In response to Historical Contradiction in Council Decision (Letter to the Editor), January 11, 2025 and After Debate, Montclair Will Raise Black Liberation Flag, January 8, 2025 both published in the Montclair Local, I wrote a letter to the Editor, an edited version of which the paper published today. In light of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s pardon of Marcus Mosiah Garvey today, I am publishing my January 14, 2025 full letter to the Editor below.
“A people without knowledge of their history...is like a tree without roots.” This admonition, largely attributed to Marcus Mosiah Garvey, is particularly apt now and here in Montclair where accurate and complete facts about the historical record are necessary. In this case, facts about the Pan-African flag, Black Liberation, Black Power and the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Garvey is the first National Hero of Jamaica, founder and first President of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), which he founded in 1914 in Jamaica “with the program of uniting all the negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a country and Government absolutely their own”.
Returning to the United States, Garvey established the UNIA in New York in 1918 with aims, among others, to “establish a united brotherhood and sisterhood among the race; to promote race pride and love; to assist the needy; to aid in the abolishment of alien control in the whole of Africa; and, to improve conditions in all Black communities”.
In 1920, in response to the popular song "Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon", UNIA voted for the colors of red, black and green as the colors of the Negro race. On August 13, 1920 during the First International Convention of Negroes in New York City, twenty-five thousand (25,000) people, including delegates from twenty-five (25) African countries, adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, which includes Article 39 – the colors of the Pan-African flag.
In 1921, Garvey stated: “Show me the race or the nation without a flag, and I will show you a race of people without any pride. In song and mimicry they have said, “Every race has a flag but the coon.” How true! But that was said of us four years ago. They can’t say it now…”
The Universal Negro Catechism, published by UNIA in 1921, states that the meaning of the flag’s colors is: “Red is the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty; black is the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong; green is the color of the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland.”
Decades later, as African countries threw off the shackles of colonialism becoming independent from the European countries which invaded, exploited and governed them, they looked to Ethiopia – the only country in Africa which successfully fought off colonial rule – and Marcus Garvey’s UNIA Pan-African flag as the sources for their own flags of freedom. Indeed, Ghana’s flag, adopted in 1957, not only incorporated the red, gold, and green colors of Ethiopia, but included a “black star...the symbol of African emancipation. The black star was adopted from the flag of the Black Star Line, a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey that operated from 1919 to 1922. It is where the Ghana national football team derive their nickname, the ‘Black Stars’.”
It’s worth noting that some scholars believe the UNIA Declaration has been overlooked and not credited for the remarkable treatise it is. Steven L. B. Jensen wrote:
The 1920 Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World is one of the most remarkable human rights declarations prepared by an international civil society organisation during the 20th century… it laid out many themes that have continued to shape human rights debates up until today.
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The Declaration was a project of black empowerment through human rights. If we are interested in a fuller appreciation of 20th century global history and politics – especially as it relates to questions of race, imperialism, black internationalism, decolonization and democracy – this particular moment in history may illuminate a major theme that begs further exploration. As Garvey explained to the crowd: “We are here because we are tired of being a suffering people. We are here because we desire our liberty. We believe that all those human rights that are common to the rest of mankind should also be enjoyed by us.”[13] The UNIA was explicit in its use of the terminology of human rights. It is a noteworthy feature of their political rhetoric and how they addressed the question and meaning of rights.
The Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King, daughter of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, “In his last book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” my father quoted Cicero, “Freedom is participation in power.” Black liberation is the struggle for Black freedom and that endeavor has been ongoing since African people were chained and brought on ships to be enslaved in the Americas – South America, Caribbean and the British colonies which became the United States of America – to the present day.
The struggle for Black liberation and participation in the power derived from that freedom did not start in the 1960s. Story after story after story describes the constant efforts of Black people, here in the USA, in Africa and throughout the diaspora, to secure the freedom, racial justice and equality that has not, heretofore, been forthcoming.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. respected Marcus Garvey and what he achieved in mobilizing and uplifting the Black community. In 1965, Dr. King visited Jamaica laying a wreath at Garvey’s shrine. He said,
“Marcus Garvey was the first man of colour in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions to Negroes and make the Negro feel he was somebody…You gave Marcus Garvey to the United States of America,” Dr. King said, "and he gave to the millions of Negroes in the United States a sense of manhood, a sense of somebodiness. As we stand here, let us pledge ourselves to continue the struggle in this same spirit of somebodiness in the conviction that all God’s children are significant … that God’s black children are just as significant as his white children. And we will not stop until we have freedom in all its dimensions.”
