The Garvey Classroom Podcast

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 the course asks a young reader to do something with what they have learned.

So, the course has a shape, and the shape has a name. The Garvey Learning Cycle. Mind, then Purpose, then Perseverance, then Reflect, then back to Mind. Garvey did not invent these categories. I did. But if you read one life closely enough, you will find the method in it.

The cycle gives a learner somewhere to stand. A girl notices a word in chapter three. It bothers her for a day before she works out why. She does something about it, and the doing takes longer than the deciding did. Afterward she wonders whether she got it right. Then she returns to the same paragraph carrying something she did not have the first time.

Grownups need somewhere to stand too. The Parent and Homeschool Companion is built for them. It helps a parent prepare and find the answers to questions their child may be asking. It walks them into the hard parts of Garvey’s life, the racism and the rejection and the organized opposition, without pressing their child to say more about themselves than they want to.

I’ve also used Notebook LM to extend assistance to parents and families that homeschool. It has sections such as The Story of Marcus Garvey: Course at a Glance and How the Companion Supports Your Family.

And I haven’t forgotten the teachers and the administrators who want class sets or maybe a school license. The School Edition is complete and awaiting attorney review of its licensing structure.

In a way, building this course feels like kismet. I am bringing together all my skills as a writer, teacher, professor, and chairperson.

This may be true.

Or not.

All I know is that I want to get some sleep.

Good night, my friends.

If you’d like to learn more about the book and/or the course, here are the links=: The Story of Marcus Garvey

The Story of Marcus Garvey: The Course

Support the mission of The Garvey Classroom to help Black children grow into confident, conscious, and capable young people who know who they are, think for themselves, and live lives of purpose.

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 know their worth. To have confidence in themselves. Not to be ashamed of their color or their biological features. To commit themselves to beauty, love, and justice.

Listen to King beside Garvey, and another history becomes audible.

Decades before King spoke to those children, Garvey had insisted upon Black dignity, confidence, Black beauty, justice, and the development of the mind.

Their politics were not identical. Their methods were not identical. Their visions of Black freedom were not identical.

They should not be made identical.

But neither should they be separated so completely that children cannot recognize the struggle passing from one generation to another.

That is one of the principles behind The Garvey Classroom.

The struggle for dignity, justice, freedom, and self-determination did not begin with Garvey. It did not end with King. Each generation inherited questions that the previous generation could not finish answering.

Our children will inherit them too.

That changes what teaching history is for.

The task is not simply to make sure children can identify Garvey or King on a test. It is to help them recognize the longer struggle they have inherited, understand what earlier generations learned, examine where those generations disagreed, and develop the knowledge and judgment they will need for the questions waiting for them.

King asked those Philadelphia schoolchildren what was in their life’s blueprint.

The question now belongs to us.

What are we putting in the blueprint of our children?

This Substack funds The Garvey Classroom. Support the mission of The Garvey Classroom to help Black children grow into confident, conscious, and capable young people who know who they are, think for themselves, and live lives of purpose.

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 with the speech in hand. The photograph gets shown. The years get skipped. A child looks up at that and draws the obvious conclusion: those people were born that way, and I was not.

But I wanted our children to meet the boy who would become the leader of the largest mass movement of “Africans at home and abroad.”

The Story of Marcus Garvey begins in St. Ann’s Bay with a boy who loves to read, and it does not skip what happens to him. He leaves school early and goes to Kingston to set type by hand. By nineteen, he is the youngest master printer in Kingston. But then, the 1907 earthquake wrecks the city. His mother dies, and he is heartbroken. He grieves for months. Then he picks himself up, joins the National Club, wins speech contests, and starts a newspaper he names The Watchman after George William Gordon, one of the heroes of the Morant Bay Rebellion. By his early twenties, he is known in Kingston as a printer, a speaker, and a journalist.

Marcus has a bright future ahead of him.

Then, everything falls apart again. The printers go on strike. Marcus is on the management side and joins the workers anyway, because he judges their cause to be just. The strike runs for weeks. The union treasurer runs off with the funds. The strike breaks. Management fires him, calls him a troublemaker, and passes the word that no one should hire him. He cannot get work anywhere in Kingston. He takes a temporary job with the government printers and keeps going.

