the tongue refuses to be quiet in the face of falsehood. He sai...

Three days ago, I shared a short reflection on TikTok about Elder Ruth, a character I created for the series “The Work of Freedom,” and the quiet power of building with our own two hands. I could not have imagined what Hurricane Melissa would bring to Jamaica, and especially to Westmoreland, where both my mother’s and my father’s families are from. This morning, I sat again with Elder Ruth’s wisdo...

The spirit of this project rises from the long labor of our historians and truth-tellers who fought to reclaim the story of Black life from the silence imposed upon it. Marcus Garvey stands first among them, the architect of Pan-Africanism, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association and Negro World awakened a global pride that no empire could suppress. Beside him, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the “Fa...

The Work of Freedom Too many of our young people don’t know anything about our history. Some think it began in slavery. That kind of forgetting is dangerous. It cuts us off from the long line of builders, dreamers, and fighters who came before us. I started The Work of Freedom and Daily Garvey Wisdom as my answer to that forgetting. I wanted to use story to pass on what Marcus Garvey taught about...

Honoring Marcus Garvey’s legacy and celebrating a historic moment. President Biden’s pardon is a step toward justice, but the work continues. Let’s uplift our communities, educate the next generation, and live by Garvey’s vision of empowerment and unity. #MarcusGarvey #GarveyPardon #BlackEmpowerment #MyNameIsMarcus #DailyGarveyWisdom #GarveyLegacy #JusticeForGarvey #EmancipateYourself #BlackUnity...