AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Last week, President Biden made history by issuing more pardons and commutations than any president before him. Among the thousands of pardons was one that came after more than a century. Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey received a posthumous pardon for a mail fraud conviction in 1923. Advocates and congressional leaders had pushed for Garvey’s pardon for years, with supporters arguing Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the Pan-African leader who spoke of racial pride. This is audio of Marcus Garvey speaking in Harlem in 1924.

MARCUS GARVEY: The Negro is a man. We represent a new Negro. His back is not yet against the wall. We do not want his back against the wall, because that would be a peculiar and desperate position. We do not want him there. It is because of this that we are asking for fair compromise.

Well, the Belgians have control of the Belgian Congo, which they cannot use. They have not the resources to develop, nor the intelligence. The French have more territory than they can develop. There are certain parts of Africa in which they cannot live at all. So it is for you to come together and give us a United States of Africa.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, sir! Yes, sir!

MARCUS GARVEY: We are not going to be a race without a country. God never intended it, and we are not going to abuse God’s confidence in us as men. We are men, human beings, capable of the same acts as any other race, possessing, under fair circumstances, the same intelligence as any other race.

Now, Africa has been sleeping — not dead, only sleeping. Today, Africa is walking around not only on our feet but on our brains. You can enslave, as was done for 300 years, the bodies of men. You can shackle the hands of men. You can shackle the feet of men. You can imprison the bodies of men. But you cannot shackle or imprison the minds of men.

AMY GOODMAN: Born in Jamaica in 1887, Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in 1914. In 1917, he established the headquarters of the UNIA in Harlem. Black self-reliance was central to his ideology. And he established the Black Star Line, a shipping company which raised over $600,000 before collapsing in 1922. In 1923, U.S. authorities prosecuted and convicted Garvey for mail fraud in connection with the Black Star Line. He served a two-year sentence, was then deported to Jamaica. He died in 1940 in England.

For more, we go to human rights lawyer and Howard University School of Law professor Justin Hansford. He’s executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, the first American to be nominated and elected to the United Nations Permanent Forum for People of African Descent. Professor Hansford is the author of Jailing a Rainbow: The Unjust Trial and Conviction of Marcus Garvey.

So, Professor Hansford, you and Howard University were instrumental in achieving this pardon in the last hours of President Biden’s tenure. Tell us the story of Marcus Garvey.

JUSTIN HANSFORD: Yes. Good morning, Amy. This is a pleasure this morning to talk about one of my personal heroes.

You know, Marcus Garvey, as you described, was one of the first anticolonial global Black leaders. He created an organization of over 6 million people. And what he did was do more than simply provide inspiration, but he also provided a blueprint for Pan-Africanism, the creation of the red, black and green flag. You know, his words, for example, “We will emancipate ourselves from mental slavery,” would later be a foundation for the lyrics of reggae music, which were quoted by Bob Marley in images and ideas sent across the globe. And, you know, the parents of Malcolm X were devout followers of Garvey, and that served as an inspiration for Malcolm X’s activism and Dr. Martin Luther King. So the echoes of his work reverberate until today throughout the Black freedom struggle.

And this particular legacy is one that not enough people know about. One of the wonderful things about obtaining this pardon is to have this conversation this morning, to have the conversation which has taken place over the past week, to be able to — in this time when Black history is being suppressed all across the country, in schools across the country, we have an opportunity now to talk about these ideas around entrepreneurship and self-confidence and a global lens on activism and liberation, which — especially in this time where we’re facing so many threats, with our social justice struggles being pushed into a corner. As you just heard Marcus Garvey say, we do not intend to stay in that corner. We intend to fight back. And he’s a wonderful example and inspiration of what that fight back must look like going forward.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Professor Hansford, can you be specific on his life? Talk about the Black Star Line. Talk about what got him in legal trouble and the political underpinnings of that, what it meant for him to go to jail and why he ended up being deported.

JUSTIN HANSFORD: Yes. Well, we have to think back to 1920, 1921. The context a hundred years ago is we’re in the midst of Jim Crow. We’re having hundreds of lynchings taking place around the country. Black people are one generation removed from enslavement. And here comes Marcus Garvey with the idea to create a mode of travel and commerce that would connect the Black diaspora in the Caribbean and on the African continent. Remember, at that time, every country in Africa was under colonial rule except Ethiopia. So, here’s this concept — many people would use the term “back to Africa.” But what was meant by his rhetoric was that he wanted to allow people to return back to their spiritual roots on the continent and, in addition to that, think about the concept of independent economic commerce and being able to do for yourself.

And so, what took place was he created the Black Star Line, which energized the world. And it’s hard to overstate how important this was and how inspirational this was. Young kids on the continent of Africa would read his speeches in his newspapers and memorize the words and run back to the rest of their community and repeat the words that they had memorized. I mean, this electrified a people around the world that were in the midst of oppression. And at the same time, this was a shipping company created to allow people to trade goods and travel. And at this time, we know that, the early 1920s, we were on the cusp of the Great Depression. It’s after World War I, so there were a lot of ships available for this type of activity. And a number of factors made it very difficult to thrive economically with the shipping company as the Great Depression sparked off.

