President Biden on Sunday pardoned Marcus Garvey, one of the nation’s first Black civil rights leaders, more than 80 years after Garvey’s death. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s, a verdict many historians view as racially motivated. He was deported to his native Jamaica as part of his sentence, where he died in 1940. “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said of Garvey. A presidential pardon for Garvey has been on the radar for many years. Before then-President Barack Obama left office in 2017, numerous Congressional leaders recommended that he pardon Garvey. “We believe that Marcus Garvey meets the criteria for a posthumous pardon, based on his efforts to secure the rights of people of African descent and the utter lack of merit to the charges on which he was convicted,” Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) wrote in 2016. Biden, who leaves office Monday, made expansive use of his pardon powers during his four years in office. In addition to pardoning his son Hunter, Biden set the record for pardons and commutations in a term. In another sweeping decision in December, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row. Incoming President Donald Trump, a death penalty supporter, oversaw the executions of 13 people during his first term. With News Wire Services