Freedom's Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica

Gray's central thesis asserts that the Jamaican state is a form of predatory state that incorporates contradictory social forces into an arrangement that is hierarchical, often brutal and ultimately debilitating to democracy. He introduces a series of constructs to support this argument, but the more interesting and novel theses are to be found in his vivid description of the social forces that resist the predatory state and how they have carved out a modicum of autonomy based on what he describes as an elaborate value system of badness/honour.

"Since 1944, the Jamaican people, without ethnic or religious strife, civil war, military coup, one-party dictatorship, assassination of political leaders, insurgency or genocide, have voted out governments and voted in opposition parties in free and fair elections - a record in democratic governance equalled by only a handful of states worldwide. In this volume, Adult Suffrage and Poltical Administrations in Jamaica 1944-2002, Trevor Munroe and Arnold Bertram, both active participants in this process, document critical aspects of this record." "Key features include: the elections through which the consolidation of democracy occurred; the representatives - their gender, education, occupation, age - whom the people chose to form 13 successive governments and parliaments; the laws that the legislature passed and the institutions governments established in building a modern democratic state; advances and failures - political, economic, social and cultural - of each administration; comparison of the performances of successive adminstrations; and the critical challenges facing the Jamaican people and the new leaders."--BOOK JACKET.

In August 1962, the island nation of Jamaica achieved independence from Great Britain. In this provocative social and political history of the first decade of independence, Obika Gray explores the impact of radical social movements on political change in Jamaica during a turbulent formative era. Led by a minority elite and a middle class of mixed racial origins, two parties, each with its associated workers' union, emerged to dominate the postcolonial political scene. Gray argues that party leaders, representing the dominant social class, felt vulnerable to attack and resorted to dictatorial measures to consolidate their power. These measures, domestic social crises, and the worldwide rise of Black Power and other Third World ideologies provoked persistent challenges to the established parties' political and moral authority. With students, radical intellectuals, and the militant urban poor in the vanguard, the protest movement took many forms. Rastafarian religious symbolism, rebel youth's cultural innovations, efforts to organize independent labor unions, and the intelligentsia's varied attempts to use mass media to reach broader audiences--all influenced the course of political events in this period. Grounding his tale in relevant theory, Gray persuasively contends that, despite its narrow social and geographical base of support, this urban protest movement succeeded in moving the major parties toward broader and more progressive agendas.