More Than a Century After His Conviction, Marcus Garvey Receives Pardon for Mail Fraud
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1887–1940
Marcus Garvey was granted a posthumous pardon by former President Joe Biden on his last full day in office, January 19. The late Jamaican-born activist, who was a prominent proponent of Black nationalism, was convicted of mail fraud in 1923.
Garvey served two years of his five-year prison sentence before he was deported back to Jamaica. Civil rights leaders, lawmakers, and his descendants have long requested he be pardoned, claiming his conviction was unjust and politically motivated.
Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to help advance economic opportunities for people of African descent with the goal of establishing an independent government for Black people in Africa. While in the United States, the orator was targeted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hired Black agents to infiltrate Garvey's UNIA, leading to his conviction and eventual deportation.Marcus Garvey was a prominent orator and activist who advocated for Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Born in Jamaica, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association that was dedicated to promoting African Americans and their resettlement in Africa. This reflected his philosophy of Black separation and the establishment of Black nations in Africa, known as Garveyism, which sparked a global movement and went on to inspire members of the Nation of Islam and the Rastafari and Black Power movements. After launching several businesses in the United States, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and deported back to Jamaica. He continued his work for Black repatriation to Africa until his death in 1940 at age 52. Garvey received a posthumous presidential pardon in his mail fraud case in January 2025.
FULL NAME: Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr.BORN: August 17, 1887DIED: June 10, 1940BIRTHPLACE: St. Ann's Bay, JamaicaSPOUSE: Amy Ashwood Garvey (1919–1922) and Amy Jacques Garvey (1922–1940)CHILDREN: Marcus III and JuliusASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica. He was the last of 11 children born to Marcus Garvey Sr. and Sarah Jane Richards. His father was a stonemason, and his mother was a domestic worker and farmer. Marcus Sr. was a great influence on young Marcus, who once described his father as 'severe, firm, determined, bold, and strong, refusing to yield even to superior forces if he believed he was right.' His father was known to have a large library where Marcus Jr. learned to read.
At age 14, young Marcus became a printer's apprentice. In 1903, he traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, and soon became involved in union activities. In 1907, he took part in an unsuccessful printer's strike, and the experience kindled in him a passion for political activism. Three years later, he traveled throughout Central America, working as a newspaper editor and writing about the exploitation of migrant workers in the plantations.
In 1912, Garvey moved to London, where he attended the University of London's Birkbeck College and worked as a messenger for the African Times and Orient Review. It was there he was exposed to Pan-African nationalism, an ideology that promotes unity among people of African descent. During this time, Garvey also discovered Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, which greatly influenced his philosophy. He believed that Black people should be economically self-sufficient and establish an independent nation in Africa. This ideology became known as Garveyism.
Garvey returned to Jamaica after two years in London. In August 1914, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), with the goal of uniting all of African diaspora to 'establish a country and absolute government of their own.' Inspired by Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Garvey traveled to the United States in 1916 to raise funds for a similar vocational school in Jamaica. He settled in New York City and formed a UNIA chapter in Harlem to promote a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for Black people.
In 1918, Garvey began publishing the widely distributed newspaper Negro World to convey his message. He later purchased Harlem's Liberty Hall auditorium, where he held meetings to help spread his philosophy.
In 1919, Garvey and UNIA launched his most well-known business venture, a shipping company called the Black Star Line that established trade and commerce between people of African descent around the globe and transported passengers to Africa. He viewed the shipping company as a symbol of tangible success and economic potential for Black people. At the same time, Garvey started the Negros Factories Association, a series of companies that would manufacture marketable commodities in every big industrial center in the Western hemisphere and Africa. While these ventures helped facilitate the spread of Garveysim, they ultimately failed as businesses due to mismanagement and corruption.
In August 1920, UNIA claimed an estimated 4 million members and held its first International Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Before a crowd of 25,000 people from all over the world, Marcus Garvey spoke of having pride in African history and culture. Many people found his words inspiring but not all. Some established Black leaders thought his separatist philosophy ill-conceived. W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black leader and cofounder of the NAACP, called Garvey 'the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America.' Garvey, meanwhile, felt Du Bois was an agent of the white elite.
W.E.B. Du Bois wasn't the worst adversary of Garvey; history would soon reveal FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's fixation on ruining Garvey on account of his radical ideas. Hoover felt threatened by the Black leader and feared he was inciting Black people across the country to stand up in militant defiance. He referred to Garvey as a 'notorious negro agitator' and, for several years, desperately sought ways to find damning personal information on him, even going so far as to hire the first Black FBI agent in 1919 to infiltrate Garvey's ranks and spy on him.
