In his final full day in office, President Joe Biden has given a posthumous pardon to black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s.
Referring to the pan-Africanist and racial separatist as a “renowned civil rights and human rights leader,” Biden said his 1923 conviction and subsequent five-year sentence was an “injustice.”
Born in 1887 in Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, Garvey moved to the U.S. in 1916 before forming the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which aimed to “establish a brotherhood among the black race, to promote a spirit of race pride, to reclaim the fallen and to assist in civilising the backward tribes of Africa.”
In 1922, Garvey was arrested and charged with mail fraud after advertising the sale of stocks in a boat for his shipping company, Black Star Line, which the business did not yet own.
After being…
