A medical doctor by profession, 83-year-old Julius Garvey is the Long Island-based second son of Jamaica’s first national hero, black nationalist and political theorist Marcus Mosiah Garvey.

While Dr Garvey does not consider himself to be an activist, idealist, or political lobbyist by profession or desire, he has long campaigned to have his father exonerated of mail fraud conviction in America in 1923.

Mail fraud is a federal crime in the United States, and so the conviction was used as grounds to imprison and eventually deport the controversial Jamaican immigrant from the United States and quell what had been a rising movement of black nationalism and consciousness.

Marcus Garvey is recognised as a pioneer of the Pan-African movement; one of the first pro-black, economy-driven entrepreneurs, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); and forefather of the first staunch “Africa for the Africans” ideology.

Dr Garvey — and others — deem the charges as part of an agenda to historically trivialise what was essentially a trial against political ideals. Thirty years after his formal campaign began, Julius Garvey is visiting Jamaica to film footage for a documentary on his father’s life; and last week presented the medal his father received on his appointment as National Hero of Jamaica to the Liberty Hall museum in Kingston.

In an interview with the Jamaica Observer at Marcus Garvey’s birthplace in St Ann’s Bay last week, Dr Garvey recounts his campaign and reflects on his father’s ideals and how he sees them as timely today as ever before.

“We got pretty much involved in 1987, which was the centennial anniversary of my dad’s birth, with a special meeting convened with the House Judiciary Committee. Myself and my brother, Tony Martin, Rupert Lewis, John Henry Clarke, Judith Stein… a number of historians who know [what] Marcus Garvey was about were there to give testimony about Marcus Garvey to gain the exoneration,” he said.

Previous attempts were futile as Julius Garvey noted changes in Government meant the request kept revolving around the Judiciary Committee in circles, going nowhere. “Subsequent to that, we became involved with Congressman [Charles] Rangel who was the congressman from Harlem, where the US headquarters of the UNIA was based.”

A founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus political lobby, Rangel continued the process of appeal until last year, when the group changed their tactics.

“[Rangel] promulgated House resolutions from about 2004 onwards to exonerate Marcus Garvey, for this then to be done through the congressional process. He had several House resolutions; every year he would submit… but they never passed… That has continued over the years until we got to the stage with President Obama, now at the end of [his] second term, and the possibility is of a posthumous presidential pardon since we have had roadblocks to the whole process itself through Congress.”

Garvey noted that Jamaica has always supported the effort.

“All the prime ministers of Jamaica have been involved,” he said. “For example, Eddie Seaga — I think it was 1981. he was one of the first foreign dignitaries to be received by Ronald Reagan and he submitted for the exoneration… and then, of course, PJ Patterson has been a supporter of this as well. Recently in Panama we met and he was trying to get the Caricom representatives to make a statement to this effect. Portia Simpson Miller… she quotes Marcus Garvey all the time.. she has been involved and has been trying to get the [US] president to do something.”

In reference to Obama, Dr Garvey said he has ensured that the request for a pardon “is absolutely on his desk, so it’s not that he doesn’t know about it”. However, the national hero’s son has accused Obama of a lack of focus on Marcus Garvey and the case overall.

“He was here in Jamaica… he didn’t visit my father’s site, he turned left and went to the centre for soldiers who fought for the British Empire. This is very interesting that he would honour those Jamaicans and wouldn’t honour the first national hero. but anyway, that was his choice. So that has brought us up to date and I decided to make an effort to put this on his desk,” Dr Garvey said.

The process of appeal, as well as the subsequent switch to a request for a pardon have not been easy, as Dr Garvey has had to re-examine the case to prove that the fraud charges were unfounded.

“We had put together the legal case with [Washington, DC-based law firm] Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld. They had done an excellent job over the last two years of looking at the case, looking at the appeals process and so on, and analysed the case and put together the documentation of how fraudulent the case was and that there was no evidence,” he explained. “We presented that to the pardon attorney and subsequently to the president himself through Valerie Jarrett, one of his main advisors. We held a press conference… and have been public with pushing for this since then.”

Dr Garvey pointed out that this is neither a personal nor political vendetta for him, and maintained that description of the case as futile, pointless and even the general summarisation of the charges as fraud and all part of a larger agenda to bury and belittle an important part of black history.

“The thing is, it was a political trial… it’s not that somebody stole 10 shillings and, why bother, decriminalise it if you will… this was an ideology as a counterweight to white supremacy and this is the political problem… Marcus Garvey was attacked because he sought to promote the independence, and the full citizenship, and the full humanity of African people. As you know, African people are still downgraded now, even in [the present] generation, much less in Marcus Garvey’s generation,” he argued.

