Editorial | Not merely a pardon

We won’t hold our breath. But if Joe Biden, at the eleventh hour, musters the courage to do something about America’s historic wrong against Marcus Garvey, it must not be merely a pardon.

The US constitution does not give presidents the power of exoneration. But any pardon by Mr Biden must include a fulsome acknowledgement that 100 years ago, Mr Garvey, Jamaica’s first national hero, was railroaded to jail in a cynical effort by the US to crush his Pan-Africanist movement and the rising black nationalism in the United States.

Second, President Biden should declare his support for the latest effort in the US Congress, led by New York representative Yvette Clarke, for the passage of a bill formally acknowledging Garvey’s innocence, and therewith his exoneration

Mr Biden has five days to act before ceding the presidency to Donald Trump.

By ideology and instinct, everything that Marcus Garvey stood for is likely to be anathema to Mr Trump – offensive to his concept of the universe and what ought to be the social order in the United States. Nonetheless, this newspaper would not be surprised if the mercurial Mr Trump, if asked, did what his predecessors, including himself in his first stint, did not do: grant the Garvey pardon.

GLOBAL APPEAL

Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887, less than 50 years after the abolition of slavery. He was a man of sharp intellect, and greater oratory.

But Garvey possessed something more profound: a deep consciousness that black people were not inferior and that, after centuries of slavery and colonialism, they held within themselves the power of their liberation. The primary tool was their minds.

While it was expanding before, Garvey’s brand of black empowerment really blossomed after he emigrated to the United States during the First World War. He developed millions of followers in the US, and his Universal Negro Improvement Association spread to scores of countries with black populations.

By the 1920s, Garvey represented a serious social and political force among black people in the US and his Pan-Africanist message had global appeal. He was a threatening or potentially disruptive presence to America’s racial order.

That was part of the context in which he was convicted of mail fraud on evidence which historians and legal experts, even at the time, conceded was, at best, weak, but more likely a stitch-up. Garvey served two years of his five-year jail term before his sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge and he was deported from the United States.

Importantly, Marcus Garvey’s ideas informed the thinking of many of Africa’s first anti-colonial political leaders, as well as intellectuals in the African diaspora.

UNAMBIGUOUS STATEMENT

For decades, there have been attempts at seeking a full pardon for, or exoneration of, Garvey. Jamaican governments have been part of that effort.

Campaigners were most optimistic about a pardon during Barack Obama’s time as America’s first black president, especially after his 2015 visit to Jamaica, where the issue was raised.

Mr Obama did nothing.

This newspaper appreciates the ongoing efforts, including by Garvey’s descendants, to clear his name. They are willing to accept a pardon as a first step towards this goal.

However, as The Gleaner noted in these columns three years ago, when a petition aimed at President Biden was previously on the agenda, it cannot be a pardon at any price. Not for a Jamaican national hero.

A pardon, without more, implies forgiveness for guilt. Our insistence, therefore, is that if a pardon is offered, it must be accompanied by an unambiguous statement that Marcus Garvey was not a charlatan or a crook.

As P.J. Patterson, the former Jamaican prime minister, noted at that time of the previous Biden petition: “Exoneration is for the innocent, those who should have been acquitted at trial because there was no wrongdoing.”

In 2018, Jamaica’s Parliament passed legislation absolving Garvey of a 1929 conviction for contempt of court, and his fellow national heroes, Sam Sharpe, Paul Bogle and George Williams Gordon, for their roles, respectively, in the 1831-32 slave rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, for which they were hanged. Scores of Sam Sharpe followers were also absolved of their supposed crimes.

That act of Parliament, in the name of the Jamaican people, is good enough for us.