Coral Gardens 1963: The Rastafari and Jamaican Independence

Author(s): Horace G. Campbell

Source: Social and Economic Studies , March 2014, Vol. 63, No. 1 (March 2014), pp. 197-
214
Published by: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of
the West Indies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24384103

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Social and Economic Studies 63: 1 (2014): 197-214 ISSN: 0037-7651

Notes and Comments

Coral Gardens 1963: The Rastafari and Jamaican

Independence

Horace G. Campbell

A personal recollection
In May 2013 at the celebrations of fifty years of African Unity in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Rastafari brethren and sistren from the
community of Shashamane were, for a moment, excluded from the
place of the meeting, because in the eyes of some bureaucrats, their
presence would diminish the nature of the celebrations of the
African Union. The brothers and sisters had been invited to

participate in a symposium on Being Pan African as one of th

many events celebrating the quest for African Unity. Three terms
dignity, emancipation and unity were repeated and elaborated on
by presenters who participated in the celebrations to mark fifty
years of Pan Africanism and the quest for African Unity. Tho
African bureaucrats who were unfamiliar with the history of Afric
and Pan Africanism would not have known that the Rastafari
movement had been one of the bedrock forces in the struggle for
dignity, emancipation and unity. Bob Marley sang the signature
song "Africans Unite", putting into music the book of Kwame
Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite.
The debate over whether these brothers and sisters could

participate in one of the seminal discussions on Pan Africanism

brought to the forefront many of the contradictions between the
Rastafari movement and mainstream politics whether in Africa, the
Americas, the Caribbean or Europe. The standoff, which was only
resolved when some members of the meeting held their ground
against some lower level bureaucrats, brought to the fore the
questions of access to public spaces and how the ideas and practices
of the Rastafari challenged mainstream society (called the
Babylonian system in Rastafari parlance). This challenge to the right
of the Rastafari to participate in an international Pan African
conference is reminiscent of the numerous challenges to the rights
of poor African descendants in all parts of the planet and to the
Rastafari, in particular. The challenges to the poor in 2013 brought

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198 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

the questions of people's rights to the center of international politics.

The privatization of public spaces in this era again brings into
question the right of citizens to democratically participate in all
aspects of public life. Will the next fifty years be dominated by
privatization principles and the ideals of individualism, patriarchy
and greed?
It was fifty years ago, on 11 April 1963, when the Jamaican
state used an altercation at Coral Gardens on the outskirts of

Montego Bay to mount a violent campaign against the Rastafarian

community in Western Jamaica. The Coral Gardens incident
brought to the fore the continuing struggle for the rights of the black
poor in Jamaica. At the moment of the celebration of fifty years o
independence on 6 August 2012, the Jamaican state published
vision of Jamaica 2030, describing this National Development Plan
as a roadmap for Jamaica "the place of choice to live, work, raise
families and do business." However, this vision reflects the same
intellectual poverty which has brought Jamaica to its present point
of economic stagnation, food insecurity, massive unemployment
and underemployment and criminal violence against the poor. The
roots of the current state violence and repression go back to the
days of Coral Gardens when the Prime Minister gave the police
license to kill by stating, "Bring them in dead or alive." The Coral
Gardens struggle involved a number of Rastafarian brethren
including Rudolph Franklyn, the Bowen brothers and Felix
Waldron along a few others. A confrontation with the police on the
morning of Thursday 11 April left 8 persons dead. Of these eight,
three were Rastafari, one was an overseer for the Kerr-Jarrett
properties, one was an infamous police person, Corporal
Melbourne, while other Rastafari brethren were left to die or
escaped the scene only to succumb to their battle wounds later.
As in many cases of confrontation between the poor and the
powerful, the narrative of the powerful is what gets reported in the
mainstream media and then gets imprinted in the popular memory.
This has been the case with the Coral Gardens uprising where the
popular media represented the uprising as Rastafarians going wild
and killing policemen. This narrative of criminalizing the poor
when they defend their rights has been taken to a new level with
anthropological studies of social movements such as the Rastafari
movement which fail to interrogate the conditions of capitalist
oppression and racist ideas about the inferiority of Africans.

