The inside story of the pardon of Marcus Garvey

The inside story of the pardon of Marcus Garvey

Garvey in August 1924. (Library of Congress)

 

President Joe Biden pardoned him posthumously, more than 100 years after the conviction of Garvey, a champion for the liberation of people of African descent around the world.

KINGSTON, Jamaica — The quest for a U.S. presidential pardon for revolutionary Black nationalist leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey began more than 100 years ago, immediately after Garvey was convicted on racially motivated charges of mail fraud filed by the U.S. government.

On July 1, 1923, two months after his conviction, more than 2,000 people gathered in a mass protest meeting at Liberty Hall in New York. During the meeting, a speaker read a letter Garvey had written from jail:

“I have been ‘framed up’ and sacrificed because of prejudice and the political and organization designs of my enemies. I believe that when my cause is properly presented to the higher and responsible officials of our government they will see that justice is done, and that they will not hesitate in upholding the sacred principles of the Constitution.”

By DeNeen L. Brown

Over the succeeding decades, dozens of lawyers, attorneys general, prime ministers, members of Congress, historians, justice activists and Garvey’s descendants sent requests to U.S. presidents to grant a pardon and to Congress to grant an exoneration.

Many of the requests were met with cold silence. Finally, in the waning hours of his administration, President Joe Biden granted a posthumous pardon for Garvey.

The news reverberated around the world. In Jamaica, where Garvey is the first national hero, and his portrait is painted on schoolhouse walls, Prime Minister Andrew Holness called the pardon a “first step toward the total exoneration and expungement of this historical injustice.”

The road to Garvey’s presidential pardon is a story of tireless activism by human rights leaders, Garvey’s descendants and members of Congress, some of whom died before they could see their efforts come to fruition.

Marcus Garvey was born on Aug. 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. In 1914, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Two years later, he traveled to the United States where his speeches advocating Black pride were electrifying. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said Garvey “was the first man of color in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny.”

Garvey’s rising movement made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover, then a lawyer in the Justice Department who would rise to become FBI director. The FBI later acknowledged it targeted Garvey to find reasons to “deport him as an undesirable alien.” Hoover pursued him with a vengeance, as Garvey delivered speeches against the backdrop of race massacres in East St. Louis, Houston and Tulsa.

Garvey advocated for Black economic independence, opening businesses including the Negro Factories Corporation, the Universal Steam Laundry, Liberty Grocery Stores, the Negro World newspaper and the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company to facilitate the travel of Black people to Africa.

“It was the audacity of founding the Black Star Line that drew the attention of federal investigators,” Anthony T. Pierce, a partner at the law firm Akin Gump, told The Washington Post in 2021. “And ultimately, the company’s financial downfall led to Garvey’s prosecution for mail fraud in a trial replete with reversible errors and questionable evidence.”

When, in 1921, Garvey’s company told stockholders it would buy two more ships, a newspaper published an investigation claiming the U.S. Commerce Department had no record of those ships. A year later, Garvey and three business associates were indicted on charges of “conspiracy to use the mails in furtherance of a scheme to defraud,” records show.

On June 21, 1923, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud, fined $1,000 and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The three other defendants were acquitted.

Millions of Garvey’s followers gathered a petition demanding his release. They wrote to President Calvin Coolidge, requesting a presidential pardon. Because of this massive outpouring of concern, on Nov. 18, 1927, Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence.

Nine of the 12 White jurors who voted to convict Garvey supported the commutation. Garvey was released from prison and deported to Jamaica. He later traveled to London, where he died in June 1940.

After Garvey’s death, his followers continued to fight for justice. The movement picked up steam after the Congressional Black Caucus was founded in 1971.

“Efforts to clear Garvey’s name have persisted for decades,” Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-New York) said in a statement in December, noting that then-Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Michigan) convened the House Judiciary Committee in 1987 to hear evidence to exonerate Garvey. Among those who testified were Garvey’s sons. Then-Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-New York) testified: “Mr. Hoover, in his role as director of investigations on ‘Negro Activities,’ became obsessed with extinguishing the flames of the man who had become known as the ‘Negro Moses.’”

Beginning in 1987, Rangel introduced congressional resolutions demanding justice. In 2023, Clarke and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) introduced legislation calling for Garvey’s exoneration.

Last December, Clarke and 20 members of Congress wrote a letter to Biden urging Garvey’s exoneration.

