Biden Posthumously Pardons Civil Rights Leader Marcus Garvey | Joe Biden

President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. A top Virginia lawmaker and advocate for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention also received pardons.

Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an attempt to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke out about racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.

Rev Martin Luther King Jr said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of black people “a sense of dignity and destiny”.

It is not clear whether Biden, who leaves office on Monday, will pardon people who have been criticized or threatened by President-elect Donald Trump.

Issuing preemptive pardons—for actual or imagined offenses by Trump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration—would stretch presidential powers in untested ways.

Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and issuances. He announced Friday that he commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. He also granted a broad pardon to his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for weapons and tax offences.

The president has announced that he commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their sentences to life in prison, just as Trump, an outspoken advocate of expanding the death penalty, takes office. In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of executions, 13, in a long timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.

A pardon frees a person from guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the penalty, but does not absolve the offense.

Others pardoned Sunday included Don Scott, the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019 and later became the first black speaker.

Biden also pardoned immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, who was convicted of a nonviolent offense in 2001 and was sentenced to two years in prison and faced deportation to Trinidad and Tobago; Kemba Smith Pradia, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years behind bars but has since become a prison reform activist; and Darryl Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison but now studies and writes about gun violence prevention.