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 Coral Gardens 1963 199

On deeper reflection, the ways in which the history of t

Rastafari is represented in the absence of deep historical resear
much more troubling than limitations of resources or f
methodologies. The intellectual challenges associated wit
understanding of the Rasta are part of the challenge of repres
the oppressed in a moment of intellectual crisis. The world i
period of capitalist crisis (wars, revolution and counter- revolu
and the Pan African movement will have to be at the center of these

debates on the way forward. At the African Union there is a call for
a united and prosperous African Union by 2063 and it is the
responsibility of the progressive Pan Africanists and Rastafari to
give meaning and content to that unity.
From the perspective of this writer, the clash at Coral Gardens
was one reflection of two world views in Jamaican society, which is
also a reflection of two world views in the wider world. On one side

there was the view of the planter class and their intellectual word
smiths, and on the other side were the masses of poor blacks who
wanted to transcend the racial hierarchies and idea of the sanctity of
private property. Jamaican society, after the genocide of the First
Nation people, was organized around plantation agriculture and
ideas about individual wealth. The Spaniards, the first conquerors
after 1492, organized the production of rum, sugar and tobacco on
plantations. When the English military defeated the Spaniards, the
land was bequeathed in large lots to English officers and aristocrats.
For three hundred years the property relations of the Jamaican
society were buttressed by the legal principles of English law along
with moral and cultural tropes about the superiority of the
Enlightenment and 'modernity.' Ideas of white supremacy were
legitimized within the colonial rhetoric about civilizing inferior
beings. This worldview included an understanding of the
inviolability of private property, the hierarchy of human beings and
the right to use violence and divisive tactics to maintain the
hegemony of private capital accumulation.
On the other side were humans who believed that human life
was more important than private property. Rastafari in Jamaica and
all over the world claimed the right to be 'earth citizens', and a core
principle of the Rastafari movement was that Rastas had the right
and freedom to exist. There is also the core principle of the
movement that humans exist as part of a wider universe, and hence,
are part of nature. This belief places Rastafari as citizens of the

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200 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

planet rendering them aloof from struggles over residential

citizenship and crude materialism. The Rastafari brought forward a
level of spirituality to separate themselves from the rituals and
religiosity that legitimized oppression.
In the specific case of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica and
the confrontations that exploded in Coral Gardens, the Rastafari
claimed freedom of movement for themselves and for other

oppressed Jamaicans. They were being prevented from walking

along areas of the Coast close to the Half Moon Bay Hotel. These
areas were being segregated in order to make the Montego Bay area
ready for international investments in tourism. The fact that Coral
Gardens falls within the area of the historic Rose Hall plantation,
which was the scene of major rebellions during the time of
enslavement, was not lost on the black citizens at the time.
This writer vividly remembers that weekend because it was
the moment when my younger sister joined the ancestors, and on
the same Holy Thursday we interred her mortal remains. Our
family lived in the same communities as the Rastafari who were to
succumb to the violence of the state after the planter elements used
coercion and divisiveness to subdue the Rastafari. This writer knew
scores of the brothers and sisters who were incarcerated and had
their locks trimmed. That weekend is now known among freedom
loving Caribbean persons as the weekend of 'Bad Friday.' There is
now a documentary named 'Bad Friday' which uses the testimonies
of many of the survivors of this repression.1 One police person has
written his account of the confrontation.2 While the title of the book
used the phrase 'uprisings' the book's contents is like a criminal case
against the Rastafari who were accused of terrorizing Jamaicans.
Within the popular understanding of what took place, there is
clarity from within the Rastafari Community that this Coral
Gardens killing was one more episode in the long wave of repres
sion against the ideas and philosophies of African Redemption.
However, in the wider Jamaican society far more educational work

1 Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens, This Film was directed by Deborah A.
Thomas, John L. Jackson Jr., and Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn. It is distributed
through Third World Newsreel. http://www.twn.org/catalog/pages/cpage.
aspx?rec=1306
2 Selbourne Reid, Rastafari Uprisings at Coral Gardens 1963, self published. Rex
Nettleford wrote the book, Mirror Mirror: Identity Race and Protest in Jamaica,
Sangsters Books, Kingston 1970. There are two paragraphs on the Coral Gardens
uprising in this book.

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 Coral Gardens 1963 201

needs to be undertaken to clarify the clash between two

views at Coral Gardens.

