Frequently Asked Questions

We teach English Language Arts through Black history, Black writers, and the life and lessons of Marcus Garvey.

A student in our lessons reads closely, weighs evidence, and writes. The texts are the speeches, letters and lives of Black heroes. Marcus Garvey is the center of the work, and his life and philosophy give it a method: read closely, think independently, judge evidence, imagine boldly, build with purpose.

The Garvey Classroom prepares Black children for the AI era.

We publish books, lesson plans, courses and videos for students, families, educators and schools. See questions 35 and 36 for how the English and the history fit together.

Because he left behind instruction, not only argument.

In September 1937, three years before he died, Garvey gathered a small group of his organizers in Toronto and taught them for most of that month. Each student wrote out the lessons by hand: twenty-two of them, which he called the Course of African Philosophy.

He built newspapers in New York, Kingston and London, a shipping line, a factories corporation, a political party and a school. He was surveilled, prosecuted, imprisoned and deported. He was posthumously pardoned on 19 January 2025.

Most children never meet him. That is the problem this exists to solve.

We teach him as a thinker.

We study Marcus Garvey as someone whose teachings, actions, judgments, institutions, achievements, contradictions and failures deserve serious examination. Garvey is not an object of reverence here, and studying him does not require agreeing with everything he taught.

An icon cannot be questioned. A thinker can.

Students, parents, educators, schools, homeschool families, after-school programs and community organizations. Our lesson plans run from kindergarten through grade 12. Most of our classroom material is built for middle school.

Each book carries its own range, because a coloring book and a biography are not for the same child:

• The Marcus Garvey Coloring BookAges 5 to 10
• My Name Is MarcusAges 8 to 12
• Marcus and the AmazonsAges 9 to 13
• Unstoppable YouAges 10 to 17
• The Story of Marcus GarveyAges 8 to 14
• Becoming Marcus, for teachersGrades 7 to 9
• The Story of Marcus Garvey lesson plansGrades 6 to 8

Apart from its introduction, the book is written at approximately a sixth-to-seventh-grade reading level.

That is a separate fact from the age range, and the two are worth holding apart. The age range says who the book is for. The reading level says how hard the prose is. A younger child at the bottom of the range will get more from it read aloud, with someone to talk to about it. A fourteen-year-old will read it alone in an afternoon.

We would rather tell you both numbers than average them into one that is true of nobody.

The work is built for Black children first, deliberately. The Story of Marcus Garvey is not a multicultural book. It is a book for Black children.

That is about who the work centers, not who may use it. Any student, family or teacher who wants a historically serious account of Marcus Garvey will find one here.

No. We do not ask children to carry despair, perform pain, or learn hatred. We teach clarity.

The history contains a shooting, a trial, a prison and a deportation, and the book does not hide them. It also gives a child somewhere to put what they have read: questions at the end of every chapter, and activities that ask them to do something rather than recite something.

A child who can name a false limit is harder to miseducate.

The Power of the Mind and the Imagination.The Importance of Purpose.The Strength of Perseverance.

Every book, lesson and course flows from them. Each is anchored in Garvey’s own words. Reading all three together as one framework is our contribution.

No.

The research on grit has two halves. The half that holds up is sustained effort. The half that does not is staying interested in the same thing for years. Garvey would have scored high on the first and low on the second, because he kept changing what he was doing and never changed what he was aiming at.

We also do not use perseverance to explain away conditions a system created. We begin with the system, and perseverance comes after that, never instead of it.

The Garvey Method is The Garvey Classroom’s framework, developed through close study of recurring practices in Marcus Garvey’s teachings and life.

Seven movements, each a verb a student performs:

1. Observe
2. Question
3. Connect
4. Imagine
5. Judge
6. Build
7. Reflect

Reflection may lead back to renewed observation, and the work begins again.

It is not the same thing as the Three Principles. The principles are what we teach. The method is how a student works.

No, and neither did we, exactly.

Garvey ran a school and wrote twenty-two lessons. Inside them are instructions about how a mind should work, scattered through subjects named Intelligence, Character, The Universe and Propaganda. “Read with observation. Never read carelessly and recklessly.” “Observe well and see what mankind needs most in addition to what they have, and try to bring it to them.”

He observed, questioned, connected, imagined, judged, built and reflected. Those practices are his.

