The Garvey Classroom Podcast

The more I study Marcus Garvey’s life, the more I realize what a remarkable life he led during one of the most tumultuous times in American and world history. And we have not even begun to talk about the talented men and women who passed through the offices of the UNIA and whose work appeared in the Negro World . Writers and scholars such as John Edward Bruce, J. A. Rogers, Zora Neale Hurston, Hub...

It is 10 p.m. on Saturday, September 19, 2026, and I am putting the final touches on The Story of Marcus Garvey , a course I created to accompany the biography The Story of Marcus Garvey . The book runs six chapters and was written at an eighth-grade level to make it easy for anyone to understand. The book also gathers twenty-four Garvey quotations I looked up myself. The book tells the story, and...

In school, children may meet Marcus Garvey in one chapter and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in another. Garvey belongs to the 1920s. King belongs to the Civil Rights Movement. Two men. Two periods. Two stories. But history did not happen in chapters. In October 1967, King stood before students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia and asked: “What is in your life’s blueprint?” He told them to...

A sixth grader can tell you about the plumed hat. She has seen the photograph: the uniform, the sash, the open car moving through Harlem while the crowd presses in. She can tell you Garvey built a shipping line and that the government came for him. She has met the monument. She has not met the man. Children usually receive our great figures already finished, already carved, already at the summit w...

On July 17, 2026, Dr. Catherine L. Quinlan invited me to join her for an episode of “Black Representation in the Curriculum: Conversations on Teaching, Culture, Equity, and Belonging.” Our conversation lasted more than an hour and twenty-seven minutes. We spoke about lived experience and identity in education; the need for curricula that reflect Black histories; Marcus Garvey’s principles of mind,...

Today is Marcus Garvey’s birthday. He would be 139. Today is also the day I get to tell you that The Story of Marcus Garvey is officially published. Most of our children know his name. Very few know his story, the boy from St. Ann’s Bay who could not find steady work, who traveled the world and watched Black people pushed to the bottom of every society he visited, who asked a question nobody aroun...

The idea for this lesson came to me a month ago while I was preparing the rollout of classes that I will be teaching with the Marcus Garvey Education Academy. I was reading Garvey’s autobiographical essay, “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy” -- Garvey’s first experience of what he called “race distinction.” Sooner or later every Black child will experience this moment, and there are usually five response...

There is a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from searching for something that was never lost. Half the content on your timeline right now is about purpose. Find your why. Follow your passion. Trust the universe to reveal your calling. It arrives like gospel. Urgent. Confident. And entirely useless, because it describes a feeling without giving you a method. Marcus Garvey gave us the method. I...

We live in a time of mass distraction, and it is easy to get pulled back into a life of compromise that promises nothing except the loss of integrity. The distraction is the point. It keeps the attention moving so the small surrenders never get counted. One concession, then another, and the integrity is gone before you notice. Reorientation asks two things of you. Unlearn the reflexes the old worl...

The air conditioner hummed as I stacked copies of My Name Is Marcus on the table, then sat in one of the chairs reserved for the audience and waited for the first guests to arrive. As I fidgeted in my seat, a man approached me and asked what the event was about. I told him it was the launch of my new book. I handed him my card. He looked at it, turned it over twice, and said: “What do you know abo...

There is a day in Black childhood when the world stops pretending. For Marcus Garvey, the day came at fourteen. He and the girl next door had played in the same yard for as long as either of them could remember. Then her parents drew the color line. They put her on a ship to Edinburgh and told her she was never to write to him again, because he was Black (Garvey). That was the whole reason. The gi...

Nobody handed them to us in a ceremony. There was no overseer standing at the door of our minds with a list. No plantation bell rang the morning the rules arrived. They came in the curriculum of schools that never said our name. In churches that taught us to wait for a heaven we would never inherit. In the kitchens and front rooms of our own households, where grown people we loved hushed their big...

