Department of History

Visionary yet enigmatic, brilliant yet manipulative, Marcus Garvey is one of the most controversial figures in American history. Both a powerful orator and a pompous autocrat, Garvey inspired the loyalty of millions of African Americans while infuriating many black leaders. He was a strong advocate of black self-help, yet was willing to collaborate with the Ku Klux Klan. And he inspired African Americans to support his economic enterprises, then lost their hard-earned money through mismanagement. Marcus Garvey: Look For Me In The Whirlwind uses a wealth of archival film, photographs and documents to uncover the story of this Jamaican immigrant who between 1916 and 1921 built the largest black mass movement in world history. It explores Garvey's dramatic successes and failures before his fall into obscurity. Among the film's most powerful sequences are interviews with people who witnesses the Garvey movement first hand more than 80 years ago. These interviews communicate the appeal of Garvey's revolutionary ideas to a generation of African Americans, and reveal how he invested hundreds of thousands of black men and women with a newfound sense of pride.