The Long Overdue Pardon of Marcus Garvey
In pardoning Marcus Garvey, Joe Biden did something that was long overdue.
Many today do not know who Garvey was or the grave injustice that was done to him.
Born in Jamacia in 1887, he was educated in London and worked for the African Times and Orient Review, a publication that highlighted Pan-African nationalism and influenced his thinking.
In 1914, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica, an organization that tried to achieve Black nationalist aims by celebrating African history and culture. Through the UNIA, he pushed for a “back to Africa” movement, going so far as to create the Black Star Line to act as a Black owned passenger line that would carry patrons back and forth to Africa
This was all derailed by the United States Government when he brought his ideas to America. The Black folks in this country were inspired by his message and began to organize around his ideas. To quell this, Garvey was charged and convicted of mail fraud in 1923 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, a sentence that was later commuted by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927.
Congressional leaders and civil rights advocates pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey’s conviction, he was deported to Jamaica where he died in 1940.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.”
Yet, outside of classes taught by teachers who make it a point to highlight Garvey, he is not taught in classrooms around America. There are few monuments to his name by way of schools or statues. Americas who found his message distasteful succeeded in erasing him from the public consciousness.
He was convicted largely because of what he taught. The same is true of other Black thikers.
Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are but two Black nationalists who were wronged by the government and never got the treatment they deserve.
Pardoning Garvey is long overdue. It is also admitting, weak as it is, the wrong that America has done to people who 1: looked like Garvey and 2: thought as he did.
I hope it does not end here. America has a great deal of work to do when it comes to recognizing other Black leaders who embraced nationalism and were wronged by the government.
But that certainly won’t happen until after this administration.
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