Julius Garvey appeals to youth to retake, reshape world
Published:Wednesday | February 23, 2022 | 4:52 AMChristopher Serju/Senior Gleaner Writer
Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity for Caribbean people to reset and reposition themselves to take advantage of the many opportunities that life offers. This is the challenge posed to the youth by Dr Julius Garvey, son of Jamaican National Hero Marcus Mosiah Garvey.
Julius, who was speaking at Tuesday’s Vice-Chancellor’s Forum on the theme ‘Exonerating Garvey’, hosted by The University of the West Indies, in collaboration with The P.J. Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy and The Centre for Reparation Research, also used the opportunity to challenge young people to support the campaign for the posthumous exoneration of his father.
“You have the opportunity to help to remake our society in the Caribbean, and you have this opportunity to strike a blow and stand up for freedom. If you stand up straight, nobody can ride your back. So we need to get up, stand up, and we need to liberate out minds from mental slavery. We need to redeem that which we were. My father always talked about the redemption of Africa, and Bob Marley has picked up on many of my father’s statements and put them to music which is admirable. ‘Redemption’ really means ‘to repair’ and we need to repair, we need to repossess, and we need to deliver ourselves from bondage, all of that in terms of reclaiming, that is part of redemption.”
PROCESS TO SIGN UP
He then invited them to go the website justiceforgarvey.org or justice4garvey.org and find the link that will take them to the White House, where they will be asked relevant questions, including some personal information, and upon providing this, should be allowed on to the website where they can sign up for the petition to exonerate Marcus Garvey, which requires at least 10,000 signatures to get the attention of US President Joseph Biden.
The liberation struggle, Julius Garvey pointed out, is basically about freedom to renew and to remake the world, and to repair ourselves in terms of our own conception of what the world should be; the world that we deserve to live in; the shared good and flourishing for all to attain equity.
“We need a new reset as we come out of the pandemic, and this is a reset where, as Caribbean people, we repossess who and what we were before we were enslaved and before we were colonised. And it is up to young people to define the dimensions of our freedoms and democracy and the types of society that we want. I know you are going to step up to that particular challenge, and we need to do the best that we can do. So I am asking you to do one simple thing, which is to join us in terms of that petition.”