WILMINGTON, Del. — The family of late Jamaican-American activist Marcus Mosiah Garvey wants President Joe Biden to add one more name to the list of pardons he has issued in his last days in office. The descendants, represented by a nonprofit organization, want to redress a century old miscarriage of justice against the human rights icon.
In 1923, Garvey, father of the “back to Africa” movement, was sentenced to five years in federal prison for a $25 mail fraud conviction.
The Center for Global Africa, a human rights organization in Biden’s home state of Delaware, wants the president to clear Garvey’s name before he leaves office on Monday. In support of the Garvey family, the center has worked to gather support for a legal petition submitted to the Department of Justice to pardon Garvey and clear his name of any criminal wrongdoing.

“We want Biden to hear from Delawareans who sent him to Congress and the White House in the past 40 years,” Alicia Clark, director of global partnerships for the Center for Global Africa, told Black News & Views.
“I want the president to know that Garvey’s legacy has significant meaning both here in Delaware and abroad, nationally and abroad to people of African descent,” Clark continued. “There has been an acknowledgement by him and his administration that the justice system doesn’t work as it should. If we know the case against Marcus Garvey was riddled with prosecutorial misconduct, that should be corrected.”
Garvey was tried for fraud for sending brochures through the U.S. mail to raise funds for the Black Star Line shipping company, which sold stock for $5 a share. The prosecution claimed Garvey’s flyer featured pictures of a ship that Black Star didn’t own. The trial proceeded without a defense attorney; the trial judge was not considered impartial and perjured testimony was offered by a major witness.

The official pardon petition describes a series of legally reversible errors in the 1923 federal trial against Garvey. The basis for the pardon and exoneration rests on racial prejudice and political persecution to stop Garvey’s civil rights organization—The Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.)—and a growing international movement, which in part, encouraged Black people to return to their ancestral homeland of Africa for better treatment and opportunities. U.N.I.A. had gained more than 6 million members at its height, including some 200,000 readers of its national newspaper, Negro World. Garvey, a Jamaican-born immigrant, became a target of the U.S. Justice Department and its late director, J. Edgar Hoover, for at least three years before his 1923 conviction. Garvey served three years of his sentence in federal prison in Atlanta before President Calvin Coolidge, under pressure from civil rights organizations, commuted the remainder of the sentence.
Dozens of churches, community advocacy organizations and members of Congress have supported the exoneration since 1987. The request is now pending with Elizabeth Oyer, the Department of Justice pardon attorney. Various federal elected officials also sent a letter of appeal directly to President Biden, signed by 21 members of Congress, including Lisa Blunt Rochester, now Delaware’s first Black U.S. senator.
The letter outlines a case against Garvey that was “marred by prosecutorial and governmental misconduct.” This Congressional letter echoes the evidence presented in the legal petition in stressing that “that the charges against Mr. Garvey were not only fabricated but also targeted to criminalize, discredit and silence him as a civil rights leader.”
In a statement emailed to Black News & Views, Blunt Rochester said the pardon needs to happen.
“I’ve been proud to join nearly two dozen of my House colleagues to urge President Biden to pardon civil rights icon Marcus Garvey,” the statement reads. “Marcus Garvey was an American hero, and exonerating him would correct a century-old injustice and is a chance to do right by our history.”
Garvey’s conviction was predicated on perjured testimony as well as reversible judicial bias. Evidence presented in the petition also portrayed an ongoing battle among civil rights organizations of the early 1900s.
Among his rivals, Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, Black newspaper editor Chandler Owen and the NAACP led the attack against Garvey, organizing a “Garvey Must Go” campaign. The effort painted Garvey as a fraud, suggesting the Justice Department investigate his Black Star Shipping line for which he was raising millions of dollars. Garvey’s son, Dr. Julius Garvey, has said the rapidly growing U.N.I.A. was costly to these other membership organizations.
“The NAACP lost membership from 300,000 to 100,000 from 1919 to the 20s,” Garvey said during a streamed interview with The New York Society Library in November 2023.
Political and racial hostility was swirling in the environment surrounding the rise of Garvey’s U.N.I.A. In 1918, reports were sent to the military Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army accusing Garvey of preaching “every night against white people” on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The War Department, near the end of WWI was investigating Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World, implying he was a threat to achieving a peace agreement to end “the great war’.