“Pan-Africanism actually reflects a range of political views. At a basic level, it is a belief that African peoples, both on the African continent and in the Diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny. This sense of interconnected pasts and futures has taken many forms, especially in the creation of political institutions.” “King not only recognized a connection between the struggles in Africa and the United States, but he was directly influenced by the anti-colonial struggle in Africa.”
Dr. King attended the ceremonies for the independence of Ghana from Great Britain in 1957. He reflected on his experiences in a sermon entitled “The Birth of a New Nation” at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
For years the Gold Coast was exploited and dominated and trampled over. The first European settlers came in there about 1444, the Portuguese, and they started legitimate trade with the people in the Gold Coast. They started dealing with them with their gold, and in turn they gave them guns and ammunition and gunpowder and that type of thing. Well, pretty soon America was discovered a few years later in the fourteen hundreds, and then the British West Indies. And all of these growing discoveries brought about the slave trade.
You remember it started in America in 1619. And there was a big scramble for power in Africa. With the growth of the slave trade, there came into Africa, into the Gold Coast in particular, not only the Portuguese but also the Swedes and the Danes and the Dutch and the British. And all of these nations competed with each other to win the power of the Gold Coast so that they could exploit these people for commercial reasons and sell them into slavery.
Finally, in 1850, Britain won out, and she gained possession of the total territorial expansion of the Gold Coast. From 1850 to 1957, March sixth, the Gold Coast was a colony of the British Empire. And as a colony she suffered all of the injustices, all of the exploitation, all of the humiliation that comes as a result of colonialism. But like all slavery, like all domination, like all exploitation, it came to the point that the people got tired of it. And that seems to be the long story of history. There seems to be a throbbing desire, there seems to be an internal desire for freedom within the soul of every man. And it’s there; it might not break forth in the beginning, but eventually it breaks out. Men realize that, that freedom is something basic. To rob a man of his freedom is to take from him the essential basis of his manhood.
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Nkrumah stood up and made his closing speech to Parliament with the little cap that he wore in prison for several months and the coat that he wore in prison for several months, and all of his ministers round about him…As we walked out of the door and looked at that beautiful building, we looked up to the top of it. And there was a little flag that had been flowing around the sky for many years. It was the Union Jack flag of the Gold Coast, the British flag, you see. But at twelve o’clock that night we saw a little flag coming down and another flag went up. The old Union Jack flag came down and the new flag of Ghana went up. This was a new nation now, a new nation being born. And when Prime Minister Nkrumah stood up before his people out in the polo ground and said, “We are no longer a British colony, we are a free, sovereign people,” all over that vast throng of people we could see tears. And I stood there thinking about so many things. Before I knew it, I started weeping. I was crying for joy. And I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment.
Finally, Dr. King believed in non-violent means to achieve social change and the freedom and racial equality that Black people in America had not achieved since being brought here in chains in 1619. In 1961, he wrote an essay in the New York Times, The Time for Freedom Has Come, in which he asserts that “the young Negro is not in revolt…he is carrying forward a revolutionary destiny of a whole people consciously and deliberately. Hence, the extraordinary willingness to fill the jails as if they were honors classes and the boldness to absorb brutality, even to the point of death, and remain non-violent.”
The controversy over Black Power reflected and perpetuated a split in the civil rights movement between organizations that maintained that nonviolent methods were the only way to achieve civil rights goals and those organizations that had become frustrated and were ready to adopt violence and black separatism.
On 16 June 1966, while completing the march begun by James Meredith, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rallied a crowd in Greenwood, Mississippi, with the cry, “We want Black Power!” Although SNCC members had used the term during informal conversations, this was the first time Black Power was used as a public slogan…
King believed that “America must be made a nation in which its multi-racial people are partners in power” (King, 14 October 1966). Carmichael, on the other hand, believed that black people had to first “close ranks” in solidarity with each other before they could join a multiracial society (Carmichael, 44). Although King was hesitant to criticize Black Power openly, he told his staff on 14 November 1966 that Black Power “was born from the wombs of despair and disappointment. Black Power is a cry of pain. It is in fact a reaction to the failure of White Power to deliver the promises and to do it in a hurry … The cry of Black Power is really a cry of hurt” (King, 14 November 1966).
However, despite this break in tactics to achieve the same goals of freedom and racial equality, Dr. King did not waver in working for the full liberation of Black people so they could finally participate in the power enjoyed by all other peoples. I believe he would be honored to have the Pan-African flag flown in celebration of the 96th anniversary of his birth. Happy Birthday, Dr. King.
Regina Waynes Joseph