PBS:Garvey/Don't Look for Him in this Whirlwind Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Elombe Brath August 2001 PBS's American Experience Offers Marcus Garvey Special: Don't Look for Him in this Whirlwind By Elombe Brath If you were expecting to look for Marcus Garvey "in the whirlwind" as the subtitle implied in PBS's American Experience 90-minute special, which originally aired in February 2001, you may have a problem. I did. Not that the film did not have important information, which most viewers would recognize as why Garvey's philosophy and opinions had so powerful an appeal that he could develop the largest Black worldwide organization in our history. In spite of some gross inaccuracies, the documentary does not succeed in diminishing Garvey's greatness. Nor does it deny the tremendous debt we all owe him for his contributions. But it does kick up a storm. It is because of all of Garvey's accomplishments that many people view him as the most omnipotent and omnipresent personality in the worldwide Black liberation struggle of the 20th century. And it is with this in mind that it is understandable why this project to document Garvey's life was undertaken by Stanley Nelson and his Half Nelson Productions company. Giving Brother Nelson the benefit of the doubt, the question is would major media institutions like PBS and Boston's WGBH tolerate a production that would not dwell on rehashing the old criticisms usually associated with reportage on Garvey. But Nelson's Marcus Garvey film project goes beyond the old charges leveled against the internationally renowned Pan-African nationalist leader by introducing new controversial theories to demean Garvey's credibility than even earlier books, psuedo-scholarly papers, and news coverage. Although these attempts to take more away from Garvey than finally give him his just due, it fails because two years into the 21st century any fair observor realizes that his work is unparalleled in history. Never before nor since have we - as a people - been able to achieve the organizing of our people into an international force as did Garvey in his founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA/ACL). He did this without the help of white philanthropy, support of a sophisticated telecommunications industry, or U.S. governmental assistance. In fact, Garvey's achievements were done in spite of these array of forces working in collusion to try to block his efforts. And, begrudgingly, the film has no choice but to concede that point. So don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water by critiquing the PBS production. But PBS still sponsored this nationwide promotion in the context of the "American Experience", and therein, I believe, is the problem that many Garveyites and the Garvey family have found with "Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind." While many people learning about Garvey for the first time may not be disappointed, most longtime Garveyites, although appreciative of the fact that their leader and his work was finally highlighted in a major presentation, will probably not take kindly to some of the conclusions being included in this film. We have to remember that this biodoc is being projected as the definitive documentary on the life and work of the great Jamaican-born Pan-African leader. But since Garvey's influence has been acknowledged as having dominated the international Black community throughout 80 percent of the last century and is poised to continue to have a similar impact in the new millennium, there are two many undocumented insulting assumptions included that need to be challenged. Although this slick looking documentary has a beautiful cinematographic presence, whether viewed on television or the big screen, with a clever use of rare photographs and graphics and an interesting, accompanying period music mix, it is flawed with unnecessary misleading trivia. This is especially true when most of the contradictions I depicted seem to be based on the usual anti-Garvey biased opinions and corroborating, disinformational editorial commentary, ostensibly added for "balance." These subjected biases take away from the producer's stated objective: "A film that examines the dramatic rise and fall of the controversial leader who created the largest black organization in history." This Firelight/Half Nelson Productions Inc. film, produced and directed by Stanley Nelson, an acknowledged talented documentarian, seems to have slipped out of his hands and fell into the laps of some mischief makers with a penchant for meddling in the final product to suit their own hidden agenda. Surely, "too many cooks spoil the broth", and Garvey becomes the sufferer in the melee in PBS's kitchen. I had first looked forward to seeing this film when it previewed during the African Diasporic Film Festival a few months ago. But since I was out of the country, attending a World Conference Against Racism preparatory meeting in Honduras of Black activists in Central America (most whose African consciousness were initiated by Garvey's work in their respective countries during the early part of the last century), I missed the earlier showing. Not able to either preview or review "Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind" then, I was glad I had an opportunity to see its preview