I want children to go with Marcus on the ups and downs of his life. A young man does the right thing, gets robbed by his own side, loses the job, and gets his name spoiled in his own trade. Nothing about that week felt like destiny. He was twenty-two and couldn’t find a job anywhere.

Watch what his mind does next, because this is the part I most want young readers to see. He does not quit printing. He takes the trade to Costa Rica and Panama, and he uses it to document what the banana companies do to Black workers. The skill he learned in the shop becomes the instrument he uses on the road. Then London, where he works with Dusé Mohamed Ali at the African Times and Orient Review and reads African history among people arguing about Egypt, India, and empire. Every obstacle in that sequence gets converted into a stepping stone.

The same mind is at work when the movement is at its height. He buys a ship for the Black Star Line and renames it after Frederick Douglass, because he holds that the ancestors who paved the way should be honored, and because he understands what a name on a hull teaches the people watching from the pier.

Then the hardest years. In 1923, he is tried for mail fraud. He cross-examines the government’s own witness and gets him to admit on the stand that the prosecutor told him to lie. The judge lets the testimony stand and refuses a new trial. The prosecution’s key piece of evidence turns out to be an empty envelope with a Black Star Line stamp on it. He is convicted on that. It looked, at the time, like his enemies had won.

A US Marshal escorting him said, “We have captured the tiger.” Marcus answered, “But my cubs are running wild!”

He was on his way to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary when he said it.

From inside, he petitioned Coolidge, wrote to his followers, and kept the movement’s thinking alive on paper. President Coolidge commuted his sentence on one condition. He must go back home to Jamaica. He built again in Jamaica. He built again in London. In 1940, a journalist he knew published his obituary before he was dead, and reading it is what killed him.

That is the whole record, and children can hold all of it. Give them the triumphs and tragedies in the order they happened, and they learn the thing no highlight reel teaches: how a person with a purpose can survive any circumstance.

Garvey said it himself, in African Fundamentalism, printed in the Negro World on 6 June 1925: “God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own creative genius we make ourselves what we want to be.”

Read that with a twelve-year-old. Something was given. Something is still being made. The making happens in the bad years too.

Here is what to do with the book when it reaches your house or your classroom.

Read the strike chapter. Stop at the sentence where nobody in Kingston will hire him. Ask the child what they would have done that week. Let them answer out loud. Then read what he actually did and ask them what he was thinking when he chose it. Do the same at the empty envelope. Do the same at the marshal’s car. Every one of those stops puts the child inside his thinking at the moment it counted.

The record matters more now than it did when I started this book. A machine can answer almost any question a child asks in under a second. It cannot decide what is true. It cannot choose what to become. It cannot judge a hard situation and pick the next move. The child who reads closely, weighs evidence, and knows who they are walks into the age of AI holding the one set of skills that does not get automated. Garvey’s life is a case study in exactly those skills, run under pressure, on the record, with the failures left in.

Which is why I left the failures in the draft too.

In the video with this letter, I am holding the 2012 manuscript. Typos and all. Perseverance is one of the three things this book teaches, along with the power of the mind and the importance of purpose, and I was not going to teach it with a clean page.

Fourteen years ago, this story sat in my hands as a stack of pages I could not get right. Today it can sit in the hands of a child. That child will close it and start asking about their own life, about what they are reading, who they are learning from, and what they do the week everything goes wrong.

The Story of Marcus Garvey is out now in paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCH9KRS5

The Garvey Classroom transforms the life and philosophy of Marcus Garvey into a practical method for helping Black children read closely, think independently, judge evidence, imagine boldly, and build with purpose.

The Story of Marcus Garvey is my gift to our children.

Support the mission of The Garvey Classroom to help Black children grow into confident, conscious, and capable young people who know who they are, think for themselves, and live lives of purpose.

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, purpose, and perseverance; self-reliance and economic empowerment; and the cultural legacies of Garvey, Rastafari, and Bob Marley.