Pierce, an attorney for Garvey’s family, began working with Garvey’s son Julius W. Garvey in 2008, at the end of the George W. Bush administration. He filed requests for presidential pardons from President Barack Obama.

Also that year, Justin Hansford, now a Howard University professor of law and executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, began working on Garvey’s pardon request. In 2024, Hansford published the book “Jailing a Rainbow: The Unjust Trial and Conviction of Marcus Garvey.”

Obama didn’t grant a pardon.

In 2019, Roger Stone, an adviser to President Donald Trump, said he sought a pardon for Garvey. The request went unanswered.

The case for Garvey’s pardon seemed airtight and powerful. Still, it was unclear why the requests had encountered rejections.

“There were long-term obstacles thrown at us,” Hansford told The Post. The big question among those working on the pardon request was, why the obstacles?

Then in the final days of Biden’s administration, Hansford was told why.

“This time around, we had relationships in the White House,” he said. Some were long-term colleagues and classmates. Hansford, who had been elected to the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, was often called to the White House for meetings where he ran into former colleagues. That provided opportunities to press the case for Garvey.

Marcus Garvey during a parade in Harlem in 1922. (AP)

“They told me what the holds were,” Hansford recalled. “One said they think Garvey is antisemitic.”

With that information, Hansford called Julius Garvey. He rebutted the claim, pointing out the history of Marcus Garvey’s relationships with the Jewish community in Jamaica. Julius Garvey put Hansford in touch with family members of Marcus Garvey’s lifelong friend, Lewis Joseph Ashenheim, a prominent Jewish lawyer in Jamaica.

Time was of the essence. On Jan. 5, Hansford called Ashenheim’s great-grandniece, Lynda Edwards, an author and screenwriter of a film about Garvey and Ashenheim.

“Justin said to me the reason they are turning down a pardon is because they think Marcus Garvey was antisemitic,” Edwards told The Post. “I said we can prove that is not true.”

They were surprised that was the reason blocking the pardon. “It was an affront and an injustice,” Edwards said.

Hansford asked Edwards whether her family would be willing to write a letter to the White House. She called her brother, who told her to call their cousin Michael Ashenheim, the great-grandson of Lewis Ashenheim, who lives in England.

“We gave ourselves 24 hours to get the letter done,” Edwards said. “We knew Biden would be out of office within two weeks.”

They wrote through the night, using research done for the film.

Their letter dated Jan. 6 reads in part: “My cousin, Michael Ashenheim, and I, Lynda Edwards, are writing to address the widespread misunderstanding that Marcus Garvey was an anti-Semite. We firmly believe this false characterization should not hinder his deserving a posthumous pardon. The judgment against his character is based on misconceptions we seek to correct.”

They gave examples of Garvey’s speeches about the Jewish struggle. They explained that after Garvey returned to Jamaica, Lewis Ashenheim successfully represented him in a case brought to the Supreme Court in Jamaica.

“A historic court battle ensued, bringing together Marcus Garvey and Lewis Ashenheim, a Jew and one of Jamaica’s most influential lawyers,” they wrote.

Ashenheim won the case. He and Garvey became lifelong friends. Garvey supported Ashenheim when he entered politics in Jamaica.

Edwards and Ashenheim said they did not hear directly from the White House. But they were elated to hear the news that Biden had finally signed Garvey’s pardon.

A number of people impressed upon Biden “why he needed to do this. There were demonstrations in Delaware,” said Julius Garvey, 93. “We were happy it happened.”

Added Pierce, the family’s lawyer: “It took too long, but we are glad it came.”⍐

Musk aides gain access to sensitive Treasury Department payment system

 Musk aides gain access to sensitive Treasury Department payment system

The access — granted by Scott Bessent, Trump’s newly confirmed treasury secretary — comes after the ousting of the agency’s top career official.

Elon Musk walks through the Capitol complex with his son on his shoulders during meetings about the
“Department of Government Efficiency” in December. Musk allies now have access to sensitive payment
systems run by the Treasury Department. (Maansi Srivastava for The Washington Post)

By Jeff Stein The Washington Post 01-02-2025

Billionaire Elon Musk’s deputies have gained access to a sensitive Treasury Department system responsible for trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments after the administration ousted a top career official at the department, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent approved access to the Treasury’s payments system for a team led by Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive working in concert with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” the people said.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades and had been the acting secretary before Bessent’s confirmation, had refused to turn over access to Musk’s surrogates, people familiar with the situation told The Washington Post. Trump officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave, and then he announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues.

