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,

Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican civil rights activist, the founding father of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and an owner of the Black Star Line shipping company.

Successive governments of Jamaica had called for Garvey to be pardoned for 40 years, making the first appeal to Ronald Reagan and the last to Biden. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Garvey’s descendants, Jamaican immigrants and Black activists joined the call for a posthumous pardon.

She added that while Jamaica has started to honour Garvey’s legacy through the Marcus Garvey School Project, there is need to go further. “Because it is the teachings of Marcus Garvey that is ...

on Sunday expressed “its profound gratitude” to the outgoing Biden administration after it gave a posthumous pardon to Jamaica’s national hero, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, after many years of ...

"Garvey’s life was dedicated to [a] vision of justice larger than any single race or nation. His wrongful conviction [is] a reflection of the work that remains before us.”

The widespread favorable media response to the pardon speaks to the enduring usefulness of Garvey’s brand of identity politics to the powers that be.

In this August 1922 file photo, Marcus Garvey is shown in a military uniform ... the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940. The Rev. Martin Luther ...

President Joe Biden posthumously pardoned civil rights leader and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, along with four others, and commuted two sentences.

America is a country,” Pres. Joe Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon alongside four others, “built on the promise of second chances.”

President Biden on Sunday pardoned Marcus Garvey, one of the first Black civil rights leaders, more than 80 years after Garvey’s death.

Marcus Garvey, a pillar of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, died in June 1940 in London at age 52. Approximately 24 writers, including Michael Brown, Judith Falloon-Reid, Kwame McPherson, Malachi Smith, and Kellie Magnus, participated in the Jamaica Brew Festival which debuted in 2024.