at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Tuesday, February 6th, which was to be followed by a discussion with Stanley Nelson, the filmmaker. However, I'm sad to say, that all my hopes to have an inspiring evening were curtailed soon after the film began. "At the age of 34, Garvey claimed millions of followers worldwide. His controversial goal to create an indpendent Black nation made him one of the most powerful people in America and one of the most hated." So far so good. The narrator continues. "The federal government targeted him as a threat to national security. Rival Black leaders denounced him as a lunatic and as a traitor to his race. But Garvey may have been his own worst enemy? After a opening of plaudits about Garvey's rise and fall, a shot was fired above his follower's "brows" when the narrator warn us that "Garvey was his own worst enemy." Garvey is targeted by the U.S. Government as a "threat to national security", Negro rivals are denouncing him as a "lunatic and a traitor to his race", yet we are told that the problem is Garvey himself. Hearing this refrain, which usually comes up in most commentaries dealing with Garvey or Garveyism, immediately sent distress signals to alert many Black activst's antennas to tune in to where this program was going. Time to ask, "Yo, whassup?" It didn't take long to figure out that while the producers would be forced to conclude that Garvey had indeed "created a lasting legacy of pride and self-respect" by the scope and breadth of the work that his organization had dealt with, they intended to also give him some licks under the guise that they had to add some objectivity in their analysis. Like I have always argued, when media moguls and their pundits and staff start to tell us that they have to be objective in their analysis, then we need to reserve the right to question just what is their objective? In the early part of the program, we see a fabricated dramatization of Garvey's father, a celebrated stone mason, being portrayed as a grave digger. And not just an ordinary grave digger but one seemingly with a sardonic sense of fatherly consciousness. How else can one think of a father who takes his young son out with him one night in the countryside to dig a grave, takes him down into the newly dug grave - so deep that a ladder is needed - and then pulls the ladder up, leaving his offspring in the excavation to spend the rest of the night alone in the grave to learn a lesson in self-reliance? As one who has studied Garvey's life and work for over the last 50 years, I never came across anything mentioned like the graveyard scene. Where did this scene come from? What is the supporting evidence to actually dramatize such a scenario in this documentary? What is its meaning? Is it suppose to suggest some childhood traumatic incident as an alleged plausible basis for future attitudinal problems that they want to attribute to Marcus Garvey during his adulthood? It seems so to me. How come none of the immediate members of Garvey's family ever heard of this incident? As far as I have been able to ascertain, neither have most of the renowned Garvey scholars, biographers and activists ever heard of anything resembling this in their research. Was it to play psuedo-psychiatrist and try to plan a seed that any idiosyncrasies they may subscribe to him in the program would be in turn attributed to his graveyard trauma? Again, I ask, why was it necessary to use this scene in such a highly financed and widely publicized documentary when so much relevant primary source historical material was excised out of the film? For instance, both Marcus Garvey, Jr. and Dr. Julius Garvey, the two sons of Marcus Garvey and his wife Amy Jacques Garvey, were individually interviewed for about two hours apiece. Yet the documentary only feature Marcus, Jr. in three cameos appearances for a total of one minute and 12 (00:01:12) seconds and Julius Garvey was in one snipet for about 11 seconds - a simple blip on the screen! Not even two minutes for Garvey's two sons in this production? The two most qualified repositories and sources for intimate details on Garvey had their contributions minimized and literally trashed! Why was so much of their interviews left on the cutting room floor while folks like Clarence Walker, identified as an historian, was on the screen constantly spewing forth venomous personal incriminations against a man he obviously doesn't have any real regard for. Personally, I don't believe that Prof. Walker is even qualified to carry Garvey's sword or shine his boots. Walker's discordant negative notes, when compared with the contributions of Prof. Theodore Kornweibel on how seriously British and U.S. imperialists considered Garvey's activities in confict with their capitalist interests, reminds us that it is not always necessarily that the color of the historian is the only criteria to judge whom was more apt to tell the truth. Walker, who is black and is said to be an historian, believes that Garvey's greatest achievements were no more than "grandoise", "symbolic", charlotanny", buffoonery" and even "megalomanical." On the other hand, Kornweibel, who is white, seems to display a profound understanding of Garvey's importance and why J. Edgar Hoover of the then-Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI) was out to destroy the UNIA/ACL leader. (However, I don't agree with