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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I reached out to Winters, 74, who said she was not surprised to learn the MAGA crowd had co-opted the term. However, she is disheartened that some are using it against their fellow African Americans. Opinion: I remember my first Juneteenth. It's more than a Black holiday. While it's understandable for people to feel frustrated and speak out when they witness something bad happen, it's important to recognize that no single group has a monopoly on bad behavior. The bigger question is why do Black people often find themselves under greater scrutiny? I believe we know the answer to that. This disparity is precisely why Winters coined the term in the first place, capturing the struggles faced by the Black community in a world that is quick to pass judgment. Ironically, the movement co-opting the term is the one inflicting the pain by pretending bigotry doesn't exist by President Donald Trump's attempt to erase diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Opinion: Trump worries more about South Africa's nonexistent genocide than real US racism When Winters' book was released, America was grappling with a global pandemic and confronting systemic racism after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who sparked nationwide protests. When she was writing the book, many expressed to Winters, the founder and CEO of The Winters Group, Inc., a 40-year-old global organization development and DEI consulting firm, that they felt exhausted by microaggressions, conveying a sense of pressure to excel at work but thought they were only making minimal progress. Think of it as constantly walking on a new carpet. Over time, you don't realize how the fibers are worn down until you compare before-and-after pictures and see how your repeated steps have diminished the carpet's beauty. That's what racism does. Since Trump took office again, Winters noted that real Black fatigue has intensified due to his rhetoric and policies, which have escalated racial tensions and eroded civil rights protections, further compounding a long history of unacknowledged, unaddressed racism and discrimination. 'He's hurting people. Just think about all the government jobs that have been eliminated," Winters said. "A lot of those employees were Black men and women who now must figure out what they want to do." There are dozens of videos online featuring people discussing the co-opted concept of Black fatigue, and to be honest, it makes me angry. It's not surprising, though, as there are even more videos and websites seemingly dedicated to showcasing the worst behaviors. Sites like and 'Ghetto Fights' often highlight instances of fighting, or just being unkind to each other. Given that our country is so hypersegregated, it's no wonder that people watch these clips and conclude this is representative. And the thing that is so tiring is how the term has been twisted so silently. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Dynasty Ceasar, a local community activist who has studied race and racism, was unaware that the definition had changed. She described the issue as 'complex and sensitive,' making it difficult to grasp. 'We need to be mindful of the impact of such statements and avoid language that reinforces negative stereotypes or internalizes racism,' Ceasar said. It's important to clarify that I'm not suggesting that Black people should avoid accountability for their negative actions. What I mean is that everyone, regardless of their race, should be held accountable for their actions but should not be subjected to a different standard than anyone else. When I spoke to Winters, I had to be entirely transparent and shared with her that I had inadvertently fallen into the trap. I shared an incident I witnessed while shopping at Plato's Closet, a resale shop in Greenfield. I was about to buy some shoes when I noticed an elderly White woman with her grandson. She was purchasing a pair of sunglasses for him, and I let them skip ahead of me in line because her grandson was very antsy. While we were waiting, a Black woman was selling some shoes and seemed unhappy with what was being offered to her. When the cashier called for the next customer, the older woman accidentally bumped into her, which sparked a verbal altercation. The Black woman began cursing, expressing her frustration about people who bump into her without saying "excuse me." Although the older woman apologized, it only seemed to escalate the situation, as the woman continued to curse and insult her. After both women left the store, several employees asked what had just happened, and I felt compelled to explain the situation. After the incident, I called my cousin and mentioned that I had experienced "Black fatigue" because I felt that the woman's behavior was out of line. My cousin told me that I was misusing the term. Winters and Ceasar both agreed that racism is rarely the result of a single action; it is much more complex than that. While they did not condone the actions of the woman for shouting, Ceasar acknowledged that her outburst might have stemmed from the many times she had been ignored, overlooked as if she did not exist, or made to feel devalued. If Black fatigue can negatively impact on a person's mind, body and spirit, it can also lead to diminished emotional well-being, sometimes manifesting as outbursts to seek acknowledgment. If you find yourself using the term to express disappointment about something bad happening in the world, take a moment to consider how you express that. If your feelings are not specifically related to race, then your fatigue may not be about racial issues at all. It might be about human nature. However, if you believe that only Black people are capable of negative actions and continue to use the term in that context, it might be necessary to reflect on your own biases. That's what I'm tired of. James E. Causey is an Ideas Lab reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where this column originally appeared. Reach him at jcausey@jrnhttps:// or follow him on X: @jecausey You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Trump, MAGA pretend Black fatigue is something it's not | Opinion