“We now have an independent Government, certainly here and all over the Caribbean and Africa… but even though we have independent governments we know who controls what, so there is still a degree of freedom we have not obtained. But Marcus Garvey’s philosophy was directed just at that — that we should be self-sufficient, use our own resources, and unite among ourselves to develop the direction in which we want to develop, so we control our own future and our own destiny… and that’s still in play as a political argument, so that’s the rub,” Dr Garvey said.

Asked what precedence has been set with other race politic pioneers such as Malcolm X and Dr Martin Luther King, Dr Garvey said to his knowledge their charges remain on record. “Especially in the case of Martin Luther King. I’m not sure why that has not been struck off… somebody should really be pushing along those lines as well… to indicate there was no criminal offence.”

He noted the move to expunge his father’s record in Jamaica was a first step toward what he sees as a gross oversimplification of Garvey and Garveyism overall, in the media here and abroad.

According to him, there are many erroneous messages permeating mainstream media about Marcus Garvey’s history — from documentaries that position him as living in a hut in Jamaica when he lived in a house on Lady Musgrave Road, being stoned by the public during his time in Jamaica, and to the Black Star Liner concept which Dr Garvey asserted was much wider in scope than merely as a ferry to return blacks to Africa.

“It’s the marginalisation of his ideas. how can we move all these black people back to Africa, that’s not the point. The point of the Black Star Liner was to unite African people because that was the means of communication in the 20s, it was by boat… that’s how mail went and everything else. The idea was to link Africa, the Caribbean, the USA. Raw materials from Africa where the resources were, manufactured goods in the Caribbean, and the United States where we, the diaspora, [could] have the opportunity to learn industrial skills so we could make commodities that would be traded between the three areas… It was not a people-moving programme, it was an economic programme,” he argued.

In the documentary film project underway, directed by Los Angeles-based and Jamaican-born Maroon Roy Anderson, Dr Garvey seeks to rectify some of these errors and reinforce the message at the heart of his father’s beliefs.

“Marcus Garvey was about the advancement of black people… Africa for the Africans, Europe for the Europeans, China for the Chinese… about everybody having their own and not encroaching on anybody else,” he said.

Dr Garvey also acknowledged that in contemporary society many people, black or otherwise, find the move to exonerate his father frivolous in the face of other prevalent issues, but he maintained this is “…about propaganda”.

“You first make somebody look ridiculous in the media… and then you trivialise everything that they do… that’s playing right into the power structure. It’s exactly what [former British Prime Minister David] Cameron said when he [visited Jamaica], ‘let’s move on’. and then what, history didn’t happen? Nobody is accountable for anything? We start with a fresh slate? That’s not what history is,” Dr Garvey argued.

“Everybody has a story. When you wake up in the morning your story is in your head, this is who you are as you go out in the day. Now, if your story is a blank, up until that day when you get out of bed then everything around you will determine who you are. But if you have a story, then you determine what you’re going to do out there. To me, Marcus Garvey is a story, and our enslavement is a story. Our history before that [of] our first empires, our first civilisations, those are our story,” he said.

“Every day I get up and I know that my people are the first human beings. I get up and I know that my people created the first civilisations in Ethiopia and in Egypt. I know that my people created the United States of America [and] the British Empire through their work, and I know they weren’t compensated. I don’t make it a chip on my shoulder, but I can’t deny that reality and say ‘let’s move on’,” he said.

“History is something that is continuous; history is what man has done and it’s also what man can do and should not do, and we learn from those mistakes and historical errors. It’s not simply a matter of pointing the finger at somebody else, but let’s say it, let’s be real. that was a mistake, to dehumanise large numbers of human beings and to kill them. We have to acknowledge that. Everybody has to look in the mirror, and looking in the mirror is facing your history,” he added.

While his own recollections of his father are few, as he was seven when his father died in England, Dr Garvey considers his work as contributing to a greater cause and insists that his actions are not borne of a sense of obligation, neither are his intentions personal.

“I’ve never felt that I have to follow in his footsteps, and I think I’m fortunate that I am the second son and not the first son… I am interested in the bigger picture, in Marcus Garvey’s legacy, so it’s not a personal vindication I am seeking. I want his ideas to be vindicated. It’s the larger [view] so that people can look at Marcus Garvey without tint or taint,” he said.