This first short installment focuses on three principles I draw from Marcus Garvey—mind, purpose, and perseverance—and on the years of preparation hidden inside a few seconds of extraordinary performance.

“It took Usain Bolt ten years to win a race in under ten seconds. That is perseverance.”

The race is brief. The preparation is not.

When a great athlete crosses the finish line, the public sees the result. We do not see every early morning, repeated drill, correction, injury, disappointment, and decision that made the result possible.

That is why I connect Usain Bolt’s discipline to Garvey’s principles. Mind begins with knowing yourself. Purpose gives your effort direction. Perseverance keeps you working when the achievement is still far away.

The historical record sharpens the example. World Athletics records that Bolt became the youngest male world junior champion in 2002, at age fifteen. Seven years later, in Berlin, he ran the 100 metres in 9.58 seconds—a world record he still holds.

“Ten years” is a teaching shorthand, not a literal stopwatch on Bolt’s biography. His development began before his 2002 junior title, and his record came seven years afterward. The larger point remains: a performance measured in seconds can rest on years of disciplined preparation.

The finish line may be crossed in less than ten seconds. Becoming ready takes much longer.

About the series

The Story of Marcus Garvey is a weekly Saturday video series drawn from my conversation with Dr. Catherine L. Quinlan.

Next Saturday, August 29: You’re Talking About Amazon—But This Was 1919—what Marcus Garvey understood about Black economic power more than a century ago.

Subscribe to follow the series and support the mission of The Garvey Classroom.

Credit and sources

Featuring Dr. Catherine L. Quinlan, host of Black Representation in the Curriculum.

- [World Athletics: Bolt’s 9.58 world record in Berlin](https://worldathletics.org/news/news/bolt-again-958-world-record-in-berlin-updat)

- [World Athletics: Bolt becomes the youngest male world junior champion](https://worldathletics.org/heritage/history/the-21st-century)

Support the mission of The Garvey Classroom to help Black children grow into confident, conscious, and capable young people who know who they are, think for themselves, and live lives of purpose.

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 around him could answer, and then spent his life building the answer with his own hands.

This book puts that story directly into the hands of readers ages 8 to 14. Paperback, published under Mabrak Books, available today.

If there is a young person in your life who knows Garvey’s name but not his story, this is for them.

Watch the video. Then get the book.

The Story of Marcus Garvey is available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCH9KRS5

Happy birthday, Marcus Garvey. Let the children meet you.

Support the mission of The Garvey Classroom to help Black children grow into confident, conscious, and capable young people who know who they are, think for themselves, and live lives of purpose.

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 responses.

Carol S. Pearson, in Awakening the Heroes Within (which I have modified in some parts), maps the archetypal patterns. What I saw in Garvey’s story, and in the children I was trying to reach, was that those patterns were all present. And most of them share the same hidden problem.

The Shadow Innocent pretends the event never happened and continues as if racism does not harm them or their people.

The Orphan accepts the injury as evidence about the self. Something is wrong with me. The child internalizes the judgment and begins to live within its limits. This is how mental slavery begins.

The Uninformed Warrior spends life answering every insult, correcting every slight, fighting every battle placed before them. The enemy determines the battlefield, the tempo, and the expenditure of energy. Their life becomes a rebuttal.

The Uninformed Caregiver offers comfort without transformation. Let me ease the pain so we can endure what is happening. Comfort matters. It may help people survive for a while, but comfort alone leaves the conditions intact.

What connects all four is that they are all still locked inside the paradigm of mental slavery. Each is still contending with the system and its values. The system still sets the terms. The system still determines what deserves attention, what deserves resistance, what deserves care.

The Garvey Mindset arises from a completely different set of premises and follows its own logical order.

Garvey did not organize his life around the system’s assumptions. He built from the premise that Black people possess the intelligence, dignity, discipline, and creative power to construct a world of their own making.

But how did he do that? That question drove the lesson.

But this lesson could not be like any of the other lesson plans that I created for Teachers Pay Teachers (thegarveyclassroom.com/store) because AI has changed the way we should be teaching.

