Arnold Bertram, ContributorMAY MARKS the 68th anniversary of the labour which gave birth to modern Jamaica, but - as is usual -it passed without notice or fanfare.
Neither the State nor the labour movement seemed to remember the three weeks of militant action in May 1938 when the working people of Jamaica broke the back of the colonial government, won for themselves rights which they had been denied after a whole century of petitions, and created the foundations of modern Jamaica.
Within a generation, Jamaica will become completely ignorant of its historical traditions if it continues to relegate the 14 killed, 41 injured by gunshots, and the 139 otherwise injured during the rebellion, to the ranks of those " ... who have no memorial who are perished as though they had not been."
A NECESSARY BACKGROUND
The roots of the 1938 uprising can be traced to the hardship experienced by the ex-slaves after Emancipation which went unrelieved for an entire century. With their hard-won freedom gained in 1838, the ex-slaves sought to transform themselves into an independent community of small farmers. To this end, they bought small plots from anyone willing to sell, rented where they could or simply squatted.
The growth of an independent peasantry, however, was inimical to the interests of the big landowners who constantly required a cheap supply of labour. So in 1867, Governor Sir John Peter Grant set up a Lands Department to repossess for the Crown the land from the squatters and by 1912 over 240,000 acres had reverted to the Crown.
It was only a matter of time before the displaced peasantry became a formidable army of unemployed and underemployed for whom praedial larceny became the only option for survival. The response of the bigger landowners organised in the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS) was to empower with the assistance of the Crown some 2,656 "authorised persons to act as 'auxiliary policemen' and to arrest suspected persons." With this double pressure in the countryside, the urban trek began. Whereas in 1871, the population of Kingston was 34,300, by 1938 it had increased some 300 per cent.
RURAL MIGRANTS
Marcus Garvey, writing in his newspaper The Black Man, provides a most vivid description of the conditions experienced by the rural migrants in the capital city who were eventually transformed into the urban lumpen proletariat of 1938.
"In what is called the Spanish Town Road area in Jamaica, there are more people living in the most primitive and unfortunate state than can be found in any recognised part of the world. The people who live there outnumber who live in other sections of the city, yet the Governor never goes there nor legislators nor anybody of importance. The people indulge in Pocomania and in the practices of the most ruthless and horrible barbarities," The Black Man reported.
A major slum emerged in Smith Village, and became better known as 'Dungle', which was eventually bulldozed in 1963 to make way for the Tivoli Gardens housing scheme.
The continued internal build-up of this reserve army of labour would undoubtedly have reached explosive proportions before 1938, were it not for the fact that between 1880 and 1912, some 146,000 Jamaicans went abroad to Cuba, Panama and Costa Rica to seek employment.
But, with the collapse of the U.S. stock market in 1929 and the consequent world economic depression, the trek back home began in 1930. Between then and 1934, it is estimated that over 28,000 Jamaican migrants returned to their homeland.
ST. WILLIAM GRANT
The Jamaica to which they returned was one where the philosophy of black nationalism was becoming increasingly popular thanks to Marcus Garvey who had been politically active since his deportation from the United States in 1927. In December 1928, he launched the People's Progressive Party (PPP) and started the publication of The Black Man in March of the following year. Before he left in 1935 for his self-imposed exile in London, he more than any other man had sown the seeds of black nationalism in Jamaica and had trained some of the finest political cadres who would be in the vanguard of 1938.
One such was Allan George St. Claver Coombs, a small contractor who on the 17th of May, 1936, along with six labourers, formed the first labour organisation to build a decentralised network, the Jamaica Workers and Transport Union (JWTU), which provided the apprenticeship for Bustamante as well as other leaders who emerged in the labour riots in 1938.
Another was the militant Garveyite, St. William Grant, who returned to the island from New York where he had been a member of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He attracted public attention as a street corner orator along with his choice of costumes which included the full regalia of the UNIA African Legion. In 1936 Grant would be among the black nationalists for whom Coombs and his labour union had a special appeal and would play a critical role in 1938.
REORGANISATION OF THE SUGAR INDUSTRY
While social and political factors were always constant, it was the economy which sparked the flame of rebellion. The restoration of preference prices for sugar produced in Jamaica revived the fortunes of the local sugar industry. This was what led the giant British sugar firm Tate and Lyle to buy seven of the island's 35 remaining sugar estates in 1937 and to begin construction of a new factory at Frome in Westmoreland, estimated to cost 500,000 pounds sterling.
Prospects of employment brought thousands of workers from all over the island to the Frome factory compound and rumours that the new company would be paying four shillings a day created unprecedented excitement.
Such a wage increase must be understood in the context where labourers were still earning one and six pence a day, and the entire wage regime had hardly changed for a 100 years.
Such was the atmosphere when on Friday, April 29, the workers refused to accept their wages, declaring that they had expected to be paid much more. With the benefit of the weekend to plan strategies, Monday morning broke to find 300 workers assembled on the compound. The authorities were also planning as some 100 police led by their predominantly Irish officers were also in hand.
An attack on the home of a particularly obnoxious senior staffer employed by the company and a raid on a truck leaving the compound brought a charge and a volley of shots from the police, leaving four dead and nine wounded. The 1938 upheaval had begun.
Arnold Bertram, historian and former parliamentarian, is current chairman of Research and Product Development Ltd. Email redev@cwjamaica.com.
