We’re getting a little tired of politicians jumping on and off the Marcus Garvey bandwagon for nothing but self-serving ends.

Every time that the anniversary of the birth of the National Hero comes around on August 17, there is bound to be someone announcing, with the usual fiery words, that they will seek to have Mr Garvey exonerated for trumped up charges in the United States.

The latest is Mrs Portia Simpson Miller, the Leader of the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP).

It is not difficult to conclude that these periodic calls for Mr Garvey’s exoneration, which are almost always soon forgotten once the anniversary is past, are meant to achieve political ends.

Of a truth, it is shameful that the Jamaican National Hero and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), still has this US conviction against his name after all this time. It is decidedly one of the travesties of history. It is difficult to explain how Jamaicans have continued to accept this blot against the name of our first national hero.

We know now that in 1919, Mr J Edgar Hoover, the special assistant to the US Attorney General and head of the ‘anti-radical division’ of the Bureau of Investigation, forerunner to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), after hounding Mr Garvey for his black rights activities, acknowledged in a special memorandum:

“Unfortunately, however, he [Garvey] has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation.”

Bu the efforts to bring an end to Garveyism continued apace and an investigation was launched into the activities of Mr Garvey and the UNIA, with the hope of finding grounds upon which to deport him as “an undesirable alien”.

When that failed, a charge of mail fraud was brought against him in connection with stock sales of his Black Star Line enterprise, after the United States Postal Service and the Attorney General entered the investigation.

The accusation was that Mr Garvey’s corporation had not yet purchased a ship for which stocks were being sold. As evidence, his accusers produced a single empty envelope which it claimed contained brochures announcing the stocks. One witnessed testified that he did not remember what was in the envelope and another perjured himself after admitting that the chief prosecutor told him to mention certain dates in his testimony. He also admitted being told to lie by the postal inspector that he mailed letters containing the purportedly fraudulent brochures.

Of the four Black Star Line officers charged in connection with the enterprise, only Mr Garvey was found guilty of using the mail service to defraud. On 23 June 1923, he was sentenced to five years in prison. His supporters, understandably, called the trial fraudulent.

He initially spent three months in jail and on bail resumed his activities until, after exhausting the appeal process, was taken into custody and began serving his sentence at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in February 1925.

Mr Garvey’s sentence was eventually commuted by President Calvin Coolidge and upon his release in November 1927, he was deported to Jamaica.

The UNIA, once said to have as many as four million members across the globe, is a pale shadow of its former self. And Mr Garvey’s ideals appear to die bit by bit with the passing years.

His conviction remains on the US books to the eternal shame of the Jamaican people.