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What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

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Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.


This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.

Saturday, February 01, 2025

The inside story of the pardon of Marcus Garvey - The Washington Post

The inside story of the pardon of Marcus Garvey

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

"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.

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.

“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.”

The inside story of the pardon of Marcus Garvey - The Washington Post

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