I believe that Marcus Garvey’s and Booker T. Washington’s strong belief in industry and capitalism is not happenstance. Both are children of hardworking parents, Booker T. Washington was born a slave and went on to work in a salt mine, and Marcus Garvey’s parents were Jamaican intellectuals forced into labor by a poor economy. While they both experienced hard work, they didn’t experience capitalism in the ideal and perfect sense. Their parents were not appreciated equitably for their work and productions as they should have been in the ideal, un-racialized capitalist system. So they wore rose-colored lens regarding the inner machinations of the system, they ignored its constant need to exploit and plunder by espousing a sort of “black exceptionalism” that would always have black people on the better end if they “worked hard.” They were products of a time where the country was just coming into capitalism, the roaring twenties, and enjoying economic boons that they related to capitalism and not to war and the economic devastation of Europe at the time.