Show Notes
Holy Thursday, April 11, 1963. Jamaica is eight months old as an independent nation, and at Coral Gardens, on the coast east of Montego Bay, a Shell gas station is burning. By the time the violence is over, eight people are dead: two police officers, three civilians and three Rastafari men.
The next morning was Good Friday. Across western Jamaica, police, soldiers and in some places civilians began pulling Rastafari men out of their homes. Most had no connection to Coral Gardens. The Rastafari community still calls that weekend Bad Friday.
This episode follows how a dispute over land and one man's grievance became a campaign against an entire faith, and asks what really happened on that Holy Thursday.
#Jamaica #JamaicanHistory #Rastafari
More from The Griot | Stories Roots Legacy
Why did an oilfield strike in southern Trinidad spread into a colony-wide confrontation over wages, race, and political power? Sources: Trinidad and Tobago National Archives; Butler Papers; Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Trinidad, 1937; British Colonial Office reports; Trinidad Guardian archive
How did a few minutes of shaking destroy Jamaica’s commercial capital and expose the limits of colonial disaster response? Sources: Jamaica Gleaner archive; United States Geological Survey historical earthquake records; Jamaica Legislative Council papers; British Colonial Office dispatches; National Library of Jamaica
How did strikes by sugar workers in 1938 become the turning point that created Jamaica’s modern labor movement and accelerated self-government? Sources: Jamaica Labour Department reports; Jamaica Gleaner archive; UK Colonial Office reports; National Library of Jamaica; Norman Manley papers
How did enslaved workers in Demerara organize across plantations, and why did the colonial government respond with military force and mass executions? Sources: British Parliamentary Papers; Colonial Office records; Guyana National Archives; The Missionary Register; Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood
How did an American religious community in Guyana become the site of the largest mass death in modern Caribbean history? Sources: U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings; Guyana government investigative records; FBI Jonestown files; Guyana National Archives; The New York Times contemporaneous reporting