Spokespeople for Treasury and DOGE declined to comment.

The sensitive systems, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually. Tens of millions of people across the country rely on the systems. They are responsible for paying Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Typically, only a small group of career employees control the payment systems, and former officials have said it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access them.

Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. DOGE is now housed in a White House office formerly known as the U.S. Digital Service but now called the U.S. DOGE Service and has broad visibility into technology across the government.

The New York Times was first to report that Musk’s deputies had gained control of the systems.

Democrats have strongly criticized the idea of giving Musk surrogates access to the payment systems.

“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said in a letter to Bessent on Friday. “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”⍐

Trump signs order imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China

Trump signs order imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China

It’s the first official action of the president’s second-term trade war.

President Donald J Trump at the White House
on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By David J. Lynch, Mary Beth Sheridan and Amanda Coletta

The Washington Post 01-02-2025

President Donald Trump on Saturday imposed tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico and China, the nation’s three largest trading partners, invoking emergency economic powers in a high-stakes bid to compel them to crack down on illegal immigration and drugs reaching the United States.

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The president signed three executive orders establishing the measures, the first official actions of his second-term trade war, according to a White House official who briefed reporters.

They drew immediate opposition from business and labor groups, who warned of profound upheaval throughout the economy.

Effective Tuesday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time, American importers will pay a new 25-percent tax on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10-percent levy on products from China, the president said. Most products from Canada and Mexico currently face no tariffs, under a trade deal Trump signed during his first term, while many Chinese goods incur taxes of up to 25 percent. The new tariffs are in addition to those fees.

Energy products, including crude oil from Canada, will suffer a 10 percent charge.

If any of the three countries retaliate with their own tariffs on U.S. goods — as is likely — the president threatened to increase the applicable tariff rate in response

“A Nation without borders is not a nation at all. I will not stand by and allow our sovereignty to be eroded, our laws to be trampled, our citizens to be endangered, or our borders to be disrespected anymore,” the president wrote.

The president complained that Chinese fentanyl shipments are making their way to the United States via Mexico and Canada. He criticized the Chinese government for failing to fulfill its promises to reduce fentanyl output. And in remarkably blunt and almost hostile terms, he assailed two of the closest U.S. allies for their role in facilitating the drug trade.

Canada’s failure to take tougher action against fentanyl operations, he said, constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” while the Mexican government maintained “an intolerable alliance” with the drug cartels in that country.

The tariffs will remain in place until the president determines that Canada “has taken adequate steps to alleviate this public health crisis.”

The president also suspended de minimis rules for Canada that allow small packages valued at less than $800 to enter the United States on a duty-free basis.

Representatives of business and labor were quick to voice their concerns.

“The USW has long called for systemic reform of our broken trade system, but lashing out at key allies like Canada is not the way forward,” said David McCall, president of the United Steelworkers union. “These tariffs don’t just hurt Canada. They threaten the stability of industries on both sides of the border.”

The sweeping presidential actions were welcomed, however, by longtime critics of U.S. trade policies that concentrated on removing barriers to cross-border commerce

“President Trump’s decision to impose universal tariffs is a bold and necessary step toward reversing decades of failed trade policies and rebuilding America’s manufacturing and agricultural industries,” said Zach Mottl, chairman of the Coalition for a Prosperous America.

Today’s actions focused on Trump’s concerns about illegal immigration and drugs flowing across U.S. borders. But his complaints about Canada and Mexico are far broader.

In the past, he also has lashed out over the large U.S. trade deficits with each country. Steep U.S. tariffs are aimed at incentivizing manufacturers to make their products in the United States with American workers rather than ship them here from aboard.

Many economists are skeptical about prospects for success. In Trump’s first term, factory employment rose by 462,000 before flatlining in the year before the pandemic.

For the typical American household, the tariffs will mean a loss of about $1,200 in annual purchasing power, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University, a nonpartisan research center.

American companies and consumers purchased about $1.3 trillion worth of merchandise from those three countries, including food, electronics, cars and car parts, and clothing, according to the Census Bureau.

