Black Power in the Caribbean

1. Black Power in Caribbean Context

1 Black Power in Caribbean Context KATE QUINN . . . although the slogan Black Power originated with Stokely Carmichael in 1966, in ideological terms the struggle in the Caribbean has a history that is as old as the New World black experience itself. William Riviere, Black Power, NJAC and the 1970 Confrontation in the Caribbean, An Historical Interpretation The epigraph above captures both the broader and the narrower definitions of Black Power: Black Power as the long historical struggle for black liberation rooted in slavery and the transatlantic trade and Black Power as a particular political movement whose origins are attributed to African-American activism in the mid-twentieth-century United States. This chapter is concerned with Black Power as it was articulated in the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but its geographical lens is turned on the Caribbean, a region that experienced notable Black Power upheavals in parallel with those of its powerful northern neighbor. The potential for a Black Power movement to take hold in the Caribbean occupied the minds of both British and American authorities, who closely monitored events in the region for signs of political backwash from black mobilization in the United States. In the wake of the massive Black Power demonstrations in Trinidad and Tobago in 1970, both the CIA and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office produced reports attempting to assess the strength of Black Power sentiment and organization in the Caribbean.1 Both recognized that conditions in the Caribbean played a part in stimulating the growth of Black Power, the British conceding that “the inequalities of social and economic standards” gave “much scope for agitators in several Caribbean countries,” the Americans noting that “popular Kate Quinn 26 grievances” were “often real and compelling.”2 To understand the nature of the movement these conditions produced, this chapter will first address the fundamental question of what “blackness” meant within Caribbean conceptions of Black Power. It will then assess the ideological content of Caribbean Black Power through a consideration of its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. Last, it will address the relationship with the North American movement as a means of highlighting both the local specificities of the Caribbean movement and its transnational dynamics. Several Caribbean governments endorsed a moderate version of Black Power—publicly embracing its “legitimate” aspirations of black dignity, economic uplift, and cultural affirmation. This chapter, however, is concerned primarily with Black Power as it was articulated by groups and individuals outside of and most often in opposition to government and the mainstream political parties. In terms of “organized” Black Power, this includes the alternative or non-conventional political/radical groups that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the Afro-Caribbean Movement, later the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM), in Antigua; the United Black Association for Development (UBAD), in Belize; the Black Beret Cadre, in Bermuda; the United Black Socialist Party, in Dominica; the Abeng group, in Jamaica; the Forum groups, in St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada; and the Black Panther Organization (BPO), the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), the National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF), Pivot, Young Power, and the United Movement for the Reconstruction of Black Dignity (UMROBI), in Trinidad and Tobago. It also includes groups formed in an earlier period that came to identify strongly with Black Power, among these the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA ), in Guyana, established in 1964, and the People’s Progressive Movement (PPM), in Barbados, formed in 1965. As this list implies, the term Black Power spread over “a wide matrix of ideas, activities, and . . . organizations” in the region.3 Caribbean Black Power was not a singular ideology but a heterogeneous movement that encompassed a range of convergent and divergent political positions and concerns. In Trinidad, for example, NJAC consisted of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations, including students and lecturers from the University of the West Indies, radical trade unions, youth organizations, and cultural groups, all of whose members came into the alliance with different aims, political outlooks, and levels of engagement. Likewise, the Abeng group represented a number of different currents within the Jamaican political tradition, from those affiliated with the left wing of the People’s National Black Power in Caribbean Context 27 Party to Garveyites and Rastafarians. In Belize, the Black Power organization UBAD “had one executive but three different directions”: Black Muslim; “anti-Latin”; and “Malcolm X-Stokely Carmichael...