'They placed spies in the UNIA,' historian Winston James said. 'They sabotaged the Black Star Line. The engines... of the ships were actually damaged by foreign matter being thrown into the fuel.' Decades later, Hoover would use similar methods to obtain information on Black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
In 1922, Garvey and three other UNIA officials were charged with mail fraud involving the Black Star Line. Trial records indicate several improprieties occurred in the prosecution of the case. It didn't help that the shipping line's books contained many accounting irregularities. On June 23, 1923, Garvey was convicted and sentenced to prison for five years. Claiming to be a victim of a politically motivated miscarriage of justice, Garvey appealed his conviction but was denied. He served two years of his five-year sentence, starting in 1925, before he was released from prison and immediately deported to Jamaica. More than a century after his conviction, Garvey was posthumously pardoned by President Joe Biden in January 2025.
Also in the 1920s, Garvey wrote three books. His first was The Philosophy and Opinion of Marcus Garvey, initially published in 1923. He went on to pen Aims and Objects of Movement for Solution of Negro Problem the following year before delivering his final work, The Tragedy of White Injustice, in 1927.$12.73 at amazon.com
Garvey continued his political activism and the work of UNIA in Jamaica and then moved to London in 1935. But he didn't command the same influence he had earlier. Perhaps in desperation or maybe in delusion, Garvey collaborated with outspoken segregationist and white supremacist Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi to promote a reparations scheme. The Greater Liberia Act of 1939 outlined a plan to deport 12 million African Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. The act failed in Congress, and Garvey lost even more support among the Black population.
Garvey was married twice. He met his first wife, Amy Ashwood, at a debate program in Jamaica in 1914. The two were a decade apart in age, and she was 17 years old at the time of their meeting. Ashwood later became Garvey's personal secretary and a member of the UNIA board of management. The two became secretly engaged in 1916 but were briefly separated when Ashwood's parents sent her back to Panama, where she spent much of her childhood. After reuniting in the United States, the pair got married in a private Catholic ceremony in December 1919, followed by a public ceremony and reception at Liberty Hall. Just months after their wedding, however, Garvey filed for an annulment, citing his new bride's infidelity as the cause of the split. Their divorce was finalized in July 1922.
That same month, Garvey married his second wife, Amy Jacques, who was Ashwood's friend and maid of honor. At the time of their marriage, Jacques had already taken over Ashwood's secretarial duties and later became Garvey's personal representative while he was in prison. In 1930, she gave birth to their first child, Marcus Mosiah Garvey III. Three years later, their second son, Julius, was born.
Garvey died in London on June 10, 1940, after several strokes. Due to travel restrictions during World War II, his body was interred in the United Kingdom's capital city. In 1964, his remains were exhumed and taken to Jamaica, where the government proclaimed him Jamaica's first national hero and reinterred him at a shrine in the National Heroes Park.
His memory and influence remain—his message of pride and dignity inspired many Americans in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In tribute to his many contributions, Garvey's bust has been displayed in the Organization of American States' Hall of Heroes in Washington D.C. The country of Ghana named its shipping line the Black Star Line and its national soccer team the Black Stars, both in honor of Garvey. In addition, a park in Harlem, New York, was named after him in 1973.
Hungry men have no respect for law, authority or human life.
If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you have started.
[Poverty is] a hellish state to be in. It is no virtue. It is a crime.
Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality... let us hold together under all climes and in every country.
We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.
The question may start in America, but [it] will not end there.
Just at that time, other races were engaged in seeing their cause through—the Jews through their Zionist movement and the Irish through their Irish movement—and I decided that, cost what it might, I would make this a favorable time to see the Negro's interest through.
My garb is Scotch, my name is Irish, my blood is African, and my training is half-American and half-English, and I think that with that tradition I can take care of myself.
The Negro's chance will come when the smoke from the fire and ashes of 20th century civilization has blown off.
There are two classes of men in the world, those who succeed and those who do not succeed.
Be not deceived. Wealth is strength, wealth is power, wealth is influence, wealth is justice, is liberty, is real human rights.
If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.
