Marcus Garvey gave audience all stick, no carrot

“At the [1923] state fair in Raleigh, North Carolina, [“Back-to-Africa” leader Marcus Garvey]  meditated on a favorite theme: Negro lassitude….. Garvey sought to inspire by berating the black audience for its laziness. ‘If I waited for Negroes to convey me from New York to Raleigh,’ he lamented, ‘I would be walking for six months.’ Curiously, reported the Greensboro Daily News, even as Garvey ‘took the hide off his hearers…they cheered.’ ”

— From “Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey” by Colin Grant (2008)


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