October 15, 2012

Jamaican Hero, American Criminal?


On October 15, 2012, National Heroes Day, the Jamaican government will be holding island-wide ceremonies to honor the heroes who imagined the nation into existence: Nanny of the Maroons, Sam Sharp, Paul Bogle, George William Gordon, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Norman Washington Manley, and Sir Alexander Bustamante. Among the heroes of the twentieth century, only one, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, achieved international status as a liberator of the Jamaican people and as the inspiration for independence movements in the Caribbean and Africa.

Yet, sadly, amidst the pomp and circumstance with the flowers and the twenty-one gun salutes, Marcus Garvey, who once described America as “the greatest democracy in the world,” remains as far as the US government is concerned, a convicted felon.





This tarnishing of a Garvey’s good name and reputation continues, despite the Hon. Charles Rangel’s introduction on February 10, 2009, in the United States House of Representatives, H. Con. Res. 44:111th, which demonstrated conclusively that Marcus Garvey was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned by the United States Department of Justice on charges of mail fraud.

It is for this reason, the Marcus Garvey Celebrations Committee (South Florida), Rootz Foundation, and the Institute for Caribbean Studies, have joined to petition President Barack Obama to exonerate the Right Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the first National Hero of Jamaica, a nation that has been a staunch ally of the USA for over fifty years.

If you would like to join in this cause to end this vulgar contradiction please sign the petition:

http://signon.org/sign/exonerate-marcus-garvey?source=c.url&r_by=4631897


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