The Most Influential Person of the 20^th Century

By Crispin Sartwell

For more information on the SIC scale, and to vote for a most influential person of the 20^th century, and give some reasons, visit

I'm not too much help homeworkwise to my ninth grader Hayes, being mathematically inept. But occasionally I like to have a crack at a high school essay.

Recently, Hayes brought home a real chestnut: "Who was the most influential person of the twentieth century?" It is never too early for the historical assessment of centuries, and yet the choice was difficult.

One of the most popular answers among Susquehannock High freshmen, according to Hayes, was "George W. Bush." Er.

Hayes himself said Hitler. That's plausible, but it's a trifle depressing. And Hitler's "influence," though great, was spasmodic; he has, thank heavens, few explicit advocates today.

A swarm of candidates buzzed in my ears: Einstein, Lenin, Mao, FDR, Picasso, Betty Friedan, Gandhi, James Joyce. I toyed with Hemingway, Warhol, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Bob Marley, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, Churchill, Ho Chih Minh, Zapata, Muhammed Ali, Michael Jordan, Kemal Ataturk, Ronald Reagan, Gorby, John Maynard Keynes, H.L. Mencken, Henry Ford, Golda Meier, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Perhaps a fictional character would be a good way to understand the twentieth century: Stephen Daedelus? Bugs Bunny? "I"? James Bond? Jorge Luis Borges? Hawkeye Pierce? Harry Potter? Gatsby? Portnoy?

Surely the century just past was also the century of celebrity: Mae West? Groucho? Sinatra? Selena? Richard Pryor? Julia Roberts?

Through exhaustive analysis of all the world's major databases, employing the triple-entry statistical methods I developed despite Hayes, who kept saying I was multiplying fractions "wrong" (what does "wrong" mean, anyway?), I have proven beyond quibbling that the most influential person of the twentieth century is Marcus Garvey, who scores a 6.218 out of a possible 6.373 on the Sartwell Influence Calculation (SIC) scale.

It turns out that W.E.B. DuBois's was right that "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."

Born in St Ann's Bay, Jamaica in 1887, Garvey was an early Pan-Africanist and Black Nationalist, and the most inspiring leader of those movements at least until Malcolm X. His person and organizations uplifted tens of millions of black folks all over the world. Indeed, his influence has been pervasively as from his native Jamaica, to Central America, where he spent much of his youth, to the United States and the rest of the African diaspora, and to Africa itself. He invented the black, red, and green colors of black nationalism, which fly all over the world.

Garvey was credited as a decisive influence by diverse African liberation leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

In the United States, Garvey's version of black pride reached a much larger audience than that of DuBois, or even Booker T. Washington. Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, from its heyday in the 1920s, remains to this day probably the largest black organization that has ever existed. The parents of Malcolm X (who in turn converted Cassius Clay to Islam) were followers, and Malcolm's approach was, as he acknowledged, extremely close to Garvey's. Through Malcolm, Garvey gave rise to the radical wing of the American civil rights movements, including such figures as the Black Panthers.

Garvey has, indeed, come to be considered something of a messiah, and has directly affected such religious movements as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. He is the pre-eminent prophet of Rastafarianism, a religion that began in Jamaica in the 1930s, and which has spread all over the world, from Africa to the Indian reservations of the American southwest. Rastafarianism is perhaps the twentieth century's most interesting and influential new religion.

Its most famous follower, of course, was Bob Marley, who sang about Garvey and became perhaps the first third-world superstar. With a message of "one love,"Marley has been as influential as any musician of the twentieth century on world music. Roots reggae is a dominant style of music in Africa, in Europe, and in the U.S.

Now it's true that Garvey was a bit of a pompous windbag. And it's true that his endeavors were not always managed with the efficiency one could desire, though one should also say that his imprisonment on fraud charges was primarily a case of government harassment. He died, neglected, in 1940, but his had been an inspirational life.

And though it might seem that Garvey was primarily an inspiration to people of African descent, that is no mean feat.12 million or so black Africans were moved by the slave trade to the Western hemisphere. 700 million people or so live in sub-Saharan Africa today. There are about 33 million people of African descent in the US, and perhaps 150 million in Latin America.

In one way or another, Garvey's life has affected all of theirs, and through them all of us as well, because Garvey's life transformed world race relations.