By: Staff Writer
April 5, 2022
A Jamaican filmmaker is daring to tell the full story of Marcus Garvey and what he meant for Black people around the world.
Roy T. Anderson, Jamaican filmmaker living in New Jersey, U.S. and producer of the documentary, “African Redemption: The Life and Legacy of Marcus Garvey,” told Caribbean Magazine Plus about how many details about Garvey’s life was unknown until now.
Mr Anderson, also an accomplished stunt-actor, said: “The main thing that I wanted to accomplish with this film was in some way, I wanted to humanize Garvey. More importantly, I wanted to vindicate the legacy of this man because far too often the way that he’s been presented is as a caricature and if you talk to people, they’ll say he’s a guy who was a con-man and was a shyster on people’s money. I wanted to just set the record straight and this movie is your classic, biographical presentation, starting from his early life in Jamaican to his death in England in 1940.”
African Redemption: The Life and Legacy of Marcus Garvey will also be playing at the Martinique International Film Festival later this month. “We’re also going to be at the Pan African Film and Arts Festival in Los Angeles later this month too,” Mr Anderson said, then it will be distributed by streaming companies to the masses, but which company has not been determined yet.
Garvey proclaimed “black is beautiful” long before it became popular in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement in the United States. He wanted African Americans to see themselves as members of a mighty race, something Mr Anderson pointed out: “That fact of the matter is, Garvey when he stepped onto the stage in Harlem in the 1919 and talked about the Negro, and what he meant about that was the new negro was not someone who is forever and seeing themselves beat down because of the history of slavery and so forth. But that they come from a proud people and they should not hold their head down. They should be proud of who they are.”
Despite being larger than life, Garvey only stood at 5 ft 7 inches and commanding larger audiences than W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph in the civil rights movement. Garvey has influenced Civil Rights icons like Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X and world leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first Prime Minister and President. He even influenced one of Bob Marley’s most classic songs, Redemption Song, with Marley quoting passages from Garvey’s infamous speech in Nova Scotia in 1937. “Among the odds and all he had to deal with, Garvey stood tall and he didn’t allow his physical frame to define who he was. He was larger than life,” said Mr Anderson.
Mr Anderson has produced two other films, “Akwantu: The Journey,” in 2012 and “Queen Nanny: Legendary Maroon Chieftainess,” in 2015. He also says he is of Maroon heritage himself and is proud to share roots with the Maroon people of Jamaica.
Mr Anderson has travelled the world and has lived in Canada for part of his early years before he moved to the United States in 1998 with his wife to continue his stunt-acting career.