Inside the 100-year fight to get a Black revolutionary pardoned
In the days before President Joe Biden's final moments in office, Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor, received a call from a White House staffer. They told Hansford that Marcus Garvey, the revolutionary Jamaican leader who pushed for the unity of Black people and a collective return to Africa, would soon be posthumously pardoned for mail fraud.
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Hansford dialed in Garvey's son, Dr Julius Garvey, for a three-way call to break the news to him before it hit the newspaper circuit. As he thought of his nearly two decades of legal and advocacy work to help exonerate Garvey, Hansford remembered Garvey's wife Amy Jacques who began the efforts to pardon him in 1923.
'I just bore witness to the culmination of over 101 years of people trying to accomplish something,' Hansford, the founder and executive director of Howard's Thurgood Marshall civil rights center, told the Guardian. 'After working on this for all these years, it was a great honor for me to be able to be the person on the phone when [Garvey's son] got that news.'
Garvey's Black nationalist movement, anchored by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), began in the 1910s and spread throughout the world after Garvey moved to the US. His organization advocated for the celebration of African history and culture and championed a back-to-Africa movement where the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans would return to their roots.
But in 1923, Garvey was convicted of one count of mail fraud and served nearly three years of a five-year sentence at the Atlanta federal penitentiary. He was deported from the US in 1927 and the UNIA soon lost momentum. Garvey's supporters, including Hansford, say that the trial was politically motivated and designed to quash the global movement. The conviction had far-reaching effects: it sullied Garvey's reputation during his lifetime and cast a lasting shadow over the movement.
Garvey's posthumous presidential pardon on 19 January followed over a century of legal teams poring over trial transcripts, volunteers gathering tens of thousands of petition signatures, and supporters sending several US presidents letters seeking Garvey's exoneration. Hansford's 2024 book, Jailing a Rainbow: The Unjust Trial and Conviction of Marcus Garvey, provided a legal analysis in support of his exoneration.
While the conviction did not define Garvey's legacy, Hansford said, the posthumous pardoning will help restore the dignity of his global movement: 'That idea of pride in your heritage, for African Americans, all of these ideas are what we vindicate when we vindicate Garvey.'
The son of a stonemason and a domestic servant, Garvey formed the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914 to achieve what he called Black self-reliance, the idea that economic and political independence could lead to liberation. In 1916, Garvey moved to Harlem, New York, to spread UNIA's message and soon set up the movement's headquarters there. Within four years, the movement flourished among working-class people, with nearly a thousand UNIA divisions cropping up throughout the US, Canada, Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
After the first world war, Garvey saw an opportunity to unite the African diaspora in the non-colonized west African country Liberia. At a 1920 conference he organized in Manhattan called the International Conference for the Negro Peoples of the World, which was attended by African delegates and tens of thousands of his followers, the UNIA adopted a human rights document that detailed abuses towards Black people throughout the world and declared the need for unity. Along with his idea of Liberia becoming an empire for Black people in the Americas, Garvey created a shipping company called the Black Star Line that would trade between the continents and repatriate Black Americans to Africa. People could buy stocks in the Black Star Line for $5 a share.
'If you believe that the Negro has a soul, if you believe that the Negro is a man, if you believe the Negro was endowed with the senses commonly given to other men by the Creator, then you must acknowledge that what other men have done, Negroes can do. We want to build up cities, nations, governments, industries of our own in Africa, so that we will be able to have the chance to rise from the lowest to the highest positions in the African commonwealth,' Garvey said in a recorded July 1921 speech.
Even though the Black Star Line vessels transported people to Latin America, the ships never made it to Liberia. The Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), began investigating the fleet soon after it launched in 1919. The company quickly failed and lost up to an estimated $1.25m, laying the groundwork for Garvey's charge of using the mail to solicit company investments.
According to Hansford, Garvey was solely guilty of launching a business at an unfortunate time, at the beginning of the Great Depression when many businesses financially struggled. After the first world war, ships that were once used for warfare sat idle, so many people began entering the shipping business, Hansford said. 'If you try to open a business and suddenly everybody in the world has access to ships and they can open the same business as you can, it was really hard to be successful in the shipping industry.'
While gathering research for the pardon, Hansford learned from FBI documents that undercover federal agents had infiltrated the Black Star Line in order to sabotage it. The Bureau of Investigation's J Edgar Hoover 'had made it really clear in the documents that he wanted this to fail, so some of these agents were the same people in charge of operating some of these ships', Hansford said. 'So it's a number of things working against them. He had the Great Depression. He had this shipping industry. He's got infiltrators operating the company.'
Additionally, Black leaders, such as A Philip Randolph, who opposed Garvey's ideology began a 'Garvey Must Go' campaign to discredit him, and in 1923, wrote a letter to the attorney general encouraging the government to continue its prosecution of Garvey for mail fraud. Hansford said that he lamented the fact 'the policy debate around Black leadership was decided not on the merits, but it was decided by the fact that the government and J Edgar Hoover was able to intervene and convict and frame and deport one side of the debate'.
The trial led to Garvey's deportation in effect dismantled the UNIA movement and contributed to his death, Hansford said. After he survived a stroke in 1940, the media prematurely published obituaries for Garvey, many of which focused on the mail fraud conviction and caused Garvey distress. He suffered another stroke and died shortly thereafter. 'That false charge was the very thing that took his life,' Hansford said. It was 'a very, very difficult pill to swallow'.
Garvey's son Julius approached Hansford about 20 years ago after he discovered a paper that Hansford wrote about the trial. Soon after, Garvey asked him to join the legal team to help exonerate his father. Over the course of several years, Hansford pored over transcripts from the trial, visited Jamaica to view museum archives, and drafted an analysis of why Garvey deserved a pardon. When Hansford became a law professor at his alma mater, Howard University, he encouraged his students to read the trial transcripts to glean new angles, and hosted campus events to highlight the injustice of Garvey's conviction.
Goulda A Downer, an associate professor at Howard University's College of Medicine, also spent nearly a decade pushing for Garvey's pardon. As the then head of the Caribbean-American Political Action Committee, which politically advocates for Caribbean Americans in DC, Downer fell 50,000 short of gathering the 100,000 signatures needed to send a pardon petition to the White House in 2016.
She tried again six years later and successfully got the required signatures by working with advocates throughout the world, but said that she didn't hear back from the White House at that time. For several years thereafter, Downer helped organize Caribbean American community events to inform people of Garvey's legacy, and regularly met with attorneys, including Hansford, to brainstorm new ways to secure a posthumous pardon.
'We are the beneficiaries of Marcus Garvey's vision,' Downer said. 'Because he clarified for us the question of our identity, and I think that was something that we always wanted to make sure that the community knew: that we hadn't stopped. We were continuing to fight.'
Downer and Hansford are uncertain what made Biden pardon Garvey after a century of global efforts, but they saw it as a long time coming. For Hansford, it was symbolic that Garvey's pardon came on the eve of President Donald Trump's second inauguration. '[Garvey] had an outgrowth of activism that was fascinating and powerful and dynamic and energized, and those ideas are still relevant,' Hansford said. 'Those ideas could still empower resistance movements today.' He was thrilled to see videos circulating on social media of youth learning about Garvey after he received his presidential pardon.
Hansford said that advocates were planning a large celebration at Howard University in February, with global celebrations continuing into the summer.
For Downer, a posthumous presidential pardon served as a form of justice for Garvey and his family, and had the potential to restore his legacy. 'He really inspired us to take pride in ourselves,' Downer said. 'He changed the world.'
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