The idea for the change came from a TikTok I had been watching. You can see it here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Gxm1Lm/

Nate B. Jones said something that stopped me.

“We are gated by our imaginations.”

He was talking about AI models. He was arguing that 95% of the utility of these tools remains undiscovered, not because the models are limited, but because we lack the imagination to ask. The machines are getting better faster than we are coming up with imaginative new uses for them. AI can now write essays. It can generate images. It can imitate voices. It can answer almost any question. But it cannot decide what is worth believing, building, or becoming.

I heard something else in that statement.

I heard Garvey and Carter G. Woodson.

Garvey warned us more than a century ago: “PREPAREDNESS is the watch-word of this age.”

Our schools are failing our children because they are not creating the environment in which the foundational habits of mind needed for the AI era can flourish. They are stifling the imagination of Black children by banning books about our heroes. This limits our children’s sense of possibilities and agency, and disconnects them from our history.

Also, our schools are asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking,

“How do we teach students to use AI?”

The better question is,

What kind of mind will thrive in the age of AI?

Because information is no longer scarce.

Judgment is.

But before I could continue, I would have to meet the demands of Black parents:

1. Academic excellence that prepares their children for college, work, and leadership.

2. Safety and respect without racial bias, lowered expectations, or excessive punishment.

3. Cultural affirmation so their children learn Black history, see themselves reflected, and develop confidence.

Becoming Marcus fulfills all of these.

But it wasn’t until I had finished creating the lesson that I realized that for ethical and legal reasons I could not teach the course because it asks personal questions that only a parent or a teacher in loco parentis should teach.

So, I have created a family package for parents and an educator’s companion for teachers who want to prepare children for their moment of “racial distinction” or help our children to reframe the moment into something positive: nothing is wrong with you. Do not accept the system’s values of beauty, intelligence, or worth.

Both lessons are available on my website.

Becoming Marcus — The Garvey Classroom: https://thegarveyclassroom.com/becoming-marcus-series/

In the coming months, I will be writing on Becoming Marcus: Awakening to the Importance of Purpose, after the launch of my new children’s book, The Story of Marcus Garvey, which has only taken me thirteen years to write, and will be released on Garvey’s birthday.

Until then, wish me luck and walk good.

References

Garvey, Marcus. “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy.”

Garvey, Marcus. “PREPAREDNESS is the watch-word of this age.”

Jones, Nate B. “We are gated by our imaginations.” TikTok, 2026, https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Gxm1Lm/.

Pearson, Carol S. Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperCollins, 1991.

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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.

In Message to the People, the text we use as a primary source in The Garvey Classroom, he said, “Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as much as possible to be intelligent.” That instruction has a shape.

What Garvey Actually Prescribed

Garvey did not tell his students to meditate on their gifts or sit quietly until a calling arrived. He told them to read. Novels. Biography. Poetry. History. He prescribed four hours of reading per day and he meant it as a minimum. Garvey understood something the pop culture purpose industry has systematically buried: the mind does not reveal purpose through stillness. It reveals purpose through contact. Contact with ideas. Contact with lives lived differently. Contact with struggle and its outcomes.

Garvey inherited this from a tradition older than the industry that replaced it.

The Kemetic principle at the root of this practice is Sia. Deep perception. The capacity to understand before you act. In the ancient African tradition that gave Egypt to the world, Sia was a cultivated faculty. You developed it through sustained attention to the world. Through reading. Through writing. Through observation. Sia was the ground from which right action grew.

Garvey absorbed that tradition, distilled it into a curriculum, and handed it to a people who had been deliberately starved of it.

What the Spiral Does

Pop culture treats purpose as an event. A moment of revelation. The lightning bolt. You wake up one morning and you know. And if you have not had that moment yet, something is wrong with you. You have not meditated long enough. You have not journaled deeply enough. You have not found the right coach.You missed out on something and the FOMO is real.

Garvey understood purpose as a process. A spiral that moves upward and doubles back on itself. You read something. It shifts the angle of your perception. You write one sentence about what shifted. The next book lands differently because of that sentence. The observation you make on Tuesday connects to the biography you read on Saturday. The spiral tightens. A direction becomes visible. A direction, not a destination.

