The fortieth demand in the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World read: "Resolved, that the anthem 'Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers,' etc., shall be the anthem of the Negro race."

No one who has stood to the singing of one's national anthem on some important or historic occasion, or the anthem of a group or a movements can fail to imagine the emotional power transmitted by hundreds and thousands of people of African descent singing this song. Hearing old Garveyites sing it even today or the Rastafari sing their own adaptation of it is enough to convince one that the anthem has lost none of its power even if the Garveyite movement has. It undoubtedly stirred the same passion then as the "Nkosi sikele i Africa," the national anthem of the African National Congress of South Africa, does today. (*)

(*)At the singing of "Nkosi sikele i Africa" in the assembly hall of the University of the West Indies, Mona, on the historic visit of Nelson and Winnie Mandela to Jamaica in 1991, many academics, white and black, not to mention other staff and students of the university and other visitors, their fists clenched above their heads, sang this anthem as a sign of their identification with the struggles of the people whose hopes it represented.