President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other black civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s.
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Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.
Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jnr said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of black people “a sense of dignity and destiny”.
It was not clear whether Biden, who leaves office on Monday, will pardon people who have been criticised or threatened by president-elect Donald Trump.
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Issuing pre-emptive pardons – for actual or imagined offences by Trump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration – would stretch the powers of the presidency in untested ways.