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: “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.”

So I wrote Marcus and the Amazons. Then I combed through my notes and files on my hard drive and created My Name Is Marcus, a graphic novel for children who had never heard the name, Unstoppable You: Fifty Quotations from Marcus Garvey to Inspire Greatness, The Marcus Garvey Coloring Book, Amy’s Christmas Gift, and the very latest, The Story of Marcus Garvey, which releases on February 17, 2026.

Each book answered a different absence and developmental level. Each one reached for a reader the previous one could not find.

This pattern mirrors something I learned from Kamau Brathwaite years ago when I was a James Michener Fellow at the University of Miami. Do the creative work first. Build the thing. Then reverse-engineer. Let theory arise from Xperience, not the other way around.

The Garvey Blueprint is original scholarship that emerged from my reading of Marcus Garvey’s work—a close reading technique that I first learned from Dennis Scott when I was a student at Jamaica College.

The idea came to me at 2 AM on January 1, 2025. I had been circling it for years without naming it. I created a TikTok about it and got twelve likes. That did not stop me. Twelve people felt something no one else was saying. And the conviction underneath was older than any algorithm.

Yet, the framework did not arrive whole, sui generis, like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Scholars laid the foundation. Tony Martin’s Race First established the ideological architecture. Robert A. Hill’s eleven volumes of the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers gave us the documentary record. Rupert Lewis’s work provided the anti-colonial analysis. These men built the scholarly ground on which everything else stands.

Then came Linda James Myers, whose work on optimal psychology confirmed my hunches about the psychological soundness of Garvey’s philosophy. Her research gave empirical weight to what I had felt in classrooms for thirty years: that Garvey’s approach to self-knowledge, purpose, and discipline was not inspirational rhetoric. It was developmentally sound.

Dr. Julius Garvey provided the ethical guardrails. The governing principles of Maat and Ubuntu. Truth, balance, order, reciprocity. The individual exists within the community, and the community sustains the individual. These are the boundaries within which The Garvey Blueprint operates. Without ethical guardrails, any framework built on empowerment risks becoming self-serving. Maat and Ubuntu prevent that drift.

The Garvey Blueprint rests on three principles: the power of the mind, purpose, and perseverance. Three principles drawn from Garvey’s declaration: One God. One Aim. One Destiny. No other educational framework derives its developmental sequence from that declaration. Character education borrows virtues from African wisdom traditions. Culturally responsive pedagogy describes a stance. SEL names competencies. The Garvey Blueprint begins where Garvey began: an eight-stage sequence that moves from mental emancipation through a shared aim to disciplined effort to an organized life.

I grounded the framework in a course that uses two books. Unstoppable You: Fifty Quotations from Marcus Garvey to Inspire Greatness and The Power of the Mind, Purpose, and Perseverance: A Garvey Reader. The first translates his philosophy into a developmental sequence that educators, parents, and community leaders can apply, and the second provides direct access to Garvey’s teachings in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.

From this framework, I have built a middle school curriculum for grades six through eight. I have stayed in the middle school framework because I taught middle school for six years. Marcus Garvey anchors every grade. Thirty historical figures serve as case studies across the school year and feature Arturo Schomburg, Langston Hughes, Mia Mottley, Claudia Jones, and others, each matched to a heritage month: Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, National Poetry Month, and Caribbean American Heritage Month.

As a Pan-African curriculum that is not limited to teaching Black excellence for one month but rather a yearlong endeavor, the Garvey Blueprint aligns with the Common Core State Standards, the Ministry of Education Standards in Jamaica, Bloom’s taxonomy, and CASEL’s social-emotional learning competencies.

A client who wishes to remain anonymous at present has engaged The Garvey Classroom LLC for 6th-Grade curriculum licensing. This path required hiring an attorney to review the contracts and a host of other services.

As my friend Colin Channer likes to say, we will see how this plays out in “the fullness of time.”

The Story of Marcus Garvey releases February 17, 2026.

One Heart.

Geoffrey

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