Jamaica National

Heroes

NAME: Kemora Wright

CLASS:1B
SUBJECT: Social Studies
 Table of Content

Marcus Garvey………………………………………………………………. 1

Paul Bogle……………………………………………………………………… 3

George Gordon……………………………………………………………… 6

Nanny of the Maroon……………………………………………………

 Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was born on August 17, 1887, in Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica.
His father was a stonemason, and his mother was a domestic servant. As a young
man, Garvey travelled and worked in several Latin American countries before
relocating to London, England. He studied at Birkbeck College (University of London)
and worked as a messenger and handyman for the African Times and Orient Review,
a journal that emphasized Pan-African nationalism.

Garvey was known as the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA). Formed in