What we did was identify, select, organize and make teachable the recurring practices found across his writings, instruction, biography and institution-building. His course is organized by subject. Ours is organized by operation. A subject is something you study. A verb is something a child does on Tuesday.

The practices are Garvey’s. The method is our reading of them.

No. We study Garvey critically and we do not adopt every Garvey teaching.

He taught twenty-two lessons. Our framework draws on seven recurring practices. We selected, and we say so rather than implying we transcribed him.

Awakening, Confrontation, Reorientation, Continuity, Purpose, Discipline, Organization, and Individual Genius and Mental Sovereignty.

They come from the developmental-ladder tradition of Joseph Campbell and Carol Pearson, which Geoffrey Philp taught for years at Miami Dade College, adapted into a framework for collective liberation closer to Paulo Freire than to Campbell.

Three of the eight have no counterpart in those models. Continuity asks whose work you are continuing, which a Western developmental model does not know how to ask. Discipline gives repetition its own place. Organization treats building something that survives you as a stage of becoming a person.

They are disciplines, not a staircase. Nobody climbs them in order, and Garvey did not.

No. The book has six chronological chapters and back matter. The Eight Stages belong to our courses and lessons.

Every Garvey quotation we publish traces to a primary source we hold and have read: The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Message to the People, The Black Man magazine, and volumes of The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers edited by Robert A. Hill.

We log each quotation with its source and location. Anything we cannot verify is flagged and held, not published.

Garvey is one of the most misquoted figures of the twentieth century. The single most widely circulated line attributed to him, the one about history and roots that appears on posters, murals and programme covers everywhere, is not his. It belongs to Charles C. Seifert. We treat that as settled, and we do not reprint the line, because setting those words beside his name one more time is how the mistake survives.

Popularity is not provenance.

A quotation appearing on a thousand posters is evidence about the posters.

Yes, and we correct it.

An earlier printing of one of our books carried a quotation a fellow Garveyite pointed out was not Garvey’s. Geoffrey reprinted the book and gave the old stock away rather than sell it.

More recently, checking our own materials against the sources showed that a line we had printed as “created genius” reads “creative genius” in Garvey’s 1925 editorial “African Fundamentalism.” We corrected it.

We also keep open flags on our own work: quotations in print we have not been able to verify, and a speech date supported by publication but not by a dated record of delivery. We would rather publish an open question than a confident error.

Because an answer is not evidence.

A machine can produce a confident answer in seconds. A student still has to ask where it came from, what evidence supports it, what may be missing, and whether the source deserves trust. That is the work we teach.

We are not claiming Garvey predicted anything. His first lesson in 1937 teaches a reader to know who wrote a thing, know whose interest it serves, and refuse to swallow it whole. That instruction was always about interested authorship, so it moves to a machine-generated answer without a word changed.

No, and we will not manufacture any.

There is no efficacy study, no pilot data and no outcome claim in our materials. What we can show you is what the lessons are, what standards they address, and what a student is asked to do. Judge it on that.

Books, in five foundations. The Marcus Garvey Coloring Book and Amy’s Christmas Gift for the youngest readers. My Name Is Marcus and Marcus and the Amazons. Unstoppable You: 50 Quotes from Marcus Garvey to Inspire Greatness. The Power of the Mind, Purpose, and Perseverance: A Marcus Garvey Reader. And The Story of Marcus Garvey, published 17 August 2026, Garvey’s birthday.

Lesson plans on Teachers Pay Teachers, from kindergarten through grade 12, teaching English Language Arts through Black history, Black writers, and the life and lessons of Marcus Garvey.

Courses. The Story of Marcus Garvey is open now, a paid self-paced course of six chapters and thirty-nine lessons, with the Parent and Homeschool Companion for the adult. See the course page. The Garvey Blueprint: Awakening to Mental Sovereignty is still in preparation and we will announce the day it opens.

For teachers, Becoming Marcus: Awakening to the Power of the Mind, grades 7 to 9, aligned to NYS Next Generation ELA Standards, Bloom’s Taxonomy and CASEL.

Parents: with the book for your child’s age, and read a chapter together. Then ask them what they would build.

Teachers: with our free lesson, Marcus Garvey and the Power of the Mind, on Teachers Pay Teachers, to see how a lesson is built. Then the lesson plans page.

