A few hours before leaving the White House, Joe Biden on Sunday granted a posthumous pardon to Jamaican Marcus Garvey, a black activist who was a central figure in the Rastafari movement.
Died in 1940, he was a precursor of Pan-Africanism, notably defending a return of the descendants of black slaves to Africa.
A civil rights activist before his time and whose memory was saluted by Martin Luther King Jr., Marcus Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and imprisoned in the United States in the 1920s before his sentence was commuted by the president Calvin Coolidge and be deported to Jamaica.
“Activists and parliamentarians (…) highlight the injustice of his criminal conviction“, declared the White House in a press release about this prophet of Rastafarianism.
Born in the 1930s with the ideas of this Jamaican and especially the coronation of the last emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie, the Rastafari movement, at once religion, philosophy and way of life, was then popularized throughout the world by the success by Bob Marley.
In 2017, a campaign pushed Barack Obama to pardon Marcus Garvey before he left the White House, without success.
Before handing over to Donald Trump, Joe Biden also pardoned four other people on Sunday, including an activist against gun violence and an elected official from Virginia.
This is a new wave of presidential pardons granted by Joe Biden in the last weeks of his mandate, which ends Monday at noon Washington time.
At the beginning of December, Joe Biden notably reneged on his commitment by pardoning his son Hunter Biden, who was waiting to hear his sentences in two cases of illegal possession of a firearm and tax evasion.
CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, on Sunday expressed “deep gratitude” to the outgoing Biden administration after posthumously pardoning Jamaica’s national hero, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, after many years of campaigning.
CARICOM President and Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley said the pardon was “a testament to the unwavering advocacy of CARICOM leaders, both individually and collectively, as well as countless members of the diaspora, for the rectification of this unjust conviction“.
The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) expresses its deep gratitude for the posthumous pardon granted by the Biden Administration to the distinguished Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a prominent civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist leader and national hero of Jamaica. This long-awaited exoneration is a testament to the unwavering advocacy of CARICOM leaders, both individually and collectively, as well as countless members of the diaspora, for the rectification of the unjust conviction of a staunch defender of the rights and freedoms of people of African origin.