The continuities from that period of repression are to be found

in many areas of social life of Jamaica and the Caribbean. The
children of the class forces that orchestrated that repression are now
aligned with nationalists, and even former Rastas, who are conduits
for the exploitation of the people. The intelligentsia has joined in
the study of the superstructural elements of the Rastafari movement
instead of exposing the ideas and institutions that legitimize the
oppression of the poor. Today in all parts of the world, gated
communities and the privatization of space are signs of the way
private property and the protection of private property has become
all pervasive, to the point where the protection of property is
supposed to be more important that the protection of human life. In
2012, the killing of young Trayvon Martin in a gated community in
the state of Florida brought to the world's attention the disrespect
for black life in the preservation of property. David Harvey in his
study on the right to the city and the struggles over urban spaces
had maintained that:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to
access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by
changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an
individual right since this transformation inevitably depends
upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes
of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities

and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet
most neglected of our human rights.

It is this common right to urban spaces and to participate in all

spheres of social life which underpins this note on the question of
independence in Jamaica and the Rastafari movement. In 2012,
Jamaican society celebrated 50 years since the attainment of inde
pendence. There were gala celebrations and numerous commen
taries about the achievements of Jamaican society after 50 years.
This meeting on the commemoration of Coral Gardens falls within
the same moment as the commemoration of independence and
affords another opportunity to reflect on the meaning of inde
pendence from the point of view of the working poor in Jamaica.
Since confrontation between the police force and the Rastafari in
1963, Jamaican society has seen the expansion of the Rastafari
movement as well as the expansion of repression and extrajudicial

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202 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

killing by the police and military forces. Jamaica has achieved

international notoriety as a society where hundreds of poor people
are killed every year.
In this presentation, the author wants to use his own
relationship with the communities and the Rastafari movement to
offer one interpretation of Coral Gardens 1963. One of my objectives
is to reflect on Rastafari and their quest for freedom and
emancipation, and how the Coral Gardens uprising formed one link
in the chain of the struggle for basic dignity in the Caribbean. We
will start with the context of Montego Bay and St. James at Inde
pendence in 1962, and examine the social relationships between the
brethren and the dominant social elements who called on the police
to keep the thoroughfare of Coral Gardens and Rose Hall free from
the presence of bearded men walking through to Flower Hill and
Salt Springs. The spatial segregation and gated communities create
conditions of paradise for the rulers and international tourists, and
create for the poor a space of violence, hunger and exploitation. It is
the radical spirit of the people manifest in every era that has kept
the society as a sane space.

Coral Gardens: The setting

The people of Jamaica acceded to Independence on 6 August 1962.
The Independence celebrations came after years of struggle and
suffering. The people of St, James in Western Jamaica were
searching for levers to break the power of the plantation owners. In
1962, the largest landowner was the Custos of St. James, Sir Francis
Moncrieff Kerr-Jarrett. Francis Kerr-Jarrett (1886-1968), owner of
numerous sugar plantations, traced his ancestry to those Britons
who occupied Jamaica and enslaved the Jamaican people. In his
book Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native
genocide, Hilary Beckles chronicles the forms of accumulation of
wealth by the British planter class in the Caribbean and the criminal
enrichment that formed the social and cultural milieu of the
Caribbean. In the chapter "Not Human: Britain's Black property,"
Beckles documents the ideation system of British colonialism that
were refined in the processes of genocide, enslavement and
colonialism.3 Estate owners all over Jamaica were proud of their
3 Hilary Beckles, Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native
genocide, University of the West Indies Press, 2013

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 Coral Gardens 1963 203

links to the traditions of conquest and one of the more famou

factories in Jamaica, the Appleton Estates, could trace the long
of owners back to the period of the struggle between Britain
Spain for the colonial domination of Jamaica.
Kerr-Jarrett was among the most active of those in the pla
class in Jamaica who had been born and reared in the peri
colonial domination. Kerr-Jarrett opposed Marcus Garvey
Garveyism in the twenties and thirties and carved out a place
himself among the landed gentry in Jamaica. Together with
writer, H.G. De Lisser, who also came from a planter family,
colonial operators opposed Garveyism and nationalist idea
Jamaica while promoting the Jamaica Imperial Association. In
years prior to Independence, Kerr-Jarrett made numerous ap
to the Governor of Jamaica, Hugh Foot, and later, to th
Governor of Jamaica, Kenneth Blackburne, to crack down on
growing Rastafari movement. Frank Jan van Dijk devotes a la
part of his research to the activism of Francis Kerr-Jarret.4 W
also significant about this study was that it highlighted the ro
social scientists in placing a certain stamp and stereotypical im
of the Rastafari movement. From the study of the role
anthropologists in the current Global War on Terror it is impo
for Caribbean researchers to go back and study the ro
anthropologists such as MG Smith and his work for t
contribution to imperial control and the social science of
oppression.5
During the 1950s, Kerr-Jarrett continuously petitioned the
Governor and the colonial office to clamp down on the Rastafari
who he described as 'an undesirable sect' and requested that the
governor should do everything to discourage their activities. There
had been communication with the Colonial Office in London for the

