Deborah A. Thomas is Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
By Deborah A. Thomas
“Rastas on rampage in MoBay – 8 persons killed.” So screamed the headline of Jamaica’s daily afternoon paper, the Star, on 11 April 1963. Two days later the Daily Gleaner led their news coverage with four articles under the heading “8 killed after attack on gas station. Two policemen, three Ras Tafarians among the dead.” And by 10:00 am on that fateful Holy Thursday morning, RJR (then Radio Jamaica and the Re-Diffusion Network, now Radio Jamaica) reported the following: “Three people are now known to have died in this morning’s uprising by Rastafarians in Montego Bay.” For those who today understand Rastafarians as primarily advocating a philosophy of universalism (the “One Love” Bob Marley sang about), and even for those who prefer to foreground Rastafari’s ideological roots in black supremacy and pan-Africanism and its more general black nationalist stance, news of a “rampage” or an “uprising” by Rastafarians would seem uncharacteristic. But during that immediate post-independence period in Jamaica, fear and disdain were the attitudes most commonly directed toward Rastafarians, not only by those in the middle and upper classes, but also by many working-class Jamaicans. This means that events that were primarily local in scope generated national attention and concern.
In this case, the high level of concern was marked by the fact that the Prime Minister at the time – Sir Alexander Bustamante – flew to Montego Bay, Jamaica’s second city, accompanied 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. Once in Montego Bay, Bustamante mobilized police forces from St. James, as well as those from the neighboring parishes of Hanover, Trelawny, and Westmoreland, to join with civilians in the roundup of Rastafarians. Ultimately, because of the actions of five “bearded” individuals who were motivated by an ongoing land dispute, over one hundred and fifty Rastafarians were arrested, jailed, beaten, and tortured. In addition to three of those five who were involved in the attacks on the gas station, a nearby motel, and an estate manager’s home, an unknown number of Rastafarians died as a result of these tortures, and many more were permanently scarred. Since the 1990s, a group of Rastafarians in Western Jamaica has kept a public vigil commemorating this “Bad Friday,” and in 2007, this vigil was folded into the yearlong schedule of events designed to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. At these commemorations, elder Rastafarians offer testimony about their experiences, asking that the government make a formal apology to the Rastafarian community and that it consider reparations of some sort.
I had first learned about the Coral Gardens “incident” as a graduate student fifteen years earlier when I read the book Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 1960-1970 by Terry Lacey. Lacey discussed Coral Gardens briefly as one among several incidents that provoked Jamaicans to believe that Rastafarians as a whole were ready to violently revolt against the Jamaican state, thereby justifying an oppressive security policy. Wendell Bell and his student James Mau, American sociologists who conducted research in Jamaica during the 1960s, also wrote about the events that transpired at Coral Gardens in order to demonstrate that middle- and upper-class Jamaicans have consistently viewed the Jamaican “masses” as hostile, menacing, and ready to revolt at any moment. Professor Rex Nettleford treated the Coral Gardens “incident” somewhat more substantially in his classic Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race, and Protest in Jamaica in order to show how Rasta became associated in the minds of the Jamaican middle class public with crime and violence. However, like the Green Bay Massacre of 1978, the official archive of what happened at Coral Gardens is slim, and most of it relies on Gleaner reports (though John Maxwell did some excellent reporting on the events and their aftermaths in Public Opinion). When I saw the notice in the Gleaner about the 2007 commemoration and its links to the events related to the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, therefore, I decided to attend to see if I could get a more grassroots sense of what happened to trigger the events at Coral Gardens, and to find out more about the injustices that took place afterwards.
I traveled down with my friend Junior Wedderburn, a musician and Rastafarian from Portland, Jamaica who migrated to the U.S. twenty-five years ago. Junior was the drummer for the dance company I performed with years ago, and now plays for The Lion King on Broadway. During the plane ride down, Junior confessed that though he and the older Rastafarians who mentored him were no strangers to harassment at the hands of the police and other agents of the state, he had never heard about Coral Gardens, or about the suffering of the elders there in 1963. In part, he felt that this was the result of the particularly uneasy structural position of families like his when he was growing up. Working-class black people throughout Jamaica who were reading or hearing about what happened at Coral Gardens would likely have felt sympathy for the Rastas, he argued, because of a sense that the government’s actions were motivated at least in part by a desire to undermine the development of black pride. However, because at the time Rasta and black pride were so intertwined, and because Rasta was seen by people like his parents as a fearful thing – even though they themselves had been influenced in the development of their own black pride by movements like Marcus Garvey’s – they would not have wanted to discuss the incident for fear of driving their own children toward Rasta. We were both eager, therefore, to hear the stories, to try to find out “what really happened” on that fateful “Bad Friday,” and to learn what kind of reparations were being envisioned.
At the commemoration, we were fortunate to meet a few elders who were willing to talk with us about their experiences. I was, at the time, in the middle of writing a book about violence in Jamaica, and I thought that it might be compelling to think through the Coral Gardens events as a way to discuss state violence against Rastafari and its connections to more general patterns of political violence in Jamaica. Toward this end, I asked one of the elders if he would retrace his steps with me, to show me as we walked along the landscape what exactly had happened to him during the days following Holy Thursday 1963. To my great surprise, he asked whether it wouldn’t be more effective to do that on film. “Of course,” I said, and thus began our odyssey as documentarians.
Junior, my husband John Jackson (who actually is a filmmaker), and I set about tracking down elders with the help of the late Junior “Ista J” Manning, Ras Simba from Trelawny, and others. We interviewed them on camera about how they came to the Rasta faith, what happened to them as a result of Coral Gardens, and how they envisioned justice. We developed written agreements both with the individuals we interviewed, and with broader bodies of Rastafarians who had been involved in the struggle for intellectual copyright protection, among other things. We searched for archival footage of the era, and for other experts who could speak about the long-term effects of the events at Coral Gardens as well as more general efforts toward reparations. And on Friday 21 April 2011, the anniversary of Bad Friday, we showed the film at the annual commemoration to a rapt audience.
Jamaica is known all over the world for Rasta and reggae music, but so few understand the extent of the persecution that was so common in the early years, and the more subtle forms of discrimination against Rastafari that have persisted over the years. Our agenda through this process has been to bring the information of what happened to Rasta in 1963 to as broad an audience as possible, both within and beyond Jamaica. We have endeavoured to support the efforts of the community to garner some sort of official recognition and reparation, and hope that the film can assist in that process as well. In this regard, it is my understanding from Iyah V, one of the leaders of the Rastafarian Coral Gardens Committee, that the Public Defender, Mr. Earl Witter, asked him for copies of the film after the commemoration to assist them in collecting sworn testimonies from elders who went through the “crucifixion,” as they call it.
For my part, I feel that an official apology for and investigation into the events at Coral Gardens is crucial for the individuals directly affected, for the Rastafarian community as a whole, and for Jamaican society more generally. This is because it would require us – as a society – to confront the ways citizenship has not been equally available to all in post-independence Jamaica, and to come to terms with the ways threats to the body politic have been imagined and eradicated. It would compel us to think about both the limits and possibilities of reparations as a framework through which we might seek greater recognition of the historical rootedness of contemporary inequalities, not only in Jamaica but also throughout the black world. And it would force us to think creatively about how to live well together into the future.
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