Trump’s abrupt imposition of steep tariffs on goods moving across U.S. borders threatens significant disruption for regional supply chains that have become deeply intertwined over the past three decades. The auto industry in particular could soon be plunged into enormous upheaval.

There is no provision in the president’s orders for companies to seek an exemption from the tariffs for items that are unavailable from suppliers outside of North America, according to the White House official, who spoke under on condition of anonymity to share details on the orders.

Apart from the tariffs’ economic impact, Trump’s action is notable for calling into question one of the signature achievements of his first term in office: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

By placing tariffs on Canada and Mexico, Trump is effectively ripping up that deal, which replaced the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and took effect less than five years ago. Trump initially proclaimed his NAFTA rewrite “the most modern, up-to-date, and balanced trade agreement in the history of our country.”

The agreement included a provision for the three countries to review the deal on July 1, 2026, make recommendations for its improvement or begin a 10-year countdown to ending the pact. Today’s tariffs may be just a negotiating tactic, designed to wring concessions over border controls from Mexico and Canada, many Wall Street analysts believe.

But if they are wrong and the tariffs become permanent fixtures, “it would practically implode the USCMA trade deal,” economist Wilson Ferrarezi of TS Lombard wrote in a client note Friday.

Ken Salazar, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico under President Joe Biden, wrote on the social media site X that the tariffs “threaten billions in trade, weaken national security, and won’t solve the fentanyl or migration crises.”

Trump campaigned on a promise to impose the stiffest trade barriers since the 1930s. He first spoke of the measures he announced today on the first full day of his second term before expanding his tariff plans Friday to include the European Union as well as specific goods such as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, steel, cement and oil and gas.

The president’s announcement Saturday capped a prolonged administration debate. At issue were the legal rationale for tariff action; the timing; potential exemptions; and measure of success, according to two people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Since USMCA went into effect, U.S. trade with Mexico has grown especially fast.

U.S. reliance on Mexico as a source of imports has increased over the past several years. Through November 2024, almost 16 percent of the $3 trillion in merchandise that the United States purchased from other countries came from Mexican factories, according to Census Bureau data.

In 2017, before Trump’s first tariffs on Chinese products began reshaping global supply chains, around 13 percent of imports came from Mexico.

IBC Bank in Laredo, Texas, which specializes in servicing cross-border commerce has seen its assets grow by more than $3 billion or 27 percent since the new agreement took effect.

From his office window, Gerald Schwebel, the bank’s executive vice president, can see the steady flow of trucks carrying goods back and forth between the United States and Mexico, little more than five miles away. On the other side of the bank’s headquarters, freight trains belonging to the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway haul grain, lumber, fuel, chemicals, steel, cement, cars, food and appliances along a corridor that links the three nations.

Before NAFTA took effect in 1994, the unemployment rate in Laredo topped 10 percent. It’s hovered around 4 percent for the last few years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Laredo is a prime example of the benefits of North-South trade as a result of USMCA and NAFTA,” said Schwebel.

Indeed, jobs in the city — home to the nation’s largest inland port — have grown slightly faster than the national average since the new trade deal was implemented.

In other respects, USMCA has been less impressive.

Robert E. Lighthizer, Trump’s first-term trade negotiator, designed the deal to promote more domestic manufacturing than its predecessor.

Tougher “rules of origin” required 40 percent of passenger cars to contain parts produced by workers making an hourly wage of at least $16, far more than Mexican factories pay.

The most recent International Trade Commission assessment in 2023 found, however, that the new rules “had a negligible impact on GDP and aggregate employment in the U.S. economy.”

In the treaty’s first two-and-a-half years, only 35 new jobs in U.S. vehicle production were created, the ITC said.

For Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a key concern is the growing presence in Mexico of Chinese manufacturers. Many are there to serve Mexican customers. But U.S. officials worry that some Chinese company, especially makers of electric vehicles, may hope to use Mexico as a tariff-free backdoor to the U.S. market.

As the first North American trade war begins, some analysts say Mexico and Canada stand to lose more than the United States. The impact on those economies of a three-way tariff conflict could be several times larger than in the United States, which is much less dependent on trade, according to an analysis by S&P Global Ratings.

Mexican manufacturers in the auto and electrical equipment sectors could see significant output declines once tariffs take hold, according to a S&P Global Ratings analysis.

In Canada, the biggest losers are likely to be makers of paper products, rubber and plastics.⍐