Anyone else: with The Story of Marcus Garvey.

Books are available through Amazon and Blue Banyan Books. Lesson plans are on Teachers Pay Teachers. Courses are reached from their own pages on this site.

The Story of Marcus Garvey is out now on Amazon, $12.99 paperback.

Join the mailing list for new books, lessons and resources. There are separate lists for families and for educators.

If you find an error in anything we publish, tell us. We correct our own materials in public, and the record of those corrections is part of how we ask to be trusted.

Treat it as a lens, not a unit. When you teach the American Revolution, teach Crispus Attucks and the Black loyalists. When you teach the Industrial Revolution, teach Black inventors.

Pair it with what you already teach: theme, evidence and argument can all be taught through a Black text. That is how our lesson library is built, with lessons from kindergarten through grade 12, so Black history is part of the curriculum and not a month on the calendar.

Start with speeches and newspapers, because they are made for close reading. Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, the 1920 Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, and Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors pamphlet (public domain) all work.

For younger students, use short excerpts with the vocabulary explained rather than full texts. Our Marcus Garvey Speech Analysis lesson (grades 6 to 10) is a one-day close reading.

Teach the history accurately and let the sources do the talking. Your job is facilitation, not confession. Use primary sources so students hear Black voices directly and not filtered through you.

Prepare for the hard parts before the lesson. The Parent and Homeschool Companion that comes with our course is built for this: it gives you questions to ask and tells you when pausing is the right call. And listen more than you explain when students react.

Marcus Garvey (1887 to 1940) was a Jamaican-born organizer who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest Pan-African movement of the twentieth century. By the early 1920s it had about 1,000 branches in more than 40 countries. He also built the Negro World newspaper and the Black Star Line shipping company.

Malcolm X credited him with the rise of African independence. Most students meet him rarely or never, because he remains largely absent from school curricula.

Born 17 August 1887 in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Held the first meeting of the UNIA in Kingston on 20 July 1914, and settled in Harlem in 1916. Built the Negro World newspaper and the Black Star Line.

Convicted of mail fraud in a highly contested trial in 1923, sentenced to five years, and deported in 1927 when President Coolidge commuted his sentence. Died in London in 1940. Pardoned posthumously on 19 January 2025.

He said in a speech at Sydney, Nova Scotia, about 1 October 1937, that “none but ourselves can free the mind” (printed in The Black Man, Vol. III, No. 10, July 1938, p. 10).

His teaching returned again and again to the power of the mind, the importance of purpose, and the strength of perseverance. Practically, that meant education and self-knowledge first, Black-owned business (he founded the Negro Factories Corporation), pride in African heritage, and organized collective action.

Reading those three together as one framework is our own contribution, not something Garvey wrote in that form.

He was controversial. In January 1923, eight Black leaders, including two senior NAACP officers, petitioned the Attorney General to look into him. Students should wrestle with that honestly.

Yes, and not only for Black children. Every student benefits from a complete American story. Primary sources are also some of the best close-reading material there is, because the stakes are clear to a twelve-year-old.

We do not have an efficacy study or outcome data, and we will not claim results we cannot show. What we can show is what each lesson is, what standards it addresses, and what a student is asked to do.

Start with curiosity, not accusation: “I’d love to see more Black history woven into the year. Are there places in the current curriculum where that could fit?” Bring one concrete resource, not a complaint. A single lesson plan persuades more than a reading list.

If the school will not budge, supplement at home. A one-hour lesson plan once a week (ours are written for grades 6 to 8) covers what the classroom misses.

Make it hands-on. Cook a recipe from a Black cookbook while reading about its origins. Map the Great Migration with pushpins. Try quote reflections at dinner: we make 30 printable Garvey Wisdom Cards for this, for grades 3 to 8.

For young kids, read-alouds plus drawing beat worksheets, and several of our K-2 lessons pair a story with drawing and reflection.

Look for three things: primary sources and not just summaries, built-in English skill instruction so history doubles as English class, and support for the adult, because you will hit questions you cannot answer on the fly.

Our flagship, the self-paced course The Story of Marcus Garvey, has six chapters and 39 lessons, and enrollment includes the Parent and Homeschool Companion for the adult. For lighter use, one-hour lesson plans work as drop-ins.