The following year, J. Edgar Hoover was appointed to head the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division (precursor of the FBI). In the virulent anti-Communist atmosphere of the times, Hoover issued a memo that sought reasons to arrest and deport Garvey.
In the memo, Hoover described Garvey as “particularly active among the radical elements in New York City in agitating the Negro movement. Unfortunately, however, he has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation. It occurs to me, however … that there might be some proceeding against him for fraud in connection with his Black Star Line propaganda.”
Hoover also attempted to prosecute Garvey on the Mann Act, which prohibits transportation of people for prostitution or other sexual crimes. Hoover tried to uncover immoral activity between Garvey and his fiancée, Amy Jacques, then editor of the women’s page of Negro World, by posting spies to watch Garvey’s hotel rooms. This tactic became familiar throughout the civil rights era and was used unsuccessfully against Dr. Martin Luther King 50 years later.
“They could not find fault with him, so the mail fraud became the way they could bring him down,” according to Prof. Ezrah Aharone, founder and chair of the Center for Global Africa, a think tank based in Wilmington, Delaware.
“A $25 mail fraud charge was what really began to dismantle the movement, to discredit him, to delegitimize his work, and to make Garveyism a pariah,” Aharone said.
The ultimate charge that took Garvey to court was based on a brochure that was mailed to solicit contributions to start operation of the Black Start Line shipping company. He was convicted in 1923 and served two years before President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence and Garvey was deported back to Jamaica.

“My grandfather’s 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,” Garvey’s granddaughter, Nzinga Garvey, said in a statement to a January gathering of Garvey supporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
She stressed there is much work remaining to repair the system that convicted her grandfather.
“Marcus Garvey’s life was dedicated to uplifting humanity, urging us all to embrace a vision of justice that is larger than any single race or nation … it underscores the deep need for a justice system that protects, not prosecutes those who dare to inspire and empower,” she said in the statement. “This is not a Black issue nor a partisan one. It is an American issue.”
Garvey’s legacy outlived his detractors and elevated him to the status of legend — an entrepreneur and pioneering thought leader in the development of Black economic independence and freedom throughout the world. Martin Luther King saw Garvey as “the first man, on a mass scale, and level, to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny, and make the Negro feel that he (or she) was somebody”.
Garvey’s only living son, Dr. Julius Garvey, directs the Marcus Garvey Institute for Human Development, which is based in Wilmington, and sees his father’s approach as a call to understand that Africans had been dispersed throughout the world — to the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and more. He observed the same system that held Black people as slaves in the Americas also held Africans on the continent in colonial despair and oppression. American slavery and African colonialism had the same roots. The message resonated in the urban centers where Black people lived in large communities. But the exponential growth of the UNIA was costly to other U.S. civil rights groups in the early 1900s:
“His organization became so strong because the African population of the United States responded to it. They had gone through 250 years of slavery at that period of time and 150 years of Jim Crow and apartheid,” Julius Garvey said during the New York Library Society event.
“The Klan was running loose after the first World War when so many Africans were coming back from the war fighting for democracy in Europe and coming home thinking something should have changed. But the red summer was in 1919 when there were so many race riots from Chicago to Philadelphia. 1917 was [the Black massacre in] Rosewood, Black Wall Street [was destroyed] in 1920. The Klan was lynching at least one person a week. The [Garvey] movement was in the millions at that time and growing.”
Aharone of the Center for Global Africa views Garveyism as a visionary set of practices based in “economic self-reliance and Pan-African solidarity.”
U.N.I.A. chapters helped establish Black businesses, facilitated real estate ownership and encouraged Black people to dream big when it came to economic independence. Among Garvey’s own farsighted enterprises: the Negro World newspaper, Black Cross Nurses, a U.N.I.A. department that provided health services for Black people, the Universal African Motor Corps, which trained women to drive and repair vehicles, and the Black Star Line that shipped goods. Garvey’s red, black and green liberation flag stands as a cherished symbol of Black nationalism, pride and cultural independence; it is also a common color scheme of African flags today. Aharone credits Garvey’s declaration of rights of the Black people of the world as a basis for human rights philosophy and belief contained in many of today’s United Nations proclamations.
