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 has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. He announced 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 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.
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 Sunday were:
- Don Scott, speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. He was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019.
- Immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, who was convicted of a nonviolent offense in 2001, 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. She has since become a prison reform activist.
- Darryl Chambers of Wilmington, Del., a gun violence-prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison.