Marcus Garvey’s Legacy Comes to Washington: History as a Living Archive

History feels different when it is encountered through the objects people once held, the newspapers they read, the places where they gathered and the ideas they left behind. On August 23, FQM Washington, D.C. Correspondent Dr. Bruno Mazali attended The Marcus Garvey Royal Collection, a historical exhibition presented by the Heritage Gallery UNIA-International Museum and Archive in Washington, D.C. The gathering became part of a broader encounter with African American history; one that connected the international legacy of Marcus Garvey with the men and women whose struggle for freedom during the Civil War helped transform the nation.

The exhibition brought together artifacts, documents, photographs, archival materials and editions of The Negro World, the influential newspaper associated with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Rather than presenting Garvey simply as a figure confined to the early 20th century, the collection invited visitors to consider the extraordinary reach of the movement he helped build and the continuing resonance of its ideas surrounding cultural identity, economic independence, historical consciousness and the global African diaspora. Born in Jamaica in 1887, Garvey would become one of the most consequential advocates of Black self-determination and Pan-Africanism of his era, building a movement whose ambitions and influence crossed national borders.

The occasion also opened onto an earlier and fundamental chapter of that history: the service and sacrifice of African Americans during the Civil War. At the African American Civil War Memorial Museum, visitors gathered for a presentation devoted to preserving and interpreting the experiences of the African American men and women whose contributions helped reshape the struggle over slavery, citizenship and freedom in the United States. Dr. Frank Smith, PhD, delivered a presentation that brought those histories into the present, honoring pioneers, freedom fighters and the African Americans whose courage during the Civil War became part of the country’s unfinished journey toward equality.

What made the gathering particularly meaningful was the community that assembled around that history. Attendees traveled from California, Baltimore and Philadelphia, turning the occasion into more than a local museum visit. It became an opportunity to learn collectively, to reflect on histories too often compressed into a few familiar names and dates, and to recognize the human lives behind larger national narratives. In Washington, a city where history is frequently presented through monumental architecture, the experience offered something more intimate: history transmitted through documents, artifacts, testimony and people gathering deliberately to remember.

Seen alongside The Marcus Garvey Royal Collection, that Civil War history also created an intriguing historical continuum. The African American struggle for freedom did not begin with Garvey, nor did it end with emancipation. The Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of Black institutions and newspapers, Garvey’s international movement and later campaigns for civil rights belong to distinct historical periods, yet each raises enduring questions about freedom, citizenship, identity, memory and who is given the authority to tell a people’s story.

For Dr. Mazali, the visit offered FQM an opportunity to approach cultural heritage not as something safely preserved in the past, but as something continuously interpreted and transmitted. The exhibition’s message, “Honoring Our Past. Inspiring Our Future,” captured that idea particularly well. Archives matter because they preserve evidence; museums matter because they give that evidence context. But their greatest significance may emerge when a new generation encounters what has been preserved and begins asking its own questions.

That is ultimately what made the Washington gathering worth noting. The story was not simply about looking backward at Marcus Garvey or the African Americans who fought during the Civil War. It was about understanding the connections between memory and responsibility. The people represented in these collections fought different battles in different eras, but their experiences remind us that history is not sustained by remembrance alone. It survives because people continue to preserve it, examine it, question it and pass it forward.