Son seeks pardon for Marcus Garvey

Long Island’s Dr. Julius Garvey is urging President Barack Obama to grant a posthumous pardon to his father, the Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanism leader Marcus Garvey, convicted in 1923 on fraud charges.

Garvey, 82, a semiretired surgeon from Sea Cliff, said he recently filed a petition with the U.S. Justice Department and the White House counsel and will announce his campaign for a pardon on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Garvey said the federal government tried to destroy his father’s civil rights movement with “a case riddled with errors” in a racially biased courtroom.

In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge commuted Marcus Garvey’s five-year sentence and deported him to Jamaica. Garvey said it’s time to try again for a pardon.

“We have a black president. It’s a second term,” he said in a telephone interview. “We think it’s the only way left.”