WASHINGTON — 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. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.
Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.
The 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’s not clear whether Biden, who leaves office 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 the powers of the presidency in untested ways.
Biden framed the commutations and pardons as in keeping with the “sacred covenant of our nation.”
Speaking to the Royal Missionary Baptist Church in South Carolina, Biden said that when people “we love fall and make mistakes,” Americans pick them back up.
“We don’t turn on each other. We lean into each other. That’s the sacred covenant of our nation. We pledge an allegiance, not just to an idea, but to each other,” Biden said.
Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. He also gave a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.
The president has announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment just as Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office. In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of executions, 13, in a protracted timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.
A pardon relieves a person of guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.
Among those pardoned on Sunday were:
— Don Scott, who is the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates in a chamber narrowly controlled by Democrats. He 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.
“I am deeply humbled to share that I have received a Presidential Pardon from President Joe Biden for a mistake I made in 1994 — one that changed the course of my life and taught me the true power of redemption,” Scott said in a statement.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Younkin, a Republican, said in a statement that Scott’s success and determination to “reshape his future” was “inspirational for all of us.”
—Immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, who was convicted of a nonviolent offence in 2001 and was sentenced to two years in prison and was facing deportation to Trinidad and Tobago.
—Kemba Smith Pradia, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years behind bars. She has since become a prison reform activist. President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence in 2000.
—Darryl Chambers of Wilmington, Delaware, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison. He studies and writes about gun violence prevention.
Biden commuted the sentences of two people:
—Michelle West, who was serving life in prison for her role in a drug conspiracy case in the early 1990s. West has a daughter, Miquelle West, who has written publicly about the struggle of growing up with a mother behind bars.
“I was only a little girl when my mom dropped me off for school one morning and never picked me up,” she said in a statement thanking Biden. “I have grown up and lived my entire adult life under the cloud of ‘mandatory life in prison.’ Today, after more than 30 years hoping and advocating every day that her life sentence could somehow be reduced, the clouds have parted. I finally see the sunshine and a bright future for us both.”
—Robin Peoples, who was convicted of robbing banks in northwest Indiana in the late 1990s and was sentenced to 111 years in prison. The White House said in a statement that Peoples would have faced significantly lower sentences today under current laws.
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Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Charleston, South Carolina and Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