Purpose is not given. It is grown. And the growing requires the same thing Garvey required of every student who sat in his School of African Philosophy: daily contact with ideas larger than your current situation.

What Was Installed Instead

The advice you receive from pop culture is a substitution.

Find your passion keeps you searching. Follow your why keeps you feeling. Trust the universe keeps you waiting. None of these ask you to build anything. None of them ask you to read anything or ask you to sit down and write one honest sentence about what you observed today.

That substitution has a cost. A people always searching for a feeling never build a thing. Garvey was almost cruel on this point. He said, “It is better that you be dead than having no purpose in life”

An African person who reads and writes every day and tracks the movement of their own mind across months and years cannot be sold a dopamine hit in place of a life’s work. That person is on the way to what Garvey named in The Philosophy and Opinions: “For man to know himself is for him to feel that for him there is no human master. For him Nature is his servant, and whatsoever he wills in Nature, that shall be his reward.”

The destination of a disciplined mind.

What You Do Tonight

You do not need a revelation. You need a practice.

Open one book tonight from any of Garvey’s four categories. Make it something that interests you. Read for thirty minutes. When you are done, write one sentence about what moved in you. A sentence about what shifted, not a summary, not a review.

Do that again tomorrow. And the day after. Watch what the spiral does to your sense of direction over sixty days. How the work compounds.

The feeling you are waiting for will not arrive before the practice. It arrives inside it.

That shame telling you your purpose should feel obvious by now, that you are behind, that other people found theirs and you are still looking was installed. It keeps you searching instead of building. This is not to say that the yearning for wholeness that was sparked during your awakening was not real. It was. The difference between Garvey’s method and all other requires diligence in following through with the unlearning and learning and then the choice of ancestor’s work to continue during your lifetime.

The work is there and it is waiting for you.

Confidence is your inheritance.

Visit thegarveyclassroom.com.

References

Marcus Garvey. Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy. Edited by Tony Martin. The Majority Press, 1986.

Marcus Garvey. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques Garvey. The Majority Press, 1986.

This Substack funds The Garvey Classroom — curriculum, courses, and free daily teaching for students, parents, and teachers. Free subscribers receive the writing. Paid subscribers fund the work.

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 world installed, and learn who you are underneath them. Distraction is built to stop both.

Unlearning needs stillness. You have to catch the reflex in the act, the flinch, the lowered voice, the apology you never owed, and to catch it, you have to watch your own mind without moving. The feed never lets you stop moving. The reflex fires, and three screens later, you have forgotten it fired. You cannot audit a mind that is never still. The same feed pours the old rankings back in, who counts as beautiful, who counts as worth hearing, faster than you could subtract them. You cut one reflex, and the feed installs two more.

Learning needs depth. To know your heroes is to sit with them long enough to be changed. Distraction trades for a feeling. You save the post with the affirmation, and you feel you have done the work. The algorithm serves Garvey between a sneaker ad and a stranger’s grief, and by the next swipe, he is gone. You collect fragments that never add up to a self.

Reorientation carries a cost no one names. The world sells it as gain, more knowledge, more pride, more confidence. The bill comes in people.

You start to change, and the ones closest to you feel it first. You stop laughing at the joke you used to laugh at. You correct the word you used to let pass. You carry yourself like someone who answers to your own name now. And the room cools. They say you are doing too much. They say you have gone all the way conscious. They say you killed the vibe. The invitations thin out. The group chat moves on without you.

The fear of losing them is what holds people in limbo. The work itself is survivable. The shunning is what people cannot face. The fear that if you stand up in your own name, the ones who love you will love the old you instead, and leave the new one standing alone.

So you make yourself smaller to keep the table. You trade the self for the seat. That is the compromise, and it promises nothing except the slow loss of you.

Unlearning also has an outside. It draws lines.

The first line for most of us is the N-word. You stop saying it. That part is quiet, between you and your own mouth. Then comes the harder part. You stop letting it pass. You say it plainly at the table, in the car, in the room where your children are listening. Do not use that word around me.