British to use their influence with Emperor Haile Selassie for him to
deny his divinity. During the fifties, the Governor, Sir Flugh Foot,
came from a social democratic background and did not accede to

4 Frank Jan van Dijk. 1995. "Sociological Means: Colonial Reactions to the
Radicalization of Rastafari in Jamaica, 1956-1970." New West Indian Guide. Vol.
69, Nos 1/2, 67-101.

5 Don Robotham, "Pluralism as an Ideology," Social and Economic Studies, Vol.

20, No 1, 1980. For a sympathetic account of the life of M.G. Smith see Douglas
Hall, A Man Divided: Michael Garfield Smith, UWI, 1997

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204 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

the appeals of the Custos. During this period, Kerr Jarrett was also
behind one of the conservative religious movements to appear in
Jamaica under the guise of Moral Rearmament (MRA).6 In the years
1951-60 he was the principal patron of this conservative cold war
pseudo-religious movement. Through the activism of Kerr Jarrett,
the colonial Special Branch police placed numerous Rastafari camps
under surveillance and used the Vagrancy Laws from the period of
enslavement against the camps of the Rastafari.
Barnett Estates was owned by the Kerr Jarrett family and
dominated the economy of St James prior to the boom in tourism.
Rose Hall, Ironshore and Flower Hill, estates on the other side of
the town, were also becoming tourist resorts. Families such as the
De Lissers, Kerr-Jarrett, the Pringles and other British land owners
were working to transform part of their land into spaces for tourists
from Europe and North America. John Pringle, an immediate heir
to the De Lisser tradition, had been one of the most active from
these families and, after Independence, he was elevated to the
position of Director of Tourism (1963-7).
In 1954, a group of leading international capitalists came
together to establish the Half Moon Bay Hotel in the bay which was
previously the port for the offloading of sugar for the Rose Hall
estates. Among Half Moon's original investors were: Donald
Deskey of New York City's famous Radio City Music Hall; Harvey
Firestone, Jr. of the Firestone Tyre and Rubber company; Richard
Reynolds of the Reynolds Metal Company and Jamaican bauxite
company Reynolds Jamaica; oil and real estate magnate Curtis
Steuart; as well as Mrs. Laurence Armour of US meat packaging
giant Armour Packing Company. It was the same Firestone family
that had successfully undermined Garvey's project of repatriation
to Liberia.

Rose Hall Plantation was the scene of brutality for hundreds

of years and H.G De Lisser wrote a novel celebrating Annie Palmer,
the so-called White Witch, one of the owners of that plantation. H.G
de Lisser had been an activist in the Jamaica Imperial Association
and had served as the editor of the Gleaner newspaper. His family
owned large parcels of land in the parishes of St James, Trelawny

6 One of the best accounts of the relationship between Kerr-Jarrett and the Moral
Rearmament Movement can be found in the book by Frank Jan Van Dijk. 1993.
Jahmaica: Rastafari and Jamaica Society 1930-1990, Utrecht: ISOR.

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 Coral Gardens 1963 205

and Hanover. The continuities from the period of slavery was

manifest in the fact that Harold De Lisser was named the first

managing director of this plantation turned hotel.

Working class opposition to the planter class and the Rastafari

Opposition to enslavement and colonial domination were the key

features of Jamaican society since 1655 but this is not recorded in the
official history. Instead, the whims and caprices of governors, their
mistresses and of sadistic overseers are what construe the official

