| Main Performers | Hon. Marcus Garvey,
Hon. E B Knox,
Dr. Charles Garnett -speakers,
Blue and Blain - performers,
Ethyl Oughton Clarke - vocal |
| Secondary Performers | Reginald Foresythe - piano,
Edgar Pito - organ |
| Set List | Opening Remarks (E B Knox)
Overture: 'Masaniello', Auber (Meny's Band),
'From Greenland's Icy Mountains',
March: 'Carry On', Winson (Meny's Band),
'Caro Nome' from Rigoletto, Verdi (Ethyl Oughton Clarke),
'Shepherd, Thy Demeanour Vary', T Brown (Ethyl Oughton Clarke),
'Cradle Song', Macfayden (Ethyl Oughton Clarke),
Spirituals:
'Swing Along', W M Cook (Blue and Blain),
'Good News' (Blue and Blain),
'The Gospel Train' (Blue and Blain),
'Keep Cool', M Garvey (Blue and Blain),
Address (Marcus Garvey),
Entracte: 'Bells Across The Meadow', Ketelbey (Meny's Band),
'The Answer', H Terry (Ethyl Oughton Clarke),
'Swiss Echo Song', C Eckert (Ethyl Oughton Clarke),
'I Hear You Calling Me', Marshall (Ethyl Oughton Clarke),
'Going Home', A Dvorak (Ethyl Oughton Clarke),
Sketch: 'By The Swanee River', Middleton (Meny's Band),
'God Save the King' (The National Anthem) (Meny's Band),
Closing Remarks (Dr Charles Garnett) |
| Performance Notes | The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) is a black nationalist fraternal organization founded by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the United States, and Amy Ashwood Garvey. The organization was founded to work for the advancement of people of African ancestry around the world. Its motto is "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!" and its slogan is "Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad!" The Pan-African organization enjoyed its greatest strength in the 1920s, and was influential prior to Garvey's deportation to Jamaica in 1927. After that its prestige and influence declined, but it had a strong influence on decolonisation, African-American history and development.
"The importance of the Hon. Marcus Garvey's visit to Europe cannot be overestimated....The Universal Negro Improvement Association has many powerful friends throughout Europe who see in the program of Marcus Garvey the only guarantee of future world happiness....
On the sixth of June from the platform of the Royal Albert Hall, London, the best loved and best hated Negro in the world will speak to the English people, as only he can speak, in [sic] behalf of four million Negroes, and the world will be listening. An important chapter in Negro history is being written. And whether the chapters to follow shall chronicle the peaceful pursuit of happiness and a race's desire, or a troublous, critical crusade, is, perhaps, now being determined."
(Negro World, 19 May 1928)
Excerpts from his speech at the Royal Albert Hall:-
'As I have said, for 250 years we struggled in America under the burden and the rigours of slavery. We were brutalized; we were maimed; we were killed; we were ravaged in every way. Then in America a man sprang up by the name of Abraham Lincoln, and 1865 he liberated the American Negro slaves. A woman by the name of Victoria the Good, the Queen of England, in 1838 emancipated the West Indian Negroes. Tonight we have on the platform here native sons of Africa, descendants of the slaves in the western world, Negroes of America and Negroes from the West Indies. We have come to tell you how we feel about it and what we want done at the present time to prevent a recurrence of what happened to us hundreds of years ago.
we also demand that you allow the black race to remain as it is. In the Colonies you have treated us unfairly; you went to Africa and you have given us there a mongrel population; in America also you have given us a mongrel population-nearly 4,000,000 people-and so we are aggrieved socially'.
"At Versailles when the Peace Treaty was to be signed you called everybody in and you distributed the spoils of war to everybody. You gave to the Jew, Palestine, you gave the Egyptians a larger modicum of Self-government; you gave the Irish Home Rule Government and Dominion status: you gave the Poles a new Government of their own. But what did you give to the negro? ( a voice: "Nothing"). What did you give to the negro? You threw his dead body on the streets of Cardiff, smashed the coffin and kicked the corpse about and made a football of it after he came back from the war. In America 20,000 boys had hardly taken off their uniforms when on parading in the streets, one of them was lynched in the very uniform of the United States which they had bled on the battlefields in France and Flanders. Is that a juts reward for service so generously given?"
"Do you not know that we have gladly borne your burdens for hundreds of years. The cotton mills of Lancashire, the great shipping port of Liverpool, tell the tale of what we have done as black men for the British Empire. The cotton that you consume and use it keeping your mills going has for centuries come from the Southern States of America; it is the product of negro labour. Upon that cotton your industry has prospered and you have been able to build the great British Empire of today. (Hear, hear) Have you no gratitude for a people who have helped with all God gives them in fellowship and in good grace to others? We are not before you tonight asking you to pay us for 300 years of labour in slavery. No! We are only asking you now for common justice." |
| Related Archival Material | Programme (RAHE/1/1928/51),
Pamphlet (RAHE/8/2/5a) |