Marcus Garvey: demagogue or messiah?

LSE Arts ‘Revolution Time’ public lecture

Marcus Garvey: master orator, Leninist, ‘black Moses’, flamboyant hat-wearer, poet, naked propagandist, romantic, visionary. At one time, in the first half of the twentieth century, he was the most famous black man in the world. By May 1940, he was impoverished and dying in London, accused of failure and, in his failed business adventures and dealings with the Ku Klux Klan, inexcusable action. In Colin Grant’s new biography of a forgotten legend, we are reminded that, to Garvey’s admirers, there was God and there was Garvey.

Colin Grant is the son of Jamaican parents who came to Britain in the late 1950s. He grew up in Luton and spent five years studying medicine at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel before turning to the stage. He has written and produced numerous plays including The Clinic, based on the lives of the photojournalists, Don McCullin and Tim Page. He joined the BBC in 1989 and worked as a script editor and producer of arts programmes on BBC World Service before joining the BBC radio Science Unit. He lives in Brighton.

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