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I Beg Your Pardon, Joe? Suddenly Marcus Garvey Matters?
As I sit here on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, reflecting on the immeasurable sacrifices borne by one of our greatest champions for justice, I can’t ignore the bitterness gnawing at me. Yesterday, just one day before we celebrate Dr. King’s relentless hunt for equality, President Joe Biden announced the posthumous pardon of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. — a man whose perseverance, courage, and foresight were systematically dismantled by the very bureaucracy that murdered King and continue to oppress his people to this day.
The timing is almost poetic, but not in the way Biden might expect. This pardon doesn’t feel like redemption. It feels like betrayal — a ham-fisted, performative gesture dressed in the trappings of progress while Garvey’s unfinished fight for liberation and reparations remains a festering wound, ignored by the very authorities who pretend to hold him in such high regard.
This can’t be the same Joe Biden who once aligned himself with segregationists and proudly opposed busing as a means to desegregate schools. The same Joe Biden who, in the 1970s, stood shoulder to shoulder with those that fought to keep Black children out of better learning institutions, declaring that he didn’t want his kids growing up in a “racial jungle.”
