On March 31, 2015, Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller raised the issue of the nation’s first national hero Marcus Garvey, who is classified as a criminal in the United States, with the U.S. President Barack Obama during his visit to the island.

Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller expressed to President Barack Obama it is the “deep desire of the government and people of Jamaica” to have Garvey exonerated of the conviction that got him deported back to Jamaica in 1927.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He built the UNIA-ACL into a mass movement in New York from 1919 to 1927 and urged blacks to be proud of their African ancestry. He also founded the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger line which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.