record. From time to time, the rebellions were of such magnitude,

as in the case of Sam Sharpe, that the history books could not ignore
these manifestations of popular revolt. The opposition by the poor
and oppressed to the planter class took many forms and it was
from this part of Jamaica that nationalism took the consistent and
clear form of independent working people's organization. Major
working class rebellions broke out in the early part of the twentieth
century, and one hundred years after emancipation from slavery the
wages of the workers were not significantly different from what
they had been in 1838. The poor had no means of expressing
themselves because the anti-democratic colonial society meant that
only 8 percent of the population had the right to the franchise.
From the ranks of the poor there emerged many articulate
political leaders. One such leader was Allan George St. Claver
Coombs. He was the founder of the Jamaican Workmen and Trades
Union (JWTU) along with nationalists such as Hugh Clifford
Buchanan. Father Coombs, as he was affectionately called by the
workers, was a leading figure in the 1938 uprisings in opposition to
colonialism at Frome sugar estate. Alexander Bustamante moved in
on this elementary formation and, with his contacts, formed the
Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU). After Coombs was
sidelined by Bustamante, he and his followers joined with the
People's National Party, then led by a cousin of Bustamante,
Norman Manley. This history of the Jamaican workers' movement
in the thirties is well documented by Ken Post in his book, Arise Ye
Starvelings.7 Though an important book, his recounting of the
resistance replaced the actual experiences of the workers with the

7 Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: Tlte Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its
Aftermath, Springer Books, 1978

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206 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

voices of Ken Post and official academia. This tradition of sub

stituting the voice of the people with the words and pens of experts
became part of the social history of Jamaica.
Throughout the period after the rebellion of 1938, the brown
middle classes joined the movement of the sufferers and sought to
direct this movement against colonialism into safe constitutional
forms of opposition.8 Petty chauvinism was encouraged to the point
where one section of the middle class leadership mobilized the
Jamaican population against the West Indian Federation. On the eve
of Independence in 1961, the PNP leadership decided that Coombs
was too unlettered for the Drumblair set9 and moved to remove him
from the leadership of Western Jamaica. Coombs took E.B.L
Tomlinson and other supporters with him and so on the eve of
Independence, the PNP lost Western Jamaica to the JLP.10 It was this
JLP, anchored by elements such as Kerr-Jarrett and Edward Seaga,
that went about the planning for the redevelopment of the area
around Coral Gardens as a major tourist resort.

The Brethren and Sistren

Montego Bay and its environs were dominated by small farmers

who spent half of their time as workers in factories or as seasonal
workers in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of these
workers were exposed to the ideas of anti-colonialism and anti
imperialism through their work and linkages with different parts of
the Pan African world. The Rastafari movement emerged from the
ranks of craftspersons, fishermen, workers and small farmers who
wanted an independent means of self expression in Jamaican
society. One such small famer was Rudolph Franklyn, who had
tired of a life of mendicancy which was the only one available to
most workers, and joined the movement of the Rastafari. As an
urban area with a major sugar factory, small farmers from a 50 mile
radius around Montego Bay gravitated to the town, especially
during the depression years. Franklyn was from Maroon Town and

8 Trevor Munroe, The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization: Jamaica, 1944-62,

Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1972

9 The PNP elite which met regularly at Norman Manley's home, named Drumblair.
10 Father Coombs died as a poor and broken person and was buried in a pauper's
grave when he passed away in 1969.

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 Coral Gardens 1963 207

he slowly relocated to the areas around Flower Hill and Salt Sprin
just overlooking the Half-Moon Resort. My cousin Clarissa
whom I dedicated the book Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus
Garvey to Walter Rodney) was one of the females in the group who
had hailed from Springfield. Rastas from Springfield, Maroon
Town, Johns Hall, Salt Spring and other rural areas were joining the
growing ranks of workers in Montego Bay after 1950. Like
Franklyn, she walked around in the Montego Bay area and we
would commune with her as she trod up to Greenpond and
Glendevon.

Franklyn, like other Rastafari, was continuously harassed by

the police in a climate of hostility contrived by Kerr-Jarrett, Walter
Fletcher, the De Lissers and the colonial forces. For the owners of
the new and expanding hotel properties, the presence of Rastas was
a disincentive for investors. Numerous calls were made for barriers
to the movement of Rastafari in the Coral Gardens area. The

aspiring 'developers' strove to prevent 'undesirables' from walking

through private property. In essence, the struggles over the
privatization of public spaces in this period were clear examples of
the David Harvey dictum that, "the right to the city is far more than
the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to
change ourselves by changing the city." Montego Bay was being
changed and segregated and ordinary workers were excluded from
beaches and from public spaces. The processes of urbanization
were changing the very nature of Jamaican society.
This analysis by David Harvey was taken further by Don
Mitchell who described how geographers, sociologists, lawyers,
planners and religious forces all conspire with the rich and
powerful to deny the right of public spaces to the poor.11 Coral
Gardens in 1963 was a classic example of contested space where the
force of the state and the coercive powers of the police were used to
kill and intimidate Rastafari brethren and sistren.
By 1962 Franklyn had mobilized other small farmers who
were moving to become part of the Rastafari movement. One way
of coercing Rastafari was through the Dangerous Drugs Act, and
Franklyn was arrested for possession of ganja. Others such as the
Bowen brothers, who were at that time quite young, were

