The book, Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey takes the reader the early life of the African mental emancipator.
Born in Jamaica, Garvey learns at an early age the virtues of self-reliance, he moves to USA where he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which he uses to show people of color world over that the Black man, a demonized person in the social construct of the day (it still persists to this day), can.
The author Colin Grant attempts to be very balanced in the book. For me, for the most part, the book shows that Garvey was betrayed by his own people, Africans. However, the book also balances that some of Garvey’s shortcoming was of his own making.
Colin Grant writing is catchy, and superb english.
The book is an introduction to the life of Garvey for me. I only started to know about the other black emancipator through reggae music and wondered why he was not as famous as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, at least in terms of being spoken of each passing year.
Garvey is no doubt as per the book, the greatest black man, the most famous one of the 20th century.
By sidelining him in current discourses, the forces of deceit as they are don’t want you to know about a man who challenged the status quo at a time it was very dangerous to do so.
My low-down is that at 51 years old, Garvey would clash with a man he had prophesied about, HIM Haile Selassie.
The book touches on some African leaders such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Ralph Bunch, and also has a mention of Malcolm X’s father Earl Little.
Garvey, the Provisional President of Africa and the leader of over 400 million negros worldwide died lonely and friendless on June 10th 1940. He was 52 years old.
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