Check every claim against a primary source before you teach it. If you cannot find the quote in Garvey’s own words (or Douglass’s, or Wells’s), do not teach it as fact. Say “historians disagree here” when they do. Children respect honesty more than certainty.

Skip the hero-only version: teach the controversies and the failures, including the collapse of the Black Star Line, alongside the achievements.

At K-5, lead with story and identity, not dates and movements. Read-alouds about young heroes, drawing and reflection activities, and short quotes to memorize all work well. Keep lessons short.

Our Elementary Bundle (K-5) has five lessons built with read-aloud, drawing and reflection, and our Coloring Book Curriculum has 78 scripted A to Z lessons for PreK-2. Both are in the lesson plan catalog.

Both, and the skill leads.

We teach English Language Arts through Black history, Black writers, and the life and lessons of Marcus Garvey. A student reads a speech, a letter or a life closely, finds the evidence, and writes about it. The history is what they read. The skill is what they take to the next text.

Our Arturo Schomburg lesson for grades 6 to 8 shows the pattern. Schomburg is the hero. Citing evidence from a text is the skill.

Because he taught the skills at its core.

The first of his twenty-two lessons in 1937 begins with reading. He told his students to master grammar and to reread “the science of the language” every six months. He told them to read biography, and to make notes of “the striking sentences and paragraphs” in the books they owned. Then he gave an instruction any English teacher would keep: “you must pay close attention to the construction of sentences and paragraphs as you see them in the books you read. Imitate the style.”

His fourth lesson is on elocution, speaking in public. He knew what was at stake: “People judge you by your writing and your speech.”

Those lessons also carry his views on race, and some of them we teach as history, not as instruction. A student can learn how Garvey read and wrote without agreeing with everything he wrote.

Source: Marcus Garvey, Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy, edited by Tony Martin, The Majority Press, 1986, pp. 1–11.

The Black Star Line was the UNIA’s shipping company. It was launched at a meeting in New York on 28 April 1919 and incorporated in Delaware on 27 June 1919. Its first ship, the Yarmouth, sailed as the Frederick Douglass. Its stockholders were Black. It suspended operations in 1922, and the sale of its stock became the ground of the mail fraud case against Garvey.

Garvey said the line was meant to serve people “desirous of going back to Africa as missionaries and as settlers to help develop their country”, and to open trade with Black communities in the West Indies and the Americas. William Ferris, who had worked on the Negro World, wrote later that “Back to Africa” was “only one of Garvey’s ideas”, and the one the white newspapers found easiest to put in a headline.

We teach both: what the ships meant to the people who bought shares, and why the company failed.

He was charged with using the mails to defraud in the sale of Black Star Line stock. His trial opened in New York on 18 May 1923, and on 21 June 1923 he was sentenced to five years. He entered the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in February 1925. His sentence was commuted in November 1927, and on 2 December 1927 he was deported, sailing from New Orleans for Jamaica.

Garvey said the timing was about politics and money. Speaking in London in 1928, he said the President “never did anything until two years afterwards when it was convenient from a political point of view and from a commercial point of view to let me go.”

Yes, sharply and in print. On 25 April 1916, a month after he arrived in New York, Garvey called at the office of The Crisis, the magazine Du Bois edited. Within a few years they were open opponents.

In May 1924 Du Bois wrote in The Crisis that Garvey was “either a lunatic or a traitor”, and attacked his handling of the movement’s money. Garvey answered with an essay, collected in Philosophy and Opinions, titled “W. E. Burghardt Du Bois as a Hater of Dark People”, which accused Du Bois’s NAACP of trying to solve the race problem by assimilation.

Both men’s words are in print. Read them side by side.

No. Marcus Garvey never visited the African continent.

Africa still stood at the center of his political imagination and his Pan-African work. The UNIA, he wrote, had been “advocating the cause of Africa for the Africans”. It sent a commission to Liberia in 1921, and a delegation that sailed in December 1923 to seek land for settlement. In 1917 a New York paper reported that he would “then go to Africa”. He never made the trip.

What he knew of Africa came through reading, correspondence, political relationships, African associates, the reports of those delegations, and the colonial world around him, not through travel of his own. In London in 1913, a year before he founded the UNIA, he published an essay in the African Times and Orient Review.