11 Don Mitchell. 2003. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Spaces,
Guildford Press, New York.

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208 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

constantly harassed by the police. This author lived in an area of

Upper King Street in Montego Bay which many of the brethren and
sistren passed through. Mr. Mac was one of the movers in this
group of Rastafari and his yard at 16 Upper King Street was a
staging area that many passed through. There was a thriving
carpenter's shop that employed some of the brethren. The working
class areas of Montego Bay: Railway Lane, Mt Salem and Barnett
Lane were other spaces for the growth of the Rastafari. Every
Sunday evening they would gather at Charles Square (later named
Sam Sharpe Square) beating their drums and singing songs of
freedom and emancipation. With the growth of this movement,
Francis Kerr-Jarrett attempted to co-opt one section by exposing
them to the ideas and literature of the Moral Rearmament

Movement. One of the brethren, Aubrey Brown from the Orang

Street area, was even sent on a mission to the USA so that he could
be recruited by the Kerr-Jarrett forces. This created deep divisio
within the movement. The different spaces from which the Rastafari
emerged to form this opposition to Kerr-Jarrett was one
manifestation of the failure of the attempts to divide the Rastafari.

Felix Waldron

This author was familiar with one of the followers of Rudolph

Franklyn. This was Felix Waldron. Like Rex Nettleford who pre
ceded him to Cornwall College, Felix was one of the brightest
youngsters at the Montego Bay Boys School. He was a promising
mathematician and was awarded a scholarship to study at Cornwall
College. Hailing from the working class, Waldron's parents could
not afford to send him to Cornwall and so it was the Montego Bay
Boys Club, supported by Charles Agate and Dr. Herbert Morrison,
that looked out for the welfare of this promising mathematician.
Herbert Morrison, the nationalist doctor with his offices on Market
Street had been a patron of Nettleforci. Waldron was supposed to
follow the footsteps of other poor youths such as Rex Nettleford
and Danny Miller, who were also assisted by the Montego Bay Boys
Club. On the special notice board at Montego Bay Boys School
which lists those boys who had gone on to excel at Cornwall
College, the name of Felix Waldron is prominent among with the
names of other youths from the black working class.

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 Coral Gardens 1963 209

Felix Waldron had to leave Cornwall College and futu

research will shed light on the conditions that interrupte
schooling. This author knew Felix and would see Felix walking
Franklyn and others, passing Upper King Street on the way t
Spring. It is now known that Franklyn was seeking to farm i
area around Flower Hill and Salt Spring. For the developer
sight of Waldron, the Bowen brothers and Franklyn and
brethren walking along the road across from the Half Moon h
was offensive. I know that they often traversed that area bec
my oldest brother, who was the 'juiceman' for the caddies, of
sold juices to Franklyn and his brethren as they passed th
course opposite the new resort hotel. For the Jamaican state,
bearded men walking with sticks and cutlasses should not
been in the tourist areas at all, so there was constant harassme
from the police.
In an effort to remove the brothers and sisters from the areas
where they lived, the police and other law enforcement personnel
(some called busha) would raze the crops of the Rastafari. At that
historical moment, the Jamaican state was quite willing to destroy
the small farmer to please 'foreign investors.' These altercations
over the right to plant, the right to walk, the right to follow their
own culture boiled over into open confrontations. Independence
was supposed to give all Jamaicans freedom of speech, freedom of
worship, freedom of movement and the right to a decent life. All of
these freedoms had been denied to the Rastafari by constant
harassment and, after the 1960 uprisings of the Henry brothers, this
harassment increased.

