JAMAICA | The Caribbean demands Exoneration, Not Pardon for Marcus Garvey says PJ Patterson

KINGSTON, Jamaica, February 16, 2022 - Former Jamaican prime minister and  Queen's Counsel, P. J. Patterson, says the litany of travesties surrounding the wrongful conviction of Marcus Garvey should be more than sufficient to persuade US President Joe Biden  to quash the verdict of guilt and clear the blot against Garvey’s good name.

“There was no evidence given during the trial on which a conviction could be based” and that is also the view of learned jurists and eminent trial lawyers” Patterson told a collaborative forum put on by The P.J. Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy and The UWI Centre for Reparation Research, in a united Caribbean call at the University of the West Indies to ‘Exonerate Marcus Garvey’.

In his address, titled “The Exoneration of Marcus Garvey”, Mr. Patterson, said “The petition which we ask you to sign today is for a posthumous exoneration; This is in contrast to a request for Presidential pardon, and rests squarely on the central pillars of law!” 

“Pardons,” Patterson explained, “are to grant immunity or to remove any disabilities, such as the right to vote, against convicted felons.  Exoneration is for the innocent! – those who should have been acquitted at trial because there was no wrong-doing proven.

“I contend”, Mr. Patterson detailed, - “There was no evidence given during the trial on which a conviction could be based.

Mr Patterson pointed to what he described as a trial process “replete with glaring instances of prosecutorial misconduct, including State Attorneys suborning evidence from key witnesses and that in recommending clemency, to President Calvin Coolidge,  three years after Garvey’s wrongful imprisonment, Attorney General Sargent subsequently opined that, “the facts as reported to the Department are severely stated and susceptible of modification and explanation.” 

“I submit the evidence was never there and Garvey had no case to answer”, said Mr. Patterson, pointing to the racist views of the Trial Judge, who he said, “should have recused himself” as well as  the systemic prejudices in the prevailing justice system which resulted in a trial by Garvey’s so-called peers consisting of an all-white jury.

He also contended that the principal witness was a nineteen-year old who had been coached by the prosecutors to lie and who admittedly proceeded to commit perjury in his testimony.

“Egregious though these errors in the proceedings were, Mr. Patterson contended, there is yet one irrefutable ground why the conviction cannot stand; the offence was mail fraud. To succeed, the State had to establish inter alia, that mail was sent through the postal service from a post in the Southern District of New York by Marcus Garvey, or on his orders soliciting shares in a company which was defunct or bankrupt.”

He called into question, the evidence placed before the Trial Court, pointing out a number of questionable actions positioned as evidence, involving a ‘questionable empty envelope’ bearing the Black Star line name - the only ‘proof’ the envelope, exhibit offered;  as well as the forgetful witness; and no secondary evidence to support  the envelope’s contents.

“Where is the proof that it was mailed or caused to be mailed by Marcus Garvey? '' he asked.  “What was in it, if anything?  How can it be assumed that it contained fraudulent matter?   How can the Jury be asked to speculate on the contents of this empty envelope? questioned Mr, Patterson.

There is not a scintilla of evidence that Garvey placed or caused to be placed in the mails the circular or letter described or referred to in this count of the indictment. How can any conviction turn on an empty envelope where its contents cannot be assumed or ascertained?   

Mr. Patterson argued that “the Judge must have been unaware of two simple legal tenets or chosen to discard them: (i) He who asserts must prove. (ii) It is for the State to prove beyond reasonable doubt, what were the contents of the envelope and that they were inculpatory.

“For these compelling reasons, this global campaign is not begging for mercy, or pleading for pardon as Marcus Garvey committed no crime.  Marcus Garvey deserves the support of every man and woman in every continent and island who loves justice and equality under the law”; declared Mr. Patterson.

It is more than 100 years ago since this manifest act of injustice was perpetrated on Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a man whose only conviction was to ‘Get Up, Stand Up, Stand Up for your Rights; concluded Mr. Patterson in his argument for Garvey’s exoneration.

Patterson, in reiterating a quote by Marcus Garvey said , “For three hundred years the Negroes of America have given their life-blood to make the Republic the first among the nations of the world, and all along this time there has never been even one year of justice.”

He  pointed to the continued incidences of outright racial oppression, of lynching and burning as, “crimes against the laws of humanity, and a crime against the God of all mankind.” These incidences he described as ‘gospel to the ears of 370,000 African- Americans,  who had fought against Nazism and Fascism in Europe but returned home to face violence and racism in the riots of East St. Louis, of Chicago in 1919,  of sharecroppers in Washington D.C., of the destruction of a black flourishing Town in Rosewood; which he said was ‘simply deplorable and untenable’.

“In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous black community had been razed to the ground by a white mob. - The white incendiaries were insisting that the sons and daughters of slaves existed to provide cheap labour to pick cotton and cut cane; not to build a Black Wall Street.”

These and other atrocities, he said, impelled Garvey to lift his “voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be dispensers of democracy.”

After many failed attempts to find criminal wrong-doing and reasons to deport Garvey as an undesirable alien, He said FBI Director , “J. Edgar Hoover sought to imprison this man who had the audacity of launching The Black Star Line.  He indicted Garvey and three Directors on charges of “conspiracy to use the mail in furtherance of a scheme to defraud.”

Supporting addresses were also made by Prime Minister, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr The Honourable Ralph Gonsalves; Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, Jamaica, The Honourable Olivia Grange, CD, MP; Global Chief of Embo Kingdom, HH Paul J. Eganda, and  Diplomat and Chair, The UWI Open Campus Council, Ambassador Dr June Soomer.

The event which began, at 10:00 a.m., was simultaneously broadcast via the Internet. It included speakers: Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor, The University of the West Indies (UWI); The Most Hon. P. J. Patterson, ON, OCC, PC, QC, ‘Statesman in Residence’, The UWI and Director, The P.J. Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy;  Dr. Julius Garvey, Organizer, ‘Justice4Garvey Campaign’ and President, the AIDO Network International;   Professor Rupert Lewis, UWI Professor Emeritus; and Professor Verene Shepherd, Director, The Centre for Reparation Research; as Moderator.

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