Marcus Garvey
The greatest weapon used against the Negro is DISORGANIZATION.
If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you have started.
At no time within the last five hundred years can one point to a single instance of the Negro as a race of haters.
The Negro has loved even under severest punishment. In slavery the Negro loved his master, he safe-guarded his home even when he further planned to enslave him. We are not a race of Haters, but Lovers of humanity’s Cause.
Point me to a weak nation and I will show you a people oppressed, abused, taken advantage of by others.
Show me a weak race and I will show you a people reduced to serfdom, peonage and slavery.
Show me a well organized nation, and I will show you a people and a nation respected by the world.
Let us prepare TODAY. For the TOMORROWS in the lives of the nations will be so eventful that Negroes everywhere will be called upon to play their part in the survival of the fittest human group.
To be free from temptation of other people’s property is to reflect the HONESTY of our own souls. There are but few really honest people, in that between the thought and the deed we make ourselves dishonest. The fellow who steals, acts dishonestly. We can steal in thought as well as in deed, therefore to be honest is a virtue that but few indulge. To be honest is to be satisfied, having all, wanting nothing. If you find yourself in such a state then you are honest, if not the temptation of your soul is bound to make you dishonest. This applies to the king and the peasant alike.
Peoples everywhere are traveling toward industrial opportunities and greater political freedom. As a race oppressed, it is for us to prepare ourselves that at any time the great change in industrial freedom and political liberty comes about, we may be able to enter into the new era as partakers of the joys to be inherited.
So many of us find excuses to get out of the Negro Race, because we are led to believe that the race is unworthy—that it has not accomplished anything. Cowards that we are! It is we who are unworthy, because we are not contributing to the uplift and up-building of this noble race.
The masses make the nation and the race. If the masses are illiterate, that is the judgment passed on the race by those who are critical of its existence.
The political readjustment of the world means that those who are not sufficiently able, not sufficiently prepared, will be at the mercy of the organized classes for another one or two hundred years.
HISTORY is the land-mark by which we are directed into the true course of life.
Paper 18.95