Kornweibel's psuedo-psychological analysis of Garvey's alleged loneliness as a cause for alleged contemplating thoughts of suicide. After all, how much credibility should Kornweibel give to a man who while posing as Garvey's friend actually was working as agent P-138 for J. Edgar Hoover in his first counterintelligence program against Black nationalists?) With the exception of Dr. Tony Martin (author of the 1976 definitive biography of Garvey, Race First: The Organizational and Ideological Struggle of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association; The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond; Poetic Meditations, and a number of other spinoff books on Garvey's life and work which are part of his "The New Marcus Garvey Library" book series; along with Dr. Rupert Lewis, another Garvey biographer (Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion and Garvey-Africa, Europe, the Americas); and Dr. Robert Hill, who has edited several volumes of Garvey's work, they could have done away with most of the other professors of histories and given more time to the Garvey brothers. I think that the Garveyite elder members were an important and authentic addition to the project and their naturalness and honesty was priceless. This is especially true in regards to Sisters Virginia Collins, Estelle James and Madam Marianne Samad. The segue near the end of the film with Mrs. James singing "God Bless Our President", which turns into a musical voice-over and bed for Mrs. Collins to continue her monologue discribing Garvey's deportation from New Orleans, I found very moving. The recounts of male Garveyite elders like Messrs. James Mills, Claude Barnes and others, some who seemed to have been selectively edited, weighed heavily in favor of the positive qualities of Garvey in the tarnished film. I would have preferred Dr. Martin to have been used as the executive consultant instead of Dr. Bobby Hill, who was listed as the lead consultant. This is based on the belief of many Garveyites agree that Martin is clearly Garvey's most comprehensive biographer while Hill, an outstanding editor and anthologist of Garvey's works, is largely responsible for the inclusion of some of the most offensive, bothersome, unnecessary, undocumented, demeaning triva included in this film. In one case, we know for sure that it was Dr. Hill who told the story about Garvey getting his first speaking engagement by an invitation from A. Philip Randolph, and faced with a large crowd, became nervous, shaking and fell off the stage - flat on his face. Humiliated because of this, according to the PBS documentary, Garvey - who came to the U.S. as an already well respected, polished orator in Jamaica - wandered into a meeting held by the evangelist Billy Sunday. Rev. Sunday, previously known as William Ashley Sunday, a former Chicago White Sox major league baseball player who converted to a fire and brimstone revivalist and Presbyterian preacher), is said to have impressed Garvey so much that the UNIA-ACL leader felt the need to adapt some lessons for more effective speach by "refashioning his oratory" in the manner of Rev. Sunday's flamboyant speaking style and antics. This was ostensibly supposed to have jumpstarted Garvey's career and skyrocketed his UNIA & ACL to national and international fame. Well, that's at least the sum total in a nutshell, according to Dr. Bobby Hill. No mention was made of Garvey's early mentors like the great Bahamian Pan-Africanist leader Dr. Robert Love who emigrated to Jamaica and Duse Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian publisher of the African Times and Orient Review, in England. Dr. Love, who died in Jamaica the year that Garvey founded the UNIA/ACL, was a major influence on the Jamaican's racial ideologican outlook. Garvey, who was born two years after the European nations had gathered in Berlin to carve Africa up among themselves, could be impressed that his mentor had keenly observed European imperialism's soon after they had started to exacerbate the divide and rule chaos that the continent is still undergoing today. Dr. Rupert Lewis, head of the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, who reminded us that, writing in the Jamaican Advocate of April 20, 1901, Dr. Love opined that "Africa has been the carcass upon which the vultures of Europe have descended and which they have sought to partiton among themselves, without any regard whatever for the rights of the Africans." And Duse Mohammed both further developed Garvey's world view and hired him as a fellow journalist in analysing European imperialism and its attendant colonial rapacious rule in Africa. Yet neither of these men who helped shape the UNIA/ACL's leader perspective which led to his success were even mentioned. PBS found it preferable to include controversial material giving credit to an alleged white influence on Garvey while excluding uncontested empirical data which most Garvey scholars have documented as being more germane to his philosophy of "Africa for the Africans." It is the same tactic they utilized in their approach to Ken Burn's 10-day/19-hour chronology of the development of "Jazz" as an American art form - with almost as much imput in its development from white folks as Black people, the music's originators. (Don't get me started on that program.) Moreover, Amy Jacques