The rhetorical persona: Marcus Garvey as black moses

The persona concept of traditional dramaturgy which refers to the masks worn by actors in Greek and Roman theater can assist a rhetorical critic in explaining the persuasive power of speakers who strongly remind their auditors of an archetypal hero. When a speaker's rhetorical self becomes so closely associated with some set of human experiences or ideas that it becomes virtually impossible for an audience to think of one without the other, then that individual stands in a symbolic relationship to those ideas or experiences and may wear the mask of a rhetorical persona. Listeners, in such cases, impute to the speaker the ethos of their archetypal deliverer. The purpose of this essay is to test this concept by applying it to Marcus Garvey, a prototype Moses for Harlem blacks who were fervently awaiting a deliverer. The essay is grounded in the formistic world view of Stephen C. Pepper. The Black Moses Persona is treated as the transcendent form, and the factors of deliverance rhetoric found in Garvey's speeches—election, captivity, and liberation— are the particulars that allow Garvey to participate in the form. The authors argue that it is precisely the Black Moses Persona that explains why Garvey's importance survives him by thirty years, despite the loss of his ideology's influence.