In the days before President Joe Biden’s final moments in office, Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor, received a call from a White House staffer. They told Hansford that Marcus Garvey, the revolutionary Jamaican leader who pushed for the unity of Black people and a collective return to Africa, would soon be posthumously pardoned for mail fraud.
Hansford dialed in Garvey’s son, Dr Julius Garvey, for a three-way call to break the news to him before it hit the newspaper circuit. As he thought of his nearly two decades of legal and advocacy work to help exonerate Garvey, Hansford remembered Garvey’s wife Amy Jacques who began the efforts to pardon him in 1923.