Some nuh really waah si di world as it is So dem get caught wit all di tings weh dem a build Foundation fi set we got to do it quick Ah hope ah guy nuh vex there aint nuh easy way about dis Some side step, some come fi trick Dem wrong concept a devil dem a worship —Sizzla Kalonji, “Make It Secure” Think about the scale of the machinery it takes to convince Black people we are living inside a syste...

It started as a simple idea. Teach Black children about Marcus Garvey in a way that I had never received. So, I started with a book here and a book there. Then, drawing on my 30 years as a middle school teacher, professor, and chair of developmental education, I began writing lesson plans. As I wrote these lesson plans, I realized they were not enough. They were repeating what many public schools...

I have been thinking about this for a long time, but not in the way that you are imagining. In 2012, I was gathering signatures at Miami Dade College for the exoneration of Marcus Garvey, and a young Jamaican man refused to sign the petition because, as he put it, “Marcus Garvey never give us nothing but lyrics.” That was when I knew I had to change my tactics. It was like what Malcolm X said: “Th...

On October 4, 1963, Haile Selassie I stood before the United Nations General Assembly and delivered an address that would outlive every diplomat in the room. The Ethiopian emperor spoke of war and peace, of the machinery that ground small nations into dust, of a world order built on the dispossession of African peoples. His words carried the weight of a man who had watched fascist bombs fall on hi...

Marcus Garvey found the key to his freedom and ours in a London library. He was twenty-six years old, nearly broke, reading in the British Museum when he picked up a book written by a man born into American slavery. The book was Up From Slavery . By the time Garvey finished, a question burned through him that would reshape Black consciousness across the globe: “Where is the black man’s government?...

Hugh Auld could not keep his mouth shut. That was the gift. Sophia Auld, his wife, had been teaching young Frederick the alphabet, tracing letters on a slate the way you might teach any bright child. Twenty-six letters. Each one contraband. Then her husband walked in, and the room’s temperature changed. A slave who learns to read, Auld said—spitting out the words—becomes unfit for slavery. Worthle...

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. —Steve Biko Steve Biko understood something that most revolutionaries miss. The gun pointed at your head matters less than the voice inside it telling you that you deserve to be shot. Apartheid South Africa built its entire architecture of control on this insight, spending decades perfecting a system designed not merely to conta...

Marcus Garvey’s Blueprint for Mental Liberation Summary: In this episode, we confront the crisis of the "shrunken imagination"—the internal voice that convinces us to dream small due to systemic oppression. We explore how Marcus Garvey built the largest Black organization in history by transforming mental slavery into unstoppable institutional confidence. Key Topics & Takeaways: The Root Problem:...

“With confidence, you have won before you have started.” — Marcus Garvey The final candle burns. Seven days of intention close where all things begin and end: with faith. Garvey understood this. He declared that with confidence, victory precedes action. The outcome settles before the work commences. Imani, the seventh principle, anchors everything we have built across these Kwanzaa nights. Imani t...

They put him in a cell designed to break his mind. Robben Island was a factory for despair, a place where the state suppressed resistance by crushing the spirit first. Nelson Mandela understood this from the moment he arrived. He also understood something his jailers never expected him to grasp: their weakness. Mandela began studying Afrikaans with the discipline of a soldier preparing for war. Th...

“We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.” — Marcus Garvey The second night of Kwanzaa belongs to Kujichagulia. Self-determination. A red candle joins the black one at the center of the kinara, and the principle it carries completes what Umoja begins. Unity gathers the people. Self-determination decides who those p...

I learned the gradations in Kingston before anyone named them. Browning. Red. Clear-skin. Every yard had its taxonomy, every schoolroom its unspoken ranking, and no colonial officer needed to enforce what we enforced on ourselves. The British had gone home. Their measuring system stayed behind, alive in our mouths, alive in the way aunties appraised babies and decided which ones would go far. Garv...

Marcus Garvey understood something fundamental about freedom. You cannot beg your way to liberation. The hand that feeds you controls you, and the mind that accepts this arrangement has already surrendered. Garvey built the Universal Negro Improvement Association on this principle, declaring that our redemption would come through economic and spiritual independence. He was not speaking to individu...