Garvey’s impact throughout the world
Garvey is recognized as a major Pan-African leader although he never traveled to Africa himself.
Delegations of U.N.I.A. executives engaged with Liberia in attempts to repatriate 20,000 -30,000 African Americans back to Africa. Those attempts ultimately failed as did his Black Star Line, but Garveyism is arguably a strong influence and foundation not only for advancing the civil rights of Black Americans but for helping to spark the anti-colonial freedom movements of many African countries.
He had a profound influence on Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, who led the West African country’s successful fight for independence. Nkrumah adopted Garvey’s thinking about Africans dispersed throughout the world, saying, “I am not an African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me.”
“Globally, the gravity of Garveyism was a known political force for the independence movements in Africa. Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa acknowledge Garvey’s influence,” Aharone told the crowd gathered in Delaware earlier this month.

While Garvey began his own efforts to seek relief from his conviction, it was in 1987 that late U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., convened hearings. For the next three decades, various Black federal lawmakers — most notably U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. — pushed resolutions to give the Garvey family the justice their ancestor deserved. Legal petitions have been sent to various administrations —including the Obama administration — with no response.
“I am hoping President Biden will overcome any concerns about granting posthumous pardons,” said Anthony Pierce, the lawyer representing the Garvey descendants. “It is my hope that he will see that amongst the people he has pardoned, that Marcus Garvey is as deserving as any.”
The current petition is timely as recent pardons by the Biden White House, including that of Biden’s son, Hunter, have attracted global attention. There is precedent for posthumous pardons, including Trump’s pardon of Black boxer Jack Johnson.
The struggle to clear Garvey’s name has been supported by dozens of churches and community advocacy organizations for nearly 40 years. The Delaware Barristers Association defends Garvey’s reputation for his historical contributions:
“He founded an international movement for Black dignity and integrity before it was cool, without the benefit of the internet, or even television or even a high school degree,” Emery Abdel Latif, association president, said during the Delaware gathering earlier this month.
“He had little more than a powerful dream and oratorical skills he literally honed on a Harlem street corner. I join the call on President Biden to pardon Marcus Garvey for the very simple reason that how we remember our history matters, whether we remember our history matters. He ought not to be remembered as a felon but as the leader of a movement that spanned generations and borders.”
Nkrumah named Ghana’s early shipping line the Black Star Line after Garvey’s shipping company; and, a black star is incorporated into Ghana’s national flag.
“Globally, the gravity of Garveyism was a known political force for the independence movements in Africa. Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa acknowledge Garvey’s influence,” Aharone told the crowd gathered in Delaware earlier this month.
Longtime movement to pardon Garvey
While Garvey began his own efforts to seek relief from his conviction, it was in 1987 that late U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., convened hearings. For the next three decades, various Black federal lawmakers — most notably U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. — pushed resolutions to give the Garvey family the justice their ancestor deserved. Legal petitions have been sent to various administrations —including the Obama administration — with no response.
“I am hoping President Biden will overcome any concerns about granting posthumous pardons,” said Anthony Pierce, the lawyer representing the Garvey descendants. “It is my hope that he will see that amongst the people he has pardoned, that Marcus Garvey is as deserving as any.”
The current petition is timely as recent pardons by the Biden White House, including that of Biden’s son, Hunter, have attracted global attention. There is precedent for posthumous pardons, including Trump’s pardon of Black boxer Jack Johnson.
The struggle to clear Garvey’s name has been supported by dozens of churches and community advocacy organizations for nearly 40 years. The Delaware Barristers Association defends Garvey’s reputation for his historical contributions:
“He founded an international movement for Black dignity and integrity before it was cool, without the benefit of the internet, or even television or even a high school degree,” Emery Abdel Latif, association president, said during the Delaware gathering earlier this month.
“He had little more than a powerful dream and oratorical skills he literally honed on a Harlem street corner. I join the call on President Biden to pardon Marcus Garvey for the very simple reason that how we remember our history matters, whether we remember our history matters. He ought not to be remembered as a felon but as the leader of a movement that spanned generations and borders.”