Where Are The New Leaders ?

For years after the pass­ing of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and oth­er stal­warts of the Civil Rights era many in the African amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty got fat and lazy.
Not in a lit­er­al sense but they grew con­tent believ­ing the strug­gles were over. In the ear­ly Nineties when I first set foot on American soil I said to fam­i­ly mem­bers and friends “Black Americans are squan­der­ing the gains made by the valiant mar­tyrs who had gone on before and they would pay dear­ly for it”.

I was utter­ly stunned at two things in particular .
(1) That Black ‑Americans were open­ly cavort­ing with those who despised them and demo­niz­ing those who have stepped for­ward and offered them­selves as tips on the arrow for social change.
(2) That Black-Americans allowed the very same peo­ple who enslaved, bru­tal­ized, raped and mur­dered their fore-par­ents and abus­es them still, to dic­tate to the them who their lead­ers should be.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were cer­tain­ly no Dr King or Malcolm X , But Dr. King and Malcolm X were not paragons of virtue either. They were mere men who were weak and guilty of their own short-com­ings as well..
So I was lit­er­al­ly stunned that Black peo­ple would open­ly crit­i­cize and demo­nize these two men they way they did and for the most part many of them had no rea­son for doing so beyond that some white man on Television had a prob­lem with either men.

Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey found out just what that felt like long before Malcolm X and Doctor King arrived on the scene . Seeing the plight of the black man in America Garvey fig­ured the best course for the black man was to sep­a­rate him­self from America which invari­ably means going back to Africa.
Garvey through his back to Africa move­ment the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) orga­nized to get blacks back to Africa he did more than talk about it through his move­ment the (UNIA) he start­ed the Black Star Liner ship­ping line between 1919 and 1922.

The ship­ping line was cre­at­ed to facil­i­tate the trans­porta­tion of goods and even­tu­al­ly African Americans through­out the African glob­al econ­o­my. It derived its name from the White Star Line, a line whose suc­cess Garvey felt he could dupli­cate.^[1] Black Star Line became a key part of Garvey’s con­tri­bu­tion to the Back-to-Africa move­ment. It was one among many busi­ness­es which the UNIA orig­i­nat­ed, such as the Universal Printing House, Negro Factories Corporation, and the wide­ly dis­trib­uted and high­ly suc­cess­ful Negro World week­ly newspaper.

The Black Star Line and its suc­ces­sor, the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company, oper­at­ed between 1919 and 1922. It stands today as a major sym­bol for Garvey fol­low­ers and African Americans in search of a way to get back to their home­land. It is not to be con­fused with the Black Star Line, the state ship­ping cor­po­ra­tion of Ghana.wikipedia.

Before Garvey could free the black man J Edgar Hoover placed the brakes on him. It was incon­ceiv­able that a black man should have that much pow­er. It was even more dan­ger­ous for a black man to teach the Negro that he was no one’s doormat.
In 1919, J. Edgar Hoover and the BOI charged Marcus Garvey and three oth­er offi­cers with mail fraud. The pros­e­cu­tion stat­ed that the brochure of the Black Star Line con­tained a pic­ture of a ship that the BSL did not own. The ship pic­tured was the Orion, which in the brochure was renamed the Phyllis Wheatley, and at the time was going to be bought by the BSL, but which they did not yet own.^[7]The fact that the ship was not owned yet by the BSL war­rant­ed mail fraud. “In 1922, Garvey and three oth­er Black Star Line offi­cials were indict­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment for using the mails fraud­u­lent­ly to solic­it stock for the recent­ly defunct steamship line.”^[8] The Jury only con­vict­ed Garvey, not the oth­er three offi­cers, and he was sen­tenced to five years in prison. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidgedeport­ed Garvey back to Jamaica.^{[8]Wikipedia.}

Reports indi­cate Marcus Garvey was angry that some of the very peo­ple he had worked to free from their men­tal shack­les allowed them­selves to be used as pawns to bring him down. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge deport­ed Marcus Garvey back to Jamaica.
It’s time the American Black as well as every black every­where fig­ure out a way to chose their own lead­ers and desist from fol­low­ing those who hate us for the col­or of our skin.