Last month, President Biden announced an historic string of acts of clemency for federal inmates, including a single-day record of 1,300 commuted sentences and 39 pardons, as well as giving life in prison to remaining federal death row inmates. This comes after much discussion from Black political leaders and civil rights groups who had been urging him to take such action as well as for prisoners of nonviolent drug offenses and notable figures like attorneys Marilyn Mosby and Kim Gardner.
One name that has continued to come up in these discussions for years and who has yet to receive a pardon is the late pan-Africanist liberation leader Marcus Garvey. His son, Dr. Julius Garvey, 91, has championed the push for his father, who died in 1940, to receive a posthumous presidential pardon with an acknowledgment that he was unjustly charged. Dr. Garvey is promoting the release of a new book, “Justice For Garvey : Look For Me In The Whirlwind,” released on Nov. 19, focusing on his father’s legacy and having been the target of government officials.
Dr. Garvey recently visited the P.S. 44 Marcus Garvey Magnet School of Engineering and Design in Brooklyn to speak to elementary school students. He also visits HBCU campuses and other universities in Jamaica sharing his father’s legacy.
While speaking to a group of third and fourth grade students at the school, one of them asked Dr. Garvey why the school is named after his father.
“Marcus Garvey was someone who achieved a great deal for African people worldwide,” Dr. Garvey responded. “He told us that we were all connected as one people and that we should work together as one to achieve our independence as one people because [of] some negative things that happened to us as a people, meaning we had been enslaved and colonized.”
Students were able to learn more about Marcus Garvey during the visit. One of them was Amia Peoples, a 10-year-old fifth grader and the president of the student council, who says she wants to be a lawyer fighting for justice like Garvey.
“They’re not only learning about STEM, but they’re learning about their sociopolitical and economic context in which they are as young people, and what Marcus Garvey brought to the table,” Dr. Garvey said about the school. “I know they can live their own lives in some sense, emulating what Marcus Garvey did for African people worldwide, and they have to make their contributions in the same way.”
Dr. Garvey, a retired vascular surgeon, has practiced and been an attending surgeon at various New York hospitals such as Harlem Hospital and Montefiore, as well as a professor at Columbia University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and SUNY Stony Brook, among others. He has continued to lead the fight alongside other family members like late brother Marcrus Garvey Jr. to exonerate their father.
Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica, built his political footprint after moving to Harlem in 1916 and becoming a prominent figure in the liberation of African people globally. He first established the United Negro Improvement Association and Negro Communities League two years earlier and became a major leader in the Back to Africa movement. His ideology of Africans governing themselves economically and culturally would be known as Garveyism.
While in Harlem, Garvey was able to create an economic engine with the Negro Factories Corporation which had multiple businesses including restaurants, laundromats, and clothing factories, employing as many 1,000 employees in Harlem alone, Dr. Julius says. He also had the Universal Printing House which published the Negro World newspaper.
The growing movement was directly targeted and infiltrated by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who infamously went after Black liberation leaders from Garvey to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party decades later.
“It was due to a difference in ideology within the Black community, and the imperialist structure of the society was able to take advantage of that division in our society through J. Edgar Hoover and the burgeoning FBI, which became the COINTELPRO, which was designed to subvert any organization that stood for more social justice,” Dr. Garvey said.
In 1922, Garvey was arrested and charged for conspiracy to commit mail fraud for allegedly encouraging someone to buy stock in the Black Star Line, a shipping line created by Garvey to transport goods and was intended to ship African Americans back to Africa. In 1925, he was convicted and spent two years in prison before President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence. He was then deported back to Jamaica in 1927. He later died in 1940 in London at age 52.
Over the last century, much legal analysis has been documented since Garvey’s conviction outlining the many issues with his trial including a lack of sufficient evidence, a judge with proven bias, a perjured testimony from a sole witness, and other problems with both the case and trial itself working against Garvey.
In 1987, his sons Julius and Marcus Jr. partnered with Black political leaders, namely U.S. Rep. and Harlem leader Charles B. Rangel, along with scholars Dr. John Henrik Clarke and Tony Martin, among others, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by John Conyers to have Congress pass a resolution exonerating their father’s name.
By 2016, Dr. Garvey, in partnership with the Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP firm, established a 41-page petition explaining how the case was unjust and called to pardon his father. While posthumous pardons are rare, there is precedence for it as former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both executed them during their administrations, as the petition makes reference to.
It has had the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, civil rights groups like the NAACP (which historically was the principal group against Garvey), and the National Bar Association, and was promoted by U.S. Rep. of New York, Yvette Clark. Civil Rights attorney, the late Vernon E. Jordan, along with the Akin firm, hand delivered the petition to Obama’s desk, but it was ultimately not passed.
In 2022, Julius rallied alongside the Caribbean Political Action Committee, a group of Black booksellers and publishers, to gather 100,000 signatures in order to get an official response from Biden on the petition. According to the organizers, they passed the threshold as they have an internal number of how many clicked the link to sign up, yet there has been no response. He also published an open letter to Biden in 2021.
The most recent action from a political leader came from retiring congressman Clark who sent a letter in December to Biden calling for the pardon. Also last month, the Marcus Garvey Institute For Human Development, founded by Dr. Garvey and Center For Global Africa, launched the Garvey Legacy Campaign to support ongoing exoneration efforts and released a short documentary titled “The Garvey Legacy Film.” Dr. Garvey is hoping the new book, which features a compilation of essays about his father and the false charges against him, in addition to the other initiatives like the film and campaign will put further pressure on Biden to issue the pardon.
During the 2024 election between Vice President Kamala Harris and president-elect Donald Trump, an element of the online discourse was the “diaspora wars,” with groups like FBA (Foundational Black Americans) and ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) who were critical of Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian ethnicity, arguing she was not a true Black American. Dr. Garvey says the same divisions among Black folks that were used to weaken the Garvey movement (in terms of him being ostracized as a Jamaican immigrant) have continued to repeat themselves today, a result of enslavement and miseducation.
“We’re repeating history because we haven’t learned from history.” Dr. Garvey said. “Here we are rejecting Kamala Harris, although she’s not Marcus Garvey, but we’re not uniting as a people behind a candidate who can do anything for us in the big picture, so that we do not have the strength to really influence the political system.”
Dr. Garvey further underscores that political organization and engagement and an understanding of history will be needed for Black folks in the U.S. moving forward.
“We’re reliving the same traumas over and over because for some reason, we’re not able to learn the lesson that we have to unify around a common objective, and it has to be based on our own primary economic development as a community with a self-identity as a community, understanding ourselves as African people with a proper history, traditions, and culture, and we have to manifest that in terms of the society in which we live.” Dr. Garvey explained.
The news of Biden’s historic number of commutations, which surpassed former president Obama’s 330 in 2017, came after the pardon of his son Hunter over gun and tax charges as he was likely to be unfairly targeted by Trump. Last month, he also took 37 of the 40 federal inmates off death row and gave them life in prison, something the president-elect Trump criticized as he is set to resume federal executions during his administration. During his first term, Trump oversaw 13 federal executions, after only 3 had taken place in the almost 60 years prior.
Biden only has a few more days to take additional action such as a Garvey pardon before leaving office.
“President Biden is still the president until January the 20th so we’re continuing to push to exonerate my dad by using the presidential ability to grant a posthumous pardon,” Dr. Garvey said. “But it has to state that no crime was committed and was an injustice.”