Granby Street in Hartford, Connecticut has been renamed Marcus Garvey Way after the late Jamaican-born legendary black leader.
The re-naming ceremony took place on last Saturday, September 30th with Mayor of the city of Hartford, Eddie Perez along with Dr. Julius Garvey, son of the late Universal Negro Improvement Association founder, on hand for the event.
The renaming ceremony comes as the Jamaican Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller, commissioned a legal study of U.S. court documents from the trial of Garvey, hoping to prove he was unfairly convicted. And as Councilmember Charles Barron called on August 16th for a full pardon for Garvey.
Garvey was born in St. Ann's, Jamaica on August 17, 1887 and moved to the U.S. in 1916, two years after founding the UNIA. As his popularity rose in the U.S., he launched the Black Star Shipping Line but a host of legal entanglements led to charges that he had used the U.S. mail system to defraud prospective investors in the line.
He was eventually sentenced to a five-year term in Atlanta. In 1927, his half-served sentence was commuted and he was deported to Jamaica by order of President Calvin Coolidge. In 1935 Garvey traveled to England where he died on June 10, 1940 in West Kensington.