The word is the colonizer’s name for you. Every time it leaves your mouth, you do his naming for him, you call yourself the thing he needed you to believe you were, and you save him the labor. A boundary takes the labor back.

And the second you draw it, the cost arrives. It is just a word, they tell you. Why do you have to make everything so deep? You are too serious now. The boundary is where unlearning leaves your head and costs you the room. It only counts when someone else can feel it.

The work is the answer. Stillness against the feed. Depth against the fragments. The boundary against the room that wants you small. Garvey called it being “re-educated after he has imbibed the present system of education” (Garvey 97). In 2026, the present system is the feed, and the re-education is the same. You sit still. You go deep. You hold the line and pay for it.

Do that work and you have already begun the next stage. Reorientation is the turning that makes the road appear.

References

Garvey, Marcus. Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy. Edited by Tony Martin, The Majority Press, 1986.

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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 about Marcus Garvey?”

I rattled off a few dates from memory that silenced him. But I knew this would not be the last time. Nor was it the first.

The man’s question was not curiosity. It was a checkpoint.

Who gave you permission?

That is the lie in its internal form. The war on Black imagination does not only come from outside. We carry it in and turn it on each other. The empire does not need to be in the room. We run the program ourselves.

Every generation inherits the lie in the form that its time demands. In 1452 it came as papal authority. In Garvey’s time it came as laws, as prisons, as perpetual harassment. In that room in Miramar City Hall it came as a question from a man who did not know he was asking it on behalf of five hundred years of a program designed to make us doubt ourselves and each other.

In my own poems I ask the form the lie takes now. In a time of climate change, do Black and brown lives in the Global South matter? The empires have changed their instruments. The verdict remains the same.

The question is coming for you too. It may not sound like “What do you know about Marcus Garvey?” It will sound like whatever your generation’s checkpoint sounds like. But it is the same program.

How will you answer it?

Next week we talk about reorientation — the work of learning and unlearning.

Walk good.

This Substack funds The Garvey Classroom — curriculum, courses, and free daily teaching for students, parents. Free subscribers receive the writing. Paid subscribers fund the work.

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 girl was Joyce Rerrie (“Look for Me in the Whirlwind”). He had led their games. The other children had looked up to him. Until that summer, he had not known he was supposed to be less than anyone.

“It was then that I found for the first time that there was some difference in humanity” (Garvey). The line had been running through that yard the whole time. He had only now been shown it.

That is the awakening, the first of the eight stages, and nothing else moves until it lands. The world hands you a name and steps back to watch. What you do with the name is the rest of your life. There are three things you can do.

You can believe it. You can take the weight they handed you, and let it sit in you and turn. Baldwin knew the temperature of this one: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.” The rage is accurate. They installed it in you. But rage with nowhere to go turns and feeds on the one carrying it, and you become the proof they were waiting for.

You can hide from it. You can spend your one life trying to outrun the name, filing your “accent” down, and learning the manners of the house that locked you out, until you reach the door wearing a face the house agrees to tolerate. Fanon gave a whole book to the men who chose this and called it Black Skin, White Masks. The title is the entire diagnosis. A man wears another man’s face over his own long enough that he forgets which one he was born with. The house may let him in. It never lets him forget what it charged at the door. Somewhere in the trade, the authentic life ends, quietly, with no one to mark the date.

Or you can refuse it. This was Garvey’s road, and it is the steepest, because no one hands it to you. You see how the line got drawn, and you stop being the one who keeps drawing it on yourself. Garvey said plainly what slavery actually is: “When a man is a slave, he has no liberty of action; no freedom of will, he is bound and controlled by the will and act of others.” Notice the path. Break that belief, and the rest comes loose.

That is the work the other seven stages are built to do, the slow construction of a mind no one else holds the keys to. It starts with a child who has just learned the price of the ground under his feet.

The only question the awakening leaves behind is what we hand to the child standing in it right now, watching to see whether we believed the name, whether we hid from it, or whether we did what Garvey did.

References

Baldwin, James, et al. “The Negro in American Culture.” CrossCurrents, vol. 11, no. 3, 1961.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1967.

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