Garvey, Garvey's second wife and the mother of their two sons, Marcus and Julius, was really given short shrift in this film. In fact, one of the the most glaring oversights in this documentary is the treatment - or rather mistreatment - of Mrs. Amy Jacques Garvey. It was Amy Jacques Garvey who edited her husband's classic autobiographical two volume work The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey and also authored a biography on her husband and his work - Garvey and Garveyism - in her own right. She also carried on the organizational work while Garvey was imprisoned, and traveled back to Jamaica when he was deported, struggled to maintain the UNIA/ACL in its birthplace and even was with him when he went to England where he subsequently died. All of this work notwithstanding, Amy Jacques Garvey is treated as an afterthought in "Look for Me in the Worldwind." More time is spent on the marriage between Garvey and his first wife Amy Ashwood Garvey, giving the producers an opportunity to present the wedding as an extravagant affair that would last for only four months. Furthermore, they use Garvey's own words of remorse to let him take the blame for the failure of the marriage, lamenting his seemingly sudden - and some say selfish - realization that the woman who once "saved his life" had now become an "impediment to his work." This convenient misinterpretation of the relationship between Garvey and Amy Ashwood serves to illustrate the continuous point the production strives to underscore: Garvey was his "own worst enemy" because he was impetuous, stubborn, an introvert, squanderer of his organization's finances, etc. To add insult to injury, the film uses the lone, white female historian, Barbara Bair, Dr. Hill's assistant, to make the commentary summing up the failed nuptials of the preeminent Black couple, and then segue away to Marcus Garvey, Jr., leading viewers to get an impression that he was the son of that failed union. When a few of us had an opportunity to talk to Amy Ashwood Garvey in 1968, and saw that she had purged herseIf of her bitterness against her former husband since their divorce, an arrangement was made for her to be interviewed for a program on Garvey that I had initiated for Like It Is, the WABC-TV program then produced by Charles Hobson and hosted by Gil Noble. The program was entitled "Marcus Garvey - The Origin of Black Power", and was the first film and/or television program that took a truly positive view on Garvey. During the sequence that featured Amy Ashwood she gave a glowing retrospect of Garvey and his work, almost confessional in contrast to her previous disparaging remarks against him in a court appearance. The 1960's began the reemergence of studying Garvey, a time when it became fashionable among Black activists to show appreciation for the Black nationalist leader. "Black Power" had become a popular demand a year earlier and the former Mrs. Garvey showed that she surely understood his role in calling upon Africans all over the world to assert their power. And the "Like It Is" program, along with an album she had made previous to the broadcast, helped to reconnect her to the Garvey movement. But there was no confusion among most Garveyites who was their former president-general's widow and one of the UNIA's most faithful and activist member: It was Amy Jacques Garvey, his second wife. Incidently, it was this same historian, Barbara Bair, who told the story of Amy Ashwood and her struggle with George Tyler, the disgruntled Garvey member who tried to assassinate the UNIA/ACL leader over an alleged $25 debt. Although shot twice by Tyler (described as "insane" by author Edmund David Cronon), a bleeding Garvey chased Tyler through the streets of Harlem and into the hands of the police. In the documentary, Prof. Bair provides an embellished account of Amy Ashwood's encounter but does not deal with what happened to Tyler when he was arrested and taken to the nearby Harlem police station. Tyler, whom Garvey said had been sent by Assistant District Attorney Edwin P. Kilroe to assassinate him, "supposedly jumped to his death from out of a cell window while awaiting trial", according to Dr. Martin in his Race First, the book that replaced Edmund David Cronon's 1955 Black Moses - The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association as the definitive work on the UNIA-ACL leader. Garvey's name was raised from relative obscurity to a newly restored prominence during the 1960's due to the consistent work of Carlos Cooks, the Dominican-born administrator of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM) and former member of the UNIA/ ACL Juvenile Division, who became the youngest officer to be knighted in the Universal African Legion and leader of the Advanced Division of the UNIA/ACL. Within a year after Garvey's death on June 10, 1940, Cooks founded the ANPM on June 23, 1941 (his 28th birthday), and initiated a struggle to retrieve his mentor's name from out of the axiomatic "dustbin of history" where his enemies had tried to place him. In this regard, most of the Garvey conceived symbols and his substantive philosophical concepts were resurrected largley to the work of Mr. Cooks, regarded as the "Chief" of African nationalist leaders and Harlem street-speakers. Whether we talk about the popularizing of the red, black and green colors of the