Editorial | Doing right by Garvey

In retrospect, this newspaper was wrong in 2016 when it supported an online petition for the then United States (US) President Barack Obama to pardon Marcus Garvey, and expressed our deep disappointment that the document fell woefully short of the 100,000 signatures required to force Mr Obama to give the matter serious thought. We felt, at the time, that, if Garvey’s ancestors were in support of the effort, then it deserved our backing. It is to Mr Obama’s discredit that he, America’s first black president, did nothing, and said less, about the petition.

P. J. Patterson, and people behind the current petition, are right. If the US is to do anything about Garvey’s conviction and jailing, it must be total exoneration. From this newspaper’s perspective, this complete and unfettered absolution of Marcus Garvey wouldn’t primarily be about cleaning his record, or to establish that he wasn’t a crook and charlatan. Rather, it is about America’s acknowledgement of this particularly pernicious and shameful episode in its history and part of its continued reckoning with the question of race in the US. A country telling the truth to itself. In that sense, there is interconnectedness between the exoneration of Marcus Garvey and the unsettled business of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Outside of this admittedly important context, Mr Garvey, a Jamaican national hero, requires no exoneration. He has long since been absolved by history – and global respect.

Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887, a mere 49 years after the end of slavery in the island. He, however, couldn’t be contained by any system or philosophy that held that Africans and people of African descent were somehow intellectually inferior, or less than others. Indeed, by the 1920s, Marcus Garvey was not only espousing radical new thought about the place of black people in the world, but had built a global organisation of millions of people in support of Back-to-Africa ideas.

Marcus Garvey gave black people assuredness about their capacities, without the need for shorting-up or mentorship by other groups. In that sense, he was the forerunner to, and inspiration for, the leaders of the anti-colonial and imperial struggles in Africa and the Caribbean, many of whom acknowledged his influence.

TRUMPED-UP CHARGES

But a black man of Garvey’s intellect, charisma and following was, for the establishment, dangerous in early 20th century America. It is not surprising that there was a concerted effort to cut him down – almost by any means possible. Legal and other scholars, as Mr Patterson pointed out this week, long ago concluded that Garvey’s conviction for mail fraud in 1923 was on trumped-up charges. And the trial deliberately skewed to a guilty verdict.

Unlike five years ago when the aim of the 100,000 signatures was to get President Obama to consider a pardon for Garvey, this request is for exoneration. “Exoneration is for the innocent, those who should have been acquitted at trial because there was no wrongdoing,” Mr Patterson explained.

Even as we hope that the requisite numbers of signatures are collected and President Joe Biden ultimately does right by history, Jamaica, too, has unfinished business with respect to Garvey and others of its heroes.

In 2016, in the aftermath of the failure to gather signatures in support of the Garvey pardon, the Holness administration promised legislation to erase and, ultimately, absolve the country’s “freedom fighters” of supposed crimes.

In 1929, Garvey was criminally convicted in Jamaica for contempt of court. In 1865, Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, were hanged by Governor Eyre for the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in St Thomas, in eastern Jamaica. Thirty-three years earlier, in the west, in Montego Bay, Sam Sharpe was hanged in the town square as the leader of a slave uprising.

We wonder if the Government still intends to pass that law. The legislation, as would be America’s acceptance of its wrong against Garvey, would be a powerful intervention in the argument for reparatory justice for the victims of slavery.