But what happened was, J. Edgar Hoover — and we know that name as, later on in his career as the head of the FBI, he would go on to create COINTELPRO and to harass Dr. Martin Luther King and the Black Panther Party, but he really got his start harassing Marcus Garvey, who he feared would be a, quote-unquote, “Black Moses.” And so, he led an investigation where he targeted Garvey. The first Black FBI agent, named James Wormley Jones, was assigned to infiltrate Garvey’s Black Star Line. And ultimately, they brought a lawsuit arguing that the entire Black Star Line enterprise and project was just a fraud, and to use the mail to advertise for the Black Star Line was using the mail to defraud. And so, they brought that case before an all-white jury in 1923 and convicted Garvey and ultimately imprisoned and deported him, and he would never return to the United states after that conviction.

And I just want to say, what made that conviction so terrible, it wasn’t simply a random charge. What they did is they tried to undercut his life’s work and say the very thing that inspired millions of people around the world was actually a fake and a fraud. And so it spoke to the heart of his activism and his vision, and really tried to delegitimize his life’s work. That’s what made it so important to overturn that conviction.

AMY GOODMAN: In July of 1917, the city of East St. Louis, Illinois, became the scene of one of the bloodiest race riots of the 20th century. Mobs of whites set fire to the homes of Black residents, beat, shot and lynched men, women and children. Marcus Garvey spoke out against the violence in an emergency meeting in Harlem, marking the expansion of his movement to include American race relations. This is a clip from Stanley Nelson’s PBS American Experience documentary, Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind. It’s an actor reading Garvey’s speech.

MARCUS GARVEY: [read by Ron Bobb-Semple] The whole thing, my friends, is a bloody farce. That the police and soldiers did nothing to stem the murder thirst of the mob is conclusive proof of conspiracy on the part of the civil authorities to condone the acts of the white mob against Negroes. White people are taking advantage of Black men today, because Black men all over the world are disunited.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was a reading of Marcus Garvey. Explain the context, Professor Hansford.

JUSTIN HANSFORD: Yes, well, what we’re talking about in 1923 is, shortly after the Red Summer of 1919, we’re seeing lynchings happening all across the country, and also they’re being framed as race riots. And in this context, there’s a debate taking place as to how we should respond in our community. And Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois and others were hotly debating this topic. Garvey’s position was that we must stand up aggressively and be willing to assert ourselves and be willing to have a global vision, bring people together from around the world to fight back.

It’s very similar to, I have to say, and an inspiration to what we’re facing right now, where we’re in a very dark moment politically, and we have to think amongst ourselves: How are we going to respond? Are we going to respond with confidence? Are we going to respond with a sense of self-empowerment? Or do we feel like we have to cower and take a less aggressive approach?

It was very confrontational, it was very courageous, in terms of what Marcus Garvey advocated for. And, you know, that’s one of the reasons that he was seen as a threat, and that’s why he was targeted by the United States government, because of his approach and his way of inspiring people to respond and stand up for themselves and really assert their dignity and come up with effective strategies that often demanded that we took an economic-based approach to self-empowerment.

AMY GOODMAN: The posthumous pardon for Marcus Garvey is in the same pardon as Ravi Ragbir, the immigrant rights leader. And I encourage people to go to democracynow.org to see our interview with Ravi after he, too, was pardoned. That came out on Sunday.

But, finally, Professor Hansford, I wanted to ask you about President Trump expanding his crackdown on DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, revoking a 60-year-old executive order signed by then-President LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, banning hiring discrimination — banning hiring discrimination. And talk about, overall, what has happened with this. DEI workers across the federal government have been suspended as of Wednesday. I mean, it is astounding, what’s going on. And in the next days, anyone in the federal government is encouraged to rat out others who might be working on disguised DEI issues. Have we seen anything like this before? And what’s the significance of it?

JUSTIN HANSFORD: Well, you’d have to go back to these periods in history we’re talking about to see similar efforts from the federal government. And, you know, I would say that the important thing for us to understand right now is that the constitutional grounds for providing some way of creating inclusion in these institutions has not suddenly disappeared on the grounds of these executive orders. There’s a big difference between the Supreme Court and the presidency. And so, there’s still a pathway forward.

And this is connected to the pardon of Marcus Garvey, interestingly, because Garvey’s pardon is an example of the process of seeking to repair harms of the past. Many people talk about the push for reparations. And many of these institutions, although the grounds for diversity based on simply an effort to create more inclusive communities for effectiveness purposes may be under challenge, it is still constitutional to create diversity on the grounds of repairing for past harm, under the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. So there is a need for us to look back. You know, this is not just symbolic. This is not just academic. More of our institutions need to look back and acknowledge the harms of the past, because then they can institute these programs as a way to provide remedies for the harms that they were culpable in in the past. So, these efforts, even though for the — you know, at the first glance, it would not seem that something like a posthumous pardon has particular resonance and relevance to our contemporary struggles, these are intimately connected processes, and we should take the message and use it for our fight going forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Justin Hansford, I want to thank you for being with us, Howard University School of Law professor, author of Jailing a Rainbow: The Unjust Trial and Conviction of Marcus Garvey.

Up next, Australian journalist Peter Greste, who was imprisoned by Egyptian authorities, now on hunger strike to free his former cellmate, the jailed blogger and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah. Stay with us.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/24/marcus_garvey