UNIA (renamed the "liberation flag" by young Black activists in the `60's), honored his mentor Marcus Garvey with an annual Garvey-like parade (although on a much more scaled down dimension) on Mr. Garvey's mentor's birthday each August 17th, and maintained his own ANPM African nationalist legion, the name of Carlos Cooks stands above all others. Mr. Cooks initiated the concept of "Buy Black" and subsequent campaigns designed to make African communities more economically viable. He held a convention in 1959 to replace the word "Negro" with that of African as the official universal appellation for Black people everywhere, etc., and encouraged Black people to stop trying to emulate every other racial or ethnic group and see the natural beauty of themselves through his annual "Miss Standard of Beauty Contests" held each "Garvey Day." As a matter of fact, the basic concept of the African Jazz-Art Society & Studio's (AJASS) "Naturally" series of "Black is Beautiful" programs, which initiated the African consciousness movement of the 1960's, was derived from the Miss Natural Standard of Beauty pageant where each contestant was obligated to wearing their hair in its natural state. In effect, it was Mr. Cooks who essentially restored Garvey's "African fundamentalism" as the basic ideological, political, cultural and social order for Black nationalists to live by. The most evident omission in the PBS-Stanley Nelson production is failing to establish their stated claim: They failed to show the evidence of seriously "looking for Garvey in the worldwind." That statement issued by Garvey asked his folowers to look for his presence in all manner of phenomena that would follow in his demise which gave credence to his ideas and helped to manifest his prophetic vision. By abbreviating the biographer's mission to tell a whole story, from beginning to the end of one's life - even beyond their final passing and the continuation of their work, the producers missed a splendid opportunity to making this project indeed an definitive work. The inclusion of controversial and suspicious material into the production was not substantial enough to negate what Garvey was able to achieve in his lifetime. But to have polluted the documentary by inserting material to attempts to denigrate Garvey with historical misinformation, was shameful. Given so much airtime to a host of "historians" whose knowledge of Garvey is rudimentary at most and therefore irrelevant to an honest appraisal of the greatest influence in African international liberation in the 20th century. It is disappointing that such errors were made because it prevents many concerned Garveyites and neo-Garveyites to give the production its total support rather than that of only qualified constructive criticism. But the program is still worth viewing, especially if you have alternative research as a program guide. This would be helpful in order to understand why some of us feel that PBS's attempt to "balance" the program actually was a failed attempt to try rein in Garvey's almost supernatural accomplishments and bring them down to mere human proportions. The late El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, more popularly known as Malcolm X, understood this. Paying his respect to Mr. Garvey during a trip to Jamaica in 1964, a year before his own assassination, Malcolm reminded those assembled that: "Every time you see another nation on the African continent become independent, you know that Marcus Garvey is alive...It was Marcus Garvey's philosophy of Pan-Africanism that initiated the entire freedom movement, which brought about the independence of African nations. And had it not been for Marcus Garvey, and the foundations laid by him, you would find no independent nations in the Caribbean today. All the freedom movements are that are taking place right here in America were initiated by the work and teachings of Marcus Garvey. The entire Black Muslim philosophy here in America is feeding upon the seeds that were planted by Marcus Garvey." Luckily, Malcolm understood the impact of Garvey's whirlwind. While we can't say the same of PBS and Stanley Nelson, they did kick up a storm. But they could not hold Garvey down. No amount of attempts at character assassination can. There is no force that can. He is still all around us. "Look for me in the whirlwind and the song of the storm", he admonished us. Claude Barnes, the Garveyite elder who closed out the documentary, understood what his leader meant. If you carefully scrutinize the elements swirling around you, such as the militant demands for "Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad", "Black Power"; the calls to reclaim Africa's resources for the broad masses of African people, as well as reclaiming the legacy of our African history, Black youth and control of African communities; and show respect for Black women - the mothers, daughters and sisters of Africa; you will also see that Garvey is indeed in these whirlwind of events. It's a shame that the PBS only felt the breeze but missed the force driving the whirlwind. Copyright (c) 2001 Elombe Brath. All Rights Reserved. [IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this list are solely those of the authors and/or publications, and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC). 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