Editorial | Beyond the Garvey pardon

Joe Biden did not – which this newspaper felt was required, and suggested he should do – offer a full-throated and unequivocal acknowledgement that, a century ago, Marcus Garvey was railroaded into jail by the American state because it felt threatened by his global movement for black people.

But, to be fair to Mr Biden, in pardoning Garvey on Sunday, on the eve of the end of his term in office, he implicitly conceded the great likelihood that a historic wrong was perpetrated against the Jamaican national hero. He was explicit in saying that many historians and legal experts who have studied the case concluded that Garvey was framed.

“Advocates and lawmakers praise his (Garvey’s) global advocacy and impact, and highlight the injustice underlying his criminal conviction,” Mr Biden said in a statement.

Except for stronger exculpatory language, the pardon issued by Mr Biden was as much as he could legally do for Garvey. American presidents do not have the constitutional power to formally exonerate people convicted of crimes.

DONE FAR MORE

To his credit, Mr Biden has done far more than any of his predecessors towards the realisation of the effort to clear Garvey’s name in the United States, despite decades of lobbying towards that end.

In 1925, after he had served two years of his five-year prison term for mail fraud, President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence, which was a nod to the fact that the prosecution was concocted and that evidence against him was flimsy, or did not meet the standards required in a criminal matter.

But Coolidge also had a larger motive. The clemency allowed for the early deportation of Garvey from the United States, with the aim of humiliating and demoralising a man who was followed by millions of black Americans, thus undermining the global movement he had founded, the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Before Mr Biden, the president who might have been expected to be empathetic towards, and acted in favour of, the efforts to clear Garvey’s name was Barack Obama, America’s first black president.

Throughout Mr Obama’s presidency, black members of the US Congress not only maintained a decades-old effort to have the legislature pass a law to exonerate Garvey, but they took their case to the White House. Yvette Clarke, New York Congresswoman who is of Jamaican parentage, was at the forefront of that effort.

When Mr Obama visited Jamaica in 2015, the matter was placed before him. Up to the point when he was exiting the White House in January 2017, many hoped that he would offer a last-minute pardon to Garvey.

That Mr Obama did nothing will not be considered by history as a worthy legacy of his presidency.

NOTEWORTHY DEVELOPMENT

While the US presidential pardon of Garvey is a noteworthy development, it is not, from a Jamaican perspective, as The Gleaner has noted before, a particularly defining development, notwithstanding the fact that it is welcomed.

The point is, Marcus Garvey, and no other Jamaican national hero, requires validation from the United States. That is an approbation exclusively within the realm of the Jamaican people, notwithstanding that it shares Garvey and his ideas of black liberation and black worth with the world.

So, what is far more important to this newspaper is the 2018 Act of the Jamaican Parliament that, in the name of the Jamaican people, vindicated Garvey for his 1929 conviction in Jamaica for contempt of court; Sam Sharpe and scores of his following for the Christmas (1831-32) slave uprising; and Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, for the 1865 rebellion.

While Jamaica has an interest in the issue, and should offer as much support as it can towards that end, America’s exoneration of Garvey has another, more particular purpose. It is one of the points on which the United States must reckon with its own history and the place of its black population within it.

For, as Mr Biden said separately on Sunday with respect to the work of the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr, “black history is American history”. Slavery and its aftermath cannot be airbrushed away.

In that context, Marcus Garvey, although an immigrant, had a profound impact on early 20th-century America. No black leader up to then, and few since, was able to mobilise so many black Americans in a cause for their liberation and worth.

Therein was the basis for framing Garvey and delegitimising his movement among black Americans. His exoneration by the United States, its formal acknowledgement of wrong, would be an act in that country’s still uncertain, and often halting, attempts to come to terms with the unsettled question of race.