Dear Editor,

This is an open letter to US President Barack Obama.

We will spare you the long-winded debate about the significance of the work of Marcus Garvey, much of which was done in the United States in the early 20th century, fighting the rampant racism that engulfed black people there and indeed the world.

For his troubles Garvey faced persecution in your country, which ranged from assassination attempts, bitter attacks and sabotage of his programmes, and finally in 1925 imprisonment in Atlanta for five years, on a dubious charge of mail order fraud.

After much agitation by Garvey’s followers, the nervous President Coolidge commuted his sentence and deported him to Jamaica in November 1927 – a convicted felon.

There are perhaps two unmatched testimonies to Garvey’s influence: the first by your hero Martin Luther King Jnr who, on his visit in 1965 to Jamaica, while laying a wreath at Garvey’s shrine, graciously acknowledged that Marcus Garvey was the first black man to have started a mass movement in the United States: translated – without Garvey, there would be no Martin Luther King and indeed no President Obama. The second testimony is in your book, Dreams From My Father, where after a brief discussion on black nationalism you quoted Garvey’s signature motto: “Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will”.

Mr President, it is time to restore Marcus Garvey’s dignity and integrity and this you can do with your pen, by pardoning him now.

We write this letter for our son Justin Obama, aged six, and named long before you took your oath for the presidency of the United States.

Karl and Michelle Watts

msrevolve@gmail.com