Professor Rupert Lewis, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, was presented with the 2017 Marcus Garvey Lifetime Achievement Award at the Marcus Garvey Rootz Extravaganza on August 17.
The ceremony took place at Lauderdale Lakes Cultural and Educational Center in Lauderdale Lakes.
Lewis was recognized for “his longstanding contributions to the literary scholarship about Marcus Garvey, Jamaica’s first National Hero.”
Written extensively on Garvey
Lewis, a Jamaican, is based at the UWI’s Mona campus in Kingston. He has written extensively on Garvey, including the book Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion.
He is chairman of the Friends of Liberty Hall, a Kingston base that served as Garvey’s headquarters. Lewis was also main speaker at the event.
Patron of the event was Jamaican Consul General in Miami, Franz Hall, who represented the Jamaican government.
Award Recipients
After a montage featuring over 30 previous Rootz Extravaganza awardees, recipients of the 2017 Marcus Garvey Community Service Award were announced. They are clinical social worker Keachia Bowers; community activists Jynsen Henry and Hope Gary; and retired nurse manager Carol Gordon.
There was an emotional screening of the film 100 Years of Racial Lynching, which graphically illustrated lynchings, burnings, bombings and other forms of racial in justice against blacks in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean.
Entertainment was provided by vocalist Kristine Alicia, veteran guitarist Eugene Grey, soloist Revelation and Drumming Fingers, a children’s drum and dance troupe.
An annual event, Rootz Extravaganza celebrates the birth of Garvey who was born on August 17, 1887, in Jamaica’s rural St. Ann parish.
A leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York during the 1920s, he was imprisoned by the US government for mail fraud in 1923. Deported to Jamaica four years later, he died in London in 1940. He was made a National Hero in 1964.