CORAL GARDENS 1963

There are now journalistic sources as well as the witness of some of

the Rastafari brethren and sistren who survived the killings of April
1963. There are court proceedings and legal arguments surrounding
the confrontation. There has not been a wider discussion of the two
ideation systems that clashed at Coral Gardens. As one who
emerged from the same community as some of those who lost their
lives in April 1963, I undertook to write about these contradictions
from the perspective of those who were being oppressed. In
speaking to my brothers and colleagues, one of the features that was
not clear was the form of recruitment used by Rudolph Franklyn.

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210 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

He was persuasive enough to have a number of younger Rastas in

his group of Rastafari. Brother Mac from Upper King Street, Aubrey
Brown (Breda Brown) Rudolph Franklyn and others emerged as
com-munity leaders and were under surveillance by Special Branch.
The 16 Upper King Street space (Mr. Mac's) was one area they
passed through regularly In this group were the brothers Carlton
and Noel Bowen and others such as Clinton Larman. There was a

Rastafari formation at Railway Lane, and other Rastafari formations

in a rapidly growing area at 12 1/2 Upper King Street called Gulley
or Canterbury The Rastafari always travelled on foot from Railway
Lane and Barnet Street up to Salt Spring and through Flower Hill,
and sometimes walked to Flankers and White House (a fishing
community now blocked off by Sangster International airport).
These Rastafarians were criminalized for walking along this road
which was being developed for tourists.
The Jamaican government sought to make this area a no-go
area for the Rastafarians. Hence, there had been confrontations
between the police and this small group of Rastafarians. Detective
Corporal Melbourne, who lost his life in the altercation on 11 April,
was one of the most energetic enforcers of Francis Kerr-Jarrett's
wish that the free movement of Rastafari should be discouraged.
The altercations between the police and this band of brethren were
so frequent that the Rastafari decided to make bows and arrows to
defend themselves. It is not insignificant that one of the first persons
to be attacked by the brethren was Edward Fowler, the overseer for
Kerr-Jarrett.
On Thursday 11 April 1963, eight months after Independence,
Rastafari claimed their right to walk in this tourist area and sought
to defend themselves. In the process, a petrol station was torched,
Melbourne was killed and, after the initial altercation, the Prime
Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante flew to Montego Bay, accom
panied by the Commissioner of Police, the top command of the
Jamaica Defense Force, the Security Chief, two Ministers of
Government, and several police from the headquarters in Kingston.
Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante was making a clear state
ment to the local and foreign 'developers' that this space around
Half Moon Bay Hotel would be free from the presence of bearded
Rastas. A police manhunt rounded up and killed the other members
of the group, prior to unleashing total repression against all of the

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 Coral Gardens 1963 211

Rastafari in Western Jamaica. The Jamaican newspapers, especia

the Daily Gleaner, whipped up hysteria and demanded that "t
Rastafarian problem", described as a problem of "the lunat
fringe", be solved once and for all. Selbourne Reid has written f
the Jamaican elite his version of the confrontation and this boo
now serves to distort the climate of hostility created by the whit
planter class against the small farmers who had turned to the ide
and philosophy of peace and love. These Rastafari were provoked
harassed and, when they sought to defend themselves, they wer
shot down.

The aftermath

Thursday, 11 April 1963 was Holy Thursday. This was the day of the
funeral of my sister. In the evening we heard the news that Ken
Douglas' petrol station was burnt and that a number of brethren
had been killed. The next day we saw a massive army and police
presence all around Montego Bay I remember this vividly because
it was Good Friday on 12 April, when the police began rounding up
everyone with locks and beard. Prime Minister Alexander
Bustamante, who had been mostly disengaged from politics, gave
the order "Bring in all Rastas, dead or alive." It was this call for the
police to shoot and kill poor blacks and Rastafari, which was to
become a defining element of independent Jamaica after 1963. From
that period until now, the state has given the coercive forces the
right to kill unarmed citizens.
The police and army eagerly invaded all working class
neighbourhoods and arrested and detained all those who were
Rastas. Canterbury was raided and the spaces of the Rastafari
violated. The lockup at Barnett Street was so full that people were
held in the yard just as the enslaved had been, and from time to time
they were hosed down with water. One official reportedly stated "If
jail cannot hold the Rastafarians, put them in Bogue (the local
cemetery)". The police and military raided all the Rastafari camps
and then proceeded to cut the locks off the Rastafari in all parts of
Western Jamaica.

Increased support for Rastafari

This wave of repression marked a turning point in the history of

Jamaica.

