Rep. Lemmons offered the following resolution:

            House Resolution No. 377.

            A resolution to memorialize the President of the United States and the Congress to posthumously exonerate the Honorable Marcus Garvey.

            Whereas, In 1923, one of the most egregious travesties of justice in the annals of American jurisprudence which befell upon a giant in world history - Marcus Mosiah Garvey - Provisional President-General of Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL ) still fills our nostrils with the stench of man's inhumanity to man; and

            Whereas, The Honorable Marcus Garvey was tried and convicted of using the U.S. mail system to defraud with barely a scintilla of evidence due to the virulent antipathy of the majority of Americans who were steadfastly opposed toward Africa-American empowerment in the socio-economic and political mainstream; and

            Whereas, The abomination, which pathetically masqueraded as a trial, was so antithetical to the moral and ethical tenets proselytized world-wide by the United States that President Calvin Coolidge commuted the five-year sentence in 1927 with the caveat that the Honorable Marcus Garvey be immediately deported to his native land Jamaica upon his release from the two-year incarceration in the Atlanta federal prison appropriately called Tombs; and

            Whereas, The ramifications of this legally sanctioned kidnapping and criminalization of this international icon of the Black Liberation Movement are reverberating throughout time to this very day as the high degree of intra-racial cohesion achieved Garvey's UNIA-ACL (6 to 11 million members world-wide) has never been remotely matched by any subsequent U.S. based African-American organization; and

            Whereas, The ruthlessly systematic, U.S. sponsored terrorism apparatus (founded by J. Edgar Hoover) arrayed itself against the legitimate initiatives by African-Americans to gain social, political, and economic justice in the 20th Century and beyond cut its vicious teeth in relentless suppression  the Garvey and the UNIA-ACL and metastasizing into the malignantly infamous  FBI Counter-Intelligence Program; and

            Whereas, Due to this sad legacy, extra-legal, deadly force, and covert measures are routinely employed by the legal infrastructure to thwart the exercise of unalienable rights of the African-American populace; now, therefore, be it

            Resolved by the House of Representatives, That we memorialize the President of the United States and the Congress to posthumously exonerate the Honorable Marcus Garvey to remove this festering blight on American history; and be it further

            Resolved, That copies of this resolution be submitted to the President of the United States, the President of the United State Senate, the Speaker of the United State House of Representatives, the Michigan congressional delegation, the family of the Honorable Marcus Garvey, and the Executive Council of the UNIA-ACL.