In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

309 nine Party Politics I am not a labour leader,” Norman Manley declared to the large crowd that assembled to hear him on May 26, 1938. The barrister had volunteered to mediate the labor-inspired rebellion on the waterfront in Kingston. Hitherto , Manley was not identified with labor’s cause, but he had stepped in to fill the vacuum created in the leadership of the nascent labor movement by the arrest of Alexander Bustamante. Experiencing an epiphany, Manley became deeply immersed in the workers’ struggle for social justice . Two days after his declaration that he was not a labor leader, Manley was able to say that “now is the golden opportunity for forming a Labour Party in Jamaica.”1 The planning to create such a party was under way, he announced. Norman Manley, to be sure, was not apolitical. He was, for example, president of the Jamaica Welfare League, an organization of middle-class people founded in the 1930s to promote social and civic reforms in the island . Manley had eschewed any interest in electoral politics, however, preferring to concentrate on his very active and successful professional career. In 1937 he rejected an invitation to stand as a candidate for a seat on the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation. As he told his colleague O. T. Fairclough , “The problems of Jamaica, my dear Fairclough, are social and economic , not political.” The labor rebellion and his role in helping to resolve it sensitized him to the need to be more actively engaged in the political life of the country. As Manley admitted in 1942, “I had no previous political experience but my work for labour in the 1938 troubles convinced me of the need for organized political action devoted to the interest of the working class and small peasant.” Hitherto, Manley confessed, he “was a theoretic socialist handicapped by middle class reflexes.”2 A Fabian socialist, Manley was an admirer of the British Labour Party, using it as a model for the one he wanted to found in Jamaica. Marcus Garvey had formed the short-lived People’s Political Party in 1929, but the island had no functioning political party in 1938. The members of the “ 310 | Party Politics Legislative Council and the Parochial Boards of the parishes contested elections as individuals, not as candidates representing a political party. The first major public step on the road to founding a new political party occurredonAugust10,1938.Theoccasionwas“acrowdedmeeting”atCollegiate Hall in Kingston convened by the National Reform Association. Several prominent individuals attended, including Alexander Bustamante, Kenneth Hill, H. P. Jacobs, and Mrs. Mary Morris Knibb, a well-known social worker. Manley, the guest speaker, explained his involvement in the meeting: “I am not a professional politician. I have never, myself, taken any active part in politics as they exist in Jamaica today. But I am speaking as a Jamaican to Jamaicans. I am speaking as one who believes in the future of this country and as one who has watched and thought over it for many years. I have not myself any axe to grind; but I have ambitions for the thousands who, I know are more alive than ever today for the need for unity in this country.”3 Despite Manley’s disclaimer, this was really his first foray into Jamaica’s political arena. Unlike those Jamaicans who wanted to minimize the significance of the labor rebellion and saw it as the work of agitators, he believed it was “symptomatic of a great awakening and a real feeling in the people which, though without knowledge, or aim, or direction, sprang from a deep sense of wants, and from a deep longing for a greater unity and a greater share in belonging to a people as a whole.”4 Manley believed that some people had “witnessed the awakening of a moral sense, a moral energy and a moral desire to do something.” A political party, he argued, would promote unity and collective action to address the country’s problems. The party that he contemplated was “a party of the people, a party of the basic elements of the country out of which the future of the country must be built up.”5 Jamaica’s first truly modern political party was launched at a meeting held at the Ward Theatre on September 18, 1938. Alexander Bustamante was on the platform, along with the prominent attorney Noel Nethersole; C. A. Little, the member of the Legislative Council for Manchester; H. Anglin Jones...

Share