We will probably never know for sure why it took so long for a United States president to at least partially put right a terrible wrong done to black nationalist and Jamaica’s first National Hero Right Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey 100 years ago.

Regardless, Jamaicans and well-thinking people of African descent everywhere will be forever grateful to outgoing President Joe Biden for one of the last acts of his presidency.

That’s the issuing of a formal posthumous pardon to Mr Garvey, who was maliciously imprisoned in the United States in the 1920s and subsequently deported following an unjust charge of mail fraud.

President Biden’s action comes as a positive response, at long last, to decades of lobbying by black leaders and activists in the United States, Jamaica, and elsewhere as well as successive Jamaican governments.

While the presidential pardon falls short of the complete exoneration of Mr Garvey — which must remain a goal — we are at one with all those who insist that it is a major step in correcting a monumental act of injustice.

Born in St Ann on Jamaica’s north coast on August 17, 1887, Mr Garvey became among the more important figures of the 20th century because of his dedication — in the face of consistently fierce persecution — to championing the upliftment of black, down-pressed people everywhere.

Legendary US civil rights martyr, Rev Martin Luther King Jr, said of Mr Garvey that: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of black people “a sense of dignity and destiny”.

In terms of historical context, it’s important to recognise that Mr Garvey’s campaign came far less than a century following the abolition of chattel slavery in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, and roughly five decades after the end of the abominable system in the United Sates and wider Americas.

Even those among the black liberation movement of a century ago — who disagreed with Mr Garvey’s philosophically — took heart and inspiration from his unbending, unmitigated courage and determination. His message that black people must stand up for themselves in a hostile, white-dominated world reverberated in Jamaica, throughout the Americas, ancestral homeland Africa, and beyond.

Mr Garvey urged black people struggling for self-respect and identity in the aftermath of enslavement and unspeakable oppression to “canonise our own saints, create our own martyrs, and elevate to positions of fame and honour black men and women who have made their distinct contribution…”

Former Jamaican Prime Minister Mr P J Patterson tells us that the US presidential pardon “represents a powerful acknowledgement of the struggle for mental emancipation and self-determination that Marcus Garvey championed”. And further that it is a reminder of the “continuing relevance of the message of unity and self-reliance for peoples of African descent”.

Also, it seems to this newspaper, Mr Biden’s action serves as reminder of our own responsibility to systematically teach our people of the travails and struggles of their ancestors during and after their kidnapping in Africa, transportation across the Atlantic in chains, and barbaric enslavement in a strange land.

For, as Mr Garvey told all who would listen and read, a people without knowledge of their history and culture is “like a tree without roots”.