Request For Pardon For Marcus Garvey Rejected By The Obama Administration

Obama Rejects Marcus Garvey Pardon Request
(Salute to the co-founder of Afro Spear for this topic at hand)

Continuing on with the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter who saw the message and infrastructure that Marcus Mosiah Garvey built up to migrate Black people forward without the framework of American Politics - the Obama Administration has rejected the pardon request to clear Garvey's name.

As I have noted several times per my previous research - in addition to the dogged attempts of J Edgar Hoover - operating in a capacity as a federal agent in a pre-FBI era the same forces in Black America that attacked Booker T Washington also conspired with Hoover to remove Garvey  from his perch of power.

When Hoover succeeded in getting Garvey ('s) Black behind locked up union leader A. Phillip Randolph penned a letter to Hoover offering any assistance that he could in deporting Garvey back to Jamaica.



From A.Philip Randolph - American Experience (Some of you won't believe me unless you saw it in writing from another source)

When Marcus Garvey arrived in Harlem seeking followers for his movement, Randolph became one of his strongest supporters. In the spring of 1917, Randolph, who at the time was a respected Harlem soapbox orator, presented Garvey to a Harlem audience and asked that they listen to the young man from Jamaica who was "one of the militant black fighters for social and racial justice." Randolph was particularly impressed by Garvey's ability to reach masses of people with his spellbinding speaking voice.

By 1920, however, Randolph and other influential black leaders had begun to question Garvey's motives and the overall feasibility of the Garvey movement, and The Messenger began to publicly critique the movement. The opposition of Randolph, Owen and others eventually escalated into the "Garvey Must Go" campaign calling for federal intervention and Garvey's deportation. Randolph specifically questioned the plausibility of a black shipping line and the creation of a Universal Negro Improvement Association-controlled empire in Africa.

Let is index where we are:

1. The Prevailing Progressive Force In Black America - Hated Booker T Washington as an "Uncle Tom"


1. They rejected his call for Black people to focus on building up "organic competencies" for immediate trade instead of pursuing the course of "Social Justice" without the necessary leverage


2. Booker T Washington and Marcus Garvey were pen pals - expressing mutual admiration


2. The Prevailing Progressive Force In Black America - Hated Marcus Garvey


1. In my book Garvey, while he did have his flaws and had thugs that intimidated his critics - erected the most successful "Organic National Black Community Infrastructure For Black Mobility" than any other group - with respect to that which stood against Black people at the time.


1. Today various Black Christian Churches and the Nation Of Islam have amassed more money on relative terms.  They don't have the scale and scope that UNIA had.


3. Some of Malcolm X's family members were "Garveyites" and from this the reformed "Malcolm Little" would base his Black Nationalist foundation upon what his family members had noted to him


4. W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter campaigned to have the Black people who could vote to support then candidate Woodrow Wilson for President.   As a Progressive they figured that he would be the best hope for Black people


1. When Wilson got into office he resegregated the federal offices in Washington DC telling his intention to show any Negro who assumed that a vote in his favor would sway his opinions "how mistaken they were".  

What about what Marcus Garvey was doing as he grew an increasingly large set of Black followers - creating JOBS, and lifting up their self-worth - proved to be threatening to Randolph and Du Bois?   What caused these Progressives to hate Garvey so much that they would conspire with their COMMON OPPRESSOR in order to remove the "Threat" that the US Federal Government and the Black Progressives had in common?  

Is there any evidence of this same "Only One Black Thought At A Time Can Stand" at play today?

