David Hinds, co-founder and lead singer for Grammy-winning band Steel Pulse, is delighted that Marcus Garvey has been posthumously pardoned by United States President Joe Biden for charges of mail fraud in the 1920s.

The Biden White House announced yesterday that Garvey was among five individuals granted pardons by his Administration, which ends today with the inauguration of Donald Trump as the US’s 47th president.

Civil rights activists have lobbied for many years for the St Ann-born Garvey to be cleared of dubious charges that saw him spending two years in an Atlanta, Georgia, prison.

“It has been a long time coming, based on the fact that Garvey, a prominent pro-African activist, was jailed based more to do with his ‘Back to Africa’ campaign than the actual charges he was accused of. He was a threat to America in regard to the African American liberated mindset that had raised a deep concern to the authorities,” said the singer-songwriter.

Hinds, who was born in the United Kingdom to Jamaican parents, said he discovered the message of Garvey through Burning Spear’s 1976 album, Marcus Garvey. His parents were also from St Ann but they spoke little about Garvey in their home.

The 68-year-old Hinds wrote Worth His Weight in Gold (Rally Round) — a song from Steel Pulse’s
True Democracy album — in tribute to Garvey, who died from a stroke in London in 1940 at age 52.

Garvey’s body was exhumed and shipped to Jamaica in November 1964 at which time he was given an official funeral by the Government.

Five years later, he was made the country’s first national hero.

Hinds noted the timing of Biden’s gesture.

“What’s even more significant is that next month will be the 100th anniversary of Marcus Garvey starting that jail sentence,” he said.

A printer by profession, Garvey left Jamaica in the early 1900s and eventually settled in Harlem, New York, which was a mecca for black thinkers like writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. He became a leader of the Harlem Renaissance but, hounded by United States law enforcement, he was sentenced to five years in prison in June 1923.

Garvey was imprisoned in 1925, but in November 1927, after his sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge, he was released that month and deported to Jamaica.