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The First Posthumous Pardon by the President of the United States in 1999

published November 27, 2006

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They all have been granted, or are under consideration for, posthumous pardons.

The first posthumous pardon in the United States was granted by President Bill Clinton. In 1999, he posthumously pardoned Henry O. Flipper, who was born into slavery and became the first black American cadet to graduate from West Point. The U.S. Army's first black officer, Flipper was charged with embezzling Army funds and steadfastly maintained that he had been framed. Although he was acquitted of those charges, he was still court-martialed and dishonorably discharged in 1881 for "conduct unbecoming an officer."


In 1945, Lena Baker was put to death for killing a white man she claimed had held her in slavery and threatened her life. After a one-day trial before an all-white, all-male jury in Georgia, Baker was sentenced to die. 60 years after her execution, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles issued an official pardon and presented a proclamation to her descendants. However, it is noteworthy that the board did not rule that Lena Baker was innocent of the crime; instead, it determined that the decision to deny her clemency "was a grievous error, as this case called out for mercy."

Nicknamed "Papa Jack" and "L'il Arthur," Jack Johnson was slightly over six feet tall and weighed 212 pounds. He was a talented boxer in excellent physical condition, but during his era, white heavyweight champions drew the color line and refused to fight top black contenders. In December 1908, Tommy Burns became the first white fighter to agree to participate in a championship match with a black boxer. The fight was held in Sydney, Australia, and lasted 14 rounds before it was stopped. Films of the brutal fight were so graphic that they were censored in the United States. As a result of the match, Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion of the world.

Johnson had several white wives and mistresses, even though he lived in the segregated America of a century ago. In 1913, he was convicted under the Mann Act, or the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910. Johnson had brought one woman out of a brothel and traveled with her to another state. Although he married her and took her out of the brothel, he was prosecuted and sentenced to a year in prison. Johnson fled the United States to avoid his sentence. 91 years later, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and a bipartisan group of elected officials formed the Committee to Pardon Jack Johnson to bring the issue to the attention of President George W. Bush.

Marcus Garvey was born in St. Ann's Bay, Saint Ann, Jamaica, and is best remembered as an advocate of the Back to Africa movement, which encouraged those of African descent to return to their ancestral homelands. In Jamaica, he has been christened as his country's first national hero. After an investigation by J. Edgar Hoover and the U.S. Post Office, the Attorney General brought a charge of mail fraud against Garvey for selling stock in the failed Black Star Line. Garvey was found guilty of using the mail service to defraud, and, in 1925, he was convicted and sentenced to a five-year term in the Atlanta Federal Prison. 80 years later, Charles Rangel, the Democratic congressman from New York, introduced House Concurrent Resolution 57, which asked the president to grant a posthumous pardon to Marcus Garvey.

In the late 1950s, Clyde Kennard was a student at the University of Chicago and attempted to transfer to the University of Southern Mississippi on three separate occasions. Mississippi Governor James P. Coleman did not want to integrate the university and offered to pay for Kennard's tuition anywhere else in the state. Kennard refused the offer. In 1960, Kennard was framed for the crime of receiving stolen chicken feed and sentenced to seven years in prison to be served at Parchman Penitentiary, a high-security facility. The following year, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and died shortly after receiving clemency based on his medical condition. In 2006, Kennard's conviction was overturned; he was declared innocent and his arrest record expunged.

Another high-profile posthumous pardon recipient was Lenny Bruce; he was pardoned in 2003 by New York Governor George Pataki for a nearly 40-year-old obscenity conviction. Bruce was documented as having used more than 100 "obscene" words during a November 1964 performance at Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. Undercover police detectives in attendance testified against Bruce, and he was charged with "giving an obscene performance." Bruce was convicted following a six-month trial and mishandled his own appeal. He was 37 years old when he died of a drug overdose in 1966 with the conviction still on the books. And, finally, earlier this year, nearly 80 people convicted of sedition during World War II's anti-German frenzy received the first posthumous pardons in Montana state history.
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