Reading Tony Martin Matters
by Rhone Fraser

In my interview with Paul Coates about his 2024 Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, he made the point that the works of Tony Martin should be read.

When I read the editorial in the Jewish Forward criticizing the Foundation’s Award to Coates because of his choosing to print The Jewish Onslaught by Tony Martin, I knew I had to interview him. Coates owns Black Classic Press whose objective is to sell out-of-print books like Martin’s 1991 The Jewish Onslaught. I knew that then in this criticism, Paul Coates could not have received a better endorsement for this Award from the Foundation.

In our interview he said that the life and work of Tony Martin needs to be examined. He called The Jewish Onslaught a “great memoir,” and said when efforts emerge “to sanction” this book, “you’re taking away a voice.” He faced the criticism he did all because he chose to sell this book on his website. However I know some of Coates’s best sales come from his in person sales including Howard’s Homecoming.

As the author of the edited collection of the book released To A More Positive Purpose: Critical Responses to the Scholarship of Tony Martin, I can provide even more reasons why each of Tony Martin’s books should be read. His 1976 Race First should be read because it is the most comprehensive history of Marcus Garvey because it details his detractors like none other; his 1983 Marcus Garvey, Hero should be read because it is the first biography intended for a high school or secondary school audience; his 1983 Literary Garveyism should be read because it is the first literary analysis of fictional works and reviews published in the Negro World newspaper; his 1983 The Poetical Works of Marcus Garvey is the first collection of Garvey’s poetry; his 1983 two volume series In Nobody’s Backyard must be read because it is the only published collection to narrate the Grenadian revolution in the context of its newspaper; his 1991 edited collection African Fundamentalism should be read because it is the most comprehensive collection of articles from Garvey’s Negro World newspaper; his 1993 Pan African Connection is the first text to put Garvey in theoretical context with his contemporaries like C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon; his 2007 Amy Ashwood Garvey should be read because it the first biography of Garvey’s first wife that details her own journey to her ancestral homeland in Ghana; his 2012 Caribbean History must be read because it provides a comprehensive history of the maroon wars against foreign colonizers.

While the Jamaica Observer reports of efforts to convince the Biden administration to exonerate Marcus Garvey for the mail fraud charge against him brought forth by the U.S. government in 1925, other Jamaicans including a historian in Roy T. and Alison Anderson’s 2022 film African Fundamentalism which I reviewed, disagree with that effort to exonerate Garvey. This historian said that the conviction and deportation of Garvey should stand as a monument to current and future generations to demonstrate what Garvey was able to accomplish despite the trumped-up charge.

Tony Martin’s Marcus Garvey Library makes that clear and my book on Tony Martin provides a necessary twenty first century exploration into what both Martin and Marcus Garvey acccomplished then, and why its relevant today.