Joe Biden Posthumously Pardons Marcus Garvey
Former West Kensington resident was a civil rights campaigner
The house in Castletown Road where Marcus Garvey lived. Picture: Google Streetview
January 27, 2025
Marcus Garvey, a civil rights campaigner and former resident of West Kensington, has received a posthumous pardon from Joe Biden in one of his last acts as US president.
In the late 1920s, the black activist and his wife Amy were regarded as one of the most significant human rights married couples of the 20th century. They lived at 57 Castletown Road in West Kensington.
He was a strong influence on Malcolm X who later came to the same address before returned to New York in 1965 where he was assassinated a short time later.
Biden’s pardon for Marcus Garvey relates to a conviction for the crime of mail fraud in the United States – an act now seen as having been politically motivated in an effort to silence him.
Following the conviction, Marcus was deported from America to Jamaica, his country of birth. He then made his way to London, where the Castletown Road address eventually became his home, along with his wife Amy, from March 1928 to October 1929.
The Rev Martin Luther King Jr 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."
In September last year, the Garveys' former home was honoured with a commemorative plaque as part of H&F's celebration of Black History Month.
The five-storey house, just round the corner from the Queens Club, was also variously home to the African statesman and nationalist Jomo Kenyatta and the Nigerian civil rights lawyer and leader of the West African Organisation Ladipo Solanke.
Cllr Sharon Holder, H&F Cabinet Member for Public Realm, applauded the plaque unveiling as an appropriate way to launch Black History Month.
"This is part of the council's wider programme to diversify our public realm by visibly celebrating the borough's Black heritage and history in a proactive way," she said.
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