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As the UN turns 80, its crucial humanitarian aid work faces a clouded future
KAKUMA, Kenya (AP) — At a refugee camp in northern Kenya, Aujene Cimanimpaye waits as a hot lunch of lentils and sorghum is ladled out for her and her nine children — all born while she has received United Nations assistance since fleeing her violence-wracked home in Congo in 2007. 'We cannot go back home because people are still being killed,' the 41-year-old said at the Kakuma camp, where the U.N. World Food Program and U.N. refugee agency help support more than 300,000 refugees. Her family moved from Nakivale Refugee Settlement in neighboring Uganda three years ago to Kenya, now home to more than a million refugees from dozens of conflict-hit east African countries. A few kilometers (miles) away at the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement, fellow Congolese refugee Bahati Musaba, a mother of five, said that since 2016, 'U.N. agencies have supported my children's education — we get food and water and even medicine,' as well as cash support from WFP to buy food and other basics. This year, those cash transfers — and many other U.N. aid activities — have stopped, threatening to upend or jeopardize millions of lives. As the U.N. marks its 80th anniversary this month , its humanitarian agencies are facing one of the greatest crises in their history: The biggest funder — the United States — under the Trump administration and other Western donors have slashed international aid spending . Some want to use the money to build up national defense. Some U.N. agencies are increasingly pointing fingers at one another as they battle over a shrinking pool of funding, said a diplomat from a top donor country who spoke on condition of anonymity to comment freely about the funding crisis faced by some U.N. agencies. 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Humanitarian workers often face dangers and go where many others don't — to slums to collect data on emerging viruses or drought-stricken areas to deliver water. The U.N. says 2024 was the deadliest year for humanitarian personnel on record, mainly due to the war in Gaza. In February, it suspended aid operations in the stronghold of Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have detained dozens of U.N. and other aid workers . Proponents say U.N. aid operations have helped millions around the world affected by poverty, illness, conflict, hunger and other troubles. Critics insist many operations have become bloated, replete with bureaucratic perks and a lack of accountability, and are too distant from in-the-field needs. They say postcolonial Western donations have fostered dependency and corruption, which stifles the ability of countries to develop on their own, while often U.N.-backed aid programs that should be time-specific instead linger for many years with no end in sight. 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Not just funding cuts cloud the future of UN humanitarian work Aside from the cuts and dangers faced by humanitarian workers, political conflict has at times overshadowed or impeded their work. UNRWA, the aid agency for Palestinian refugees, has delivered an array of services to millions — food, education, jobs and much more — in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as well as in the West Bank and Gaza since its founding in 1948. Israel claims the agency's schools fan antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment, which the agency denies. Israel says Hamas siphons off U.N. aid in Gaza to profit from it, while U.N. officials insist most aid gets delivered directly to the needy. 'UNRWA is like one of the foundations of your home. If you remove it, everything falls apart,' said Issa Haj Hassan, 38, after a checkup at a small clinic at the Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. UNRWA covers his diabetes and blood pressure medication, as well as his wife's heart medicine. The United States, Israel's top ally, has stopped contributing to UNRWA; it once provided a third of its funding. Earlier this year, Israel banned the aid group , which has strived to continue its work nonetheless. Ibtisam Salem, a single mother of five in her 50s who shares a small one-room apartment in Beirut with relatives who sleep on the floor, said: 'If it wasn't for UNRWA we would die of starvation. ... They helped build my home, and they give me health care. My children went to their schools.' Especially when it comes to food and hunger, needs worldwide are growing even as funding to address them shrinks. 'This year, we have estimated around 343 million acutely food insecure people,' said Carl Skau, WFP deputy executive director. 'It's a threefold increase if we compare four years ago. And this year, our funding is dropping 40%. So obviously that's an equation that doesn't come together easily.' Billing itself as the world's largest humanitarian organization, WFP has announced plans to cut about a quarter of its 22,000 staff. The aid landscape is shifting One question is how the United Nations remains relevant as an aid provider when global cooperation is on the outs, and national self-interest and self-defense are on the upswing. The United Nations is not alone: Many of its aid partners are feeling the pinch. Groups like GAVI, which tries to ensure fair distribution of vaccines around the world, and the Global Fund, which spends billions each year to help battle HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, have been hit by Trump administration cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Some private-sector, government-backed groups also are cropping up, including the divisive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation , which has been providing some food to Palestinians. But violence has erupted as crowds try to reach the distribution sites . No private-sector donor or well-heeled country — China and oil-rich Gulf states are often mentioned by aid groups — have filled the significant gaps from shrinking U.S. and other Western spending. The future of U.N. aid, experts say, will rest where it belongs — with the world body's 193 member countries. 'We need to take that debate back into our countries, into our capitals, because it is there that you either empower the U.N. to act and succeed — or you paralyze it,' said Achim Steiner, administrator of the U.N. Development Program. ___ Chehayeb reported from Beirut and Keaten from Geneva. Associated Press writer Melina Walling in Hamburg, Germany, contributed to this report. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. 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