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212 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

Sympathy and support for the Rastafari grew. Hundreds and

thousands of youths identified with Franklyn and Waldron and the
right to freedom of movement. In Montego Bay, poor youth such as
Billy Griffiths then sought other outlets such as soccer to realize
their skills and potential. As Billy Griffiths yesterday and as Usain
Bolt today youth looked to sports and music for outlets for their
energies. The state embarked on a three-pronged approach to
coerce and control the growth of the Rastafari movement. There
was the police and military rampage. The media and local outlets
egged on the police and military so they could declare to the world
that Jamaica was safe for tourists. This media campaign by the
Gleaner and the radio stations was the second line of attack. The

third area of control was through sociologists and social scientists

who were deployed "to understand the relationship between
violence and poverty".
With the growth of the Rastafari movement, Edward Seaga
embarked on a campaign to co-opt the symbols and ideas of the
Rastafari, firstly by repatriating the remains of Marcus Garvey and
then by inviting Haile Selassie to Jamaica in 1966. Although Seaga
understood the potential of the Rastafari, he moved to bulldoze the
Rastafari settlements of Back o' Wall to create the garrison com
munity of Tivoli Gardens
Neither of the two mainstream political parties could grasp
the full depth of the ideation plane of the Jamaican poor. Walter
Rodney grounded with sections of the Rastas in 1968, and the
fusion of his ideas of African dignity with the ideas of Rastafari
became an explosive combination. Rodney was banned from
Jamaica. After Walter Rodney, the Rastafari movement expanded
primarily through the ideas communicated through Reggae music.
Many middle class elements who did not understand the deep roots
of the movement, gravitated to superstructural elements such as the
locks and the smoking of ganja without understanding the roots.
Peter Phillips, the current deputy Prime Minister of Jamaica, was
one such middle class element who joined the movement,
temporarily, before he became one of the leaders of the PNP

THE HERITAGE OF CORAL GARDENS

Fifty years after the Coral Gardens uprising, Jamaican society

segregated, with the old planter alliance cemented to bo

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 Coral Gardens 1963 213

mainstream political parties. These two parties mobilize secti

the working poor with crumbs and weapons to the point whe
militarization of working class communities makes life unbe
The introduction of crack cocaine completes the picture of co
Agricultural production has plummeted but there is very
analysis of the linkages between the experiences of Rudolf Fra
as a small farmer and the repression of small farmers in Jam
Rose Hall, Ironshore and the areas next to the Sangs
International airport are now bustling tourist centers while
the hills of Flankers there is unprecedented gun violence.
King Street and Green Pond have seen crack cocaine invasion
2010, the mass killings of poor workers at Tivoli Gardens brou
the attention of the world the inner city story of drug
politicians and the neo-liberal world of finance. In 2012, two
ders of close colleagues brought home to me the insecurity o
The first murder was that of Clover Graham. Clover was an activist
in the black community in Britain and returned to Jamaica in 1990.
She worked at the legal aid clinic of the Norman Manley Law
School in Kingston; lectured at the University of Technology on
land law, a critical aspect of a young country's development, and
worked with the UNHCR. In 2007 her son, Taiwo, was murdered in
St Andrew. She herself was murdered in August 2012.
The other murder was that of Barrington Dixon. Barry Dixon
attended Cornwall College and was in his final year there at the
time of the uprising at Coral Gardens. Barry Dixon was trained as
an obstetrician and gynecologist at the University of the West
Indies. He was killed in his home in September 2012.
The death of Felix Waldron in 1963, and of Barry Dixon fifty
years later, highlights the present condition of the Jamaican people.
Both had been brilliant students at Cornwall College. Only new
forms of politics and community can end the recursive processes set
in motion by the planter class.
Fifty years after the uprisings of 1963 a new form of politics is
being demanded to transform Jamaica. The members of the middle
class who sympathised with the Left in the 70s and 80s, have now
joined the political class as entrepreneurs, politicians or com
mentators. There is a clear effort to cut off Rastafari from pro
gressive Pan African goals so that Rastafari will be pushed to
embrace the politics of exclusion. This is against the African
principles of Ubuntu. Fifty years ago the Rastafari were the most

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214 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

alert in relation to the social and political movements in Africa. That

alertness is required now more than ever. A small group of
dedicated Rastafari continues to carry forward the messages of
peace, truth and love as a holding operation until new forces
emerge to fully overthrow the Babylonian system.

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