President Joe Biden promised he’s “not going anywhere” during a speech on his final full day as president.
Biden spoke to the congregation of Royal Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Sunday, in a message focused on the Civil Rights movement. After thanking them, the president offered a hopeful message to his supporters, much in contrast to his glum farewell address warning of a “tech-industrial complex” and “oligarchy” taking control over the country.
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“We know the struggle to redeeming the soul of this nation is difficult and ongoing,” he said on Sunday. “We must hold on to hope. We must stay engaged. We must always keep the faith in the better day to come.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he added, a remark greeted by applause.
Biden’s longtime friend, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), introduced Biden and assured him that his legacy was intact.
“So I want to say to you, good friend, very little appreciation has been shown recently but faint not. History will be very proud of you,” he said.
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A day before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Biden recognized how the black leaders he spoke to helped vault him to the Oval Office. “I owe you big,” he said.
On the same day, Biden pardoned five more people in one of his final acts as commander in chief, adding to his record of the most pardons granted by any president.
Four of the five men pardoned committed non-violent offenses, and the other (and the most well-known) was black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who has now been posthumously pardoned for mail fraud. The other four pardoned were Darryl Chambers, Don Leonard Scott, Jr., Ravidath “Ravi” Ragbir, and Kemba Smith Pradia.
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Additionally, the sentences of Michelle West and Robin Peoples were commuted from life imprisonment. Both will now be released on Feb. 18. He argued that the two had “demonstrated remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption.”
Garvey was a major figure in the early 20th-century civil rights movement. The White House described him as a “renowned civil rights and human rights leader.”
“Advocates and lawmakers praise his global advocacy and impact, and highlight the injustice underlying his criminal conviction,” it wrote.
Garvey was a black separatist and advocate of the “Back to Africa movement,” arguing that all black Americans should return to a black-ruled Africa. His support for segregation gave him a common cause with white supremacist groups, leading him to collaborate with the Ku Klux Klan, a move unpopular with other civil rights leaders of the time.
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Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923, a conviction he blamed on Catholics and Jews, who he alleged were prejudiced against him because he had met with the anti-Catholic and antisemitic Ku Klux Klan shortly before. President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence in 1927 and deported him to Jamaica.
Garvey’s legacy has been complicated, especially due to his sometimes hateful and violent rhetoric against Jews, white people, Catholics, and other groups. The leaders of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s went a different path than Garvey had advocated, and no mass migration to Africa ever took place.