The "Garvey Must Go" Campaign
PBS - American Experience

When Marcus Garvey first arrived in the United States in 1916, he quickly found his way to many of New York's most prominent black radical activists and intellectuals. And, at least briefly, Garvey enjoyed their support. But by 1920, A. Philip Randolph and other black leaders, some of whom had supported Garvey after his arrival in the United States, came to believe that Garvey's program for black advancement was unsound, and that Garvey himself was a charlatan. Though they admired his skills as a propagandist, these prominent black critics derided Garvey's proposed solutions for the problems of African Americans. They believed that his plans for black progress, including the Black Star Line and the establishment of a pan-African empire, were unrealistic and ill-advised; they considered the Universal Negro Improvement Association's grandiose titles and military regalia to be preposterous; and they thought Garvey, with his assumption of a regal posture under the title "Provisional President of Africa," to be little more than a self-aggrandizing buffoon. A. Philip Randolph, who had introduced Garvey to his first American audience on a Harlem street corner, said Garvey had "succeeded in making the Negro the laughingstock of the world." Federal investigations into the finances of the Black Star Line, along with a blistering analysis of the shipping line by W.E.B. Du Bois in the NAACP's Crisis magazine, gave fuel to Garvey's black critics. Randolph personally critiqued the economic feasibility of the Black Star Line in The Messenger , an influential magazine he co-edited with Chandler Owen, and accused Garvey of squandering the hard-earned money of his hard-working, poor supporters. Black opposition to Garvey coalesced into what came to be known as the "Garvey Must Go" Campaign. Supporters of the campaign, known collectively as the Friends of Negro Freedom, intended to unmask Garvey as a fraud before his black supporters. They also appealed to the federal government to step up investigations of irregularities in the Black Star Line, and to look into alleged acts of violence on the part of Garvey's inner circle. The "Garvey Must Go" Campaign gained momentum after Garvey held a secret meeting with Edward Young Clarke, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, in June 1922. Immediately afterward, Randolph and Owen's Messenger magazine published an article entitled "Marcus Garvey! The Black Imperial Wizard Becomes Messenger Boy of the White Klu Klux Kleagle." Black leaders were further infuriated when they learned that Garvey, at a speaking engagement in New Orleans, remarked that because black people had not built the railroad system, they should not insist on riding in the same cars with white patrons. The Messenger vowed to begin a vigorous editorial campaign against Garvey, and promised to "[fire] the opening gun in a campaign to drive Garvey and Garveyism in all its sinister viciousness from the American soil." The campaign from this point on was characterized by vitriolic personal attacks on both sides, and by escalating threats of violence. "Garvey Must Go" meetings were violently dispersed by Garvey's followers. A. Philip Randolph received the severed hand of a white man in the mail. It was accompanied by a note signed by the K.K.K., but Randolph believed the hand had been sent by the U.N.I.A. On January 15, 1923, a group of eight prominent African Americans petitioned Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty asking the U.S. government to continue its prosecution of Garvey on charges of mail fraud, and to investigate acts of violence attributed to Garvey's followers -- among them, the assassination in early January 1923 in New Orleans of J. W. H. Eason, Garvey's former deputy, who had been expelled from the movement at the August 1922 Convention on charges of personal misconduct. The letter of petition ended by urging the Attorney General to "use his full influence completely to disband and extirpate this vicious movement," and imploring him to "vigorously and speedily push the government's case against Marcus Garvey for using the mails to defraud." Garvey would eventually be convicted of mail fraud charges in 1923. He was jailed in the Atlanta federal penitentiary in February 1925, where he would serve almost three years of a five-year sentence. And in 1927, Garvey would be deported from the United States, never to return.

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Article From Carib Life Central

THE already strained relations between the Barack Obama administration and the Government of Jamaica could be in for more severe testing, as the US government now says the granting of a pardon to Jamaica’s National Hero Marcus Garvey would be a waste of time and resources, since Garvey has been dead for ages.
A report in the Sunday Observer says the flat rejection of a request for a presidential pardon for Jamaica's first national hero, the Right Honourable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, follows an eventual reply to Florida-based Jamaican-born attorney Donovan Parker, who has been writing to president Obama every week since January, requesting a posthumous pardon for Garvey.
Many believe that Garvey was set up by the J Edgar Hoover-led Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), fearful of his widening popularity among downtrodden US blacks.
Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud totalling US$25 in June 1923, and after spending two years and nine months in an Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, was deported from New Orleans, Louisiana to Jamaica on a ship.
The Sunday Observer says it acquired a copy of one letter sent by Parker to the US President, and the first ever reply from the White House on the matter .
"Marcus Mosiah Garvey is also a National Hero of Jamaica, West Indies and a leading forebear of the African American civil rights experience," wrote Parker.