Joe Biden was right to pardon Marcus Garvey

In the 1920s, Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. The Jamaican-born black nationalist led the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a mass movement of working-class black Americans aimed at freeing them from the subjugation of American and European imperial powers. He aimed to start a black renaissance and a new African empire.

Marcus Garvey was a disrupter who delighted black people and terrified the authorities who schemed to neuter his power and eventually imprison him in 1925 for mail fraud. After his death in 1940, the story of Garvey was primarily written from the perspective of his enemies but the petitions for him to be exonerated never ceased. Many of us assumed Garvey would be pardoned by Obama but he disappointed. Instead, this week, Joe Biden was the one to pardon Garvey.

Garvey’s mail fraud charge stemmed from when, as the head of the UNIA, he launched a shipping line, the Black Star Line.