President Biden pardoned five activists and public servants on Sunday, including a posthumous grant of clemency to the civil rights leader Marcus Garvey, who mobilized the Black nationalist movement and was convicted of mail fraud in 1923.
Mr. Biden also commuted the sentence of two people who are serving sentences for crimes that they committed in the 1990s that would keep them behind bars for the rest of their lives. The two individuals, Robin Peoples and Michelle West, had overwhelming support from civil rights activists and will be released next month, Mr. Biden said.
It was the latest act of clemency in Mr. Biden’s final weeks in office, many of which have highlighted Mr. Biden’s longstanding relationship among Black communities and his evolution on civil rights and criminal justice.
The president has announced thousands of individual pardons and commutations, more than any other president, in seeking to reverse longstanding disparities in convictions and sentencing laws that have disproportionately affected minority communities. Mr. Biden said that Sunday’s clemency recipients had “demonstrated remorse, rehabilitation and redemption,” and “each made significant contributions to improving their communities.”
“The list is not only important because of each and every individual that is represented on it, but it’s also important because of the broader story that it tells about the failures of our criminal legal system,” said Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
During a visit to Royal Missionary Baptist Church, a storied Black church near Charleston, S.C., Mr. Biden said that his decisions reflected how he had come to view the power of “redemption.”
“We know how healing and restoration from harm is a pathway to the kind of communities we want to live in, where there’s fairness, justice, accountability,” he said, “where the people we love go through hard times, fall down, make mistakes, but we’re right there and helping get back up. We don’t turn on each other. We lean into each other.”
Civil rights leaders and lawmakers have long called Mr. Garvey’s criminal conviction unjust and argued that his conviction was racially motivated, and that he was targeted for his civil rights activism with fabricated charges and flawed evidence. He was sentenced to five years in prison, two of which he served, before his sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927.
Mr. Garvey inspired generations of Black leaders, including Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, and he was seen as the embodiment of Black liberation and self-determination. Martin Luther King Jr. called him the “first man on a mass scale and level to give millions to Negroes and make the Negro feel he was somebody.”
A White House statement on Sunday highlighted his creation of the Black Star Line, the first Black-owned shipping line and method of international travel, and founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which celebrated African history and culture. The association, which was founded in 1914, inspired thousands with its emphasis on racial pride and liberation, which he encouraged through urging Black Americans to return to their homelands in Africa.
After his conviction, Mr. Garvey was deported back to his native Jamaica. He died in London in 1940.
For decades, many — including Mr. Garvey’s descendants, lawmakers and even Roger J. Stone Jr., an ally of President-elect Donald J. Trump — had lobbied the White House to pardon Mr. Garvey’s conviction to no avail.
-Anthony Pierce, the lawyer for the Garvey family who filed petitions to pardon Mr. Garvey during President Barack Obama’s administration and again during Mr. Biden’s, said in an interview that Mr. Biden’s decision reflected that “the country has finally done the right thing by Marcus Garvey.”
“There were a lot of legal infirmities in what the country did to convict him,” Mr. Pierce said. “And so it also shows that the country knows how to fix a wrong, and I think that’s good, both from a legal and moral standpoint.”
In a statement, Mr. Garvey’s granddaughter, Nzinga Garvey, said that his conviction was not only a “miscarriage of justice” but a “reminder of how the overreach of power can be weaponized to silence the voices that seek fairness, equity and accountability.”
A group of congressional lawmakers, led by Representative Yvette D. Clarke, Democrat of New York, sent a letter to Mr. Biden last month urging him to exonerate Mr. Garvey. In a statement Sunday, she said that although Mr. Biden’s clemency “will help remove the shadow of an unjust conviction” she and Mr. Garvey’s family would continue to “push toward his full and unambiguous exoneration.”
Among those also receiving pardons, which wipe their criminal records clean of convictions, is Darryl Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate who was previously convicted of a nonviolent drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1998; Ravi Ragbir, a well-known advocate for immigrants who was convicted of wire fraud in 2000; and Don Scott, a lawyer who served his sentence for a nonviolent drug offense and went on to be elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019, and became the first Black speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates last year.
Mr. Biden also pardoned Kemba Smith, a criminal justice advocate whose case drew attention to the mass incarceration of Black women, often victims themselves, who were harshly punished by tough-on-crime laws.
Ms. Smith was the victim of domestic abuse, and was sentenced to 24 and a half years in prison without the possibility of parole despite being a first-time, nonviolent offender who was seven months pregnant. She had observed illegal activity of her boyfriend, and federal prosecutors charged her with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, though she never sold or used drugs. Her case was taken up by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund nearly 30 years ago, which led to her sentence being commuted by President Bill Clinton.
Though she was released 25 years ago and went on to build a successful career as a criminal justice activist, Ms. Smith said in an interview that the pardon has provided a new level of freedom from the confines of a felony conviction.
“I’ve always accepted responsibility for the choices that led me down the path, and even though I have done so many things, it’s a continuous healing process,” Ms. Smith said in an interview. “There’s several collateral consequences that come with this. So I’m grateful that I can have my complete freedom today.”
Ms. Smith said she looked forward to reuniting with Ms. West, whom she befriended in prison, and who was one of the two people whose sentences Mr. Biden commuted on Sunday.
Ms. West was serving a life sentence for her role in a drug conspiracy case in the late 1980s and 1990s at the height of the war on drugs. On Sunday, as Ms. Smith grew emotional talking about newfound freedoms, she touched a necklace that Ms. West gave her. She was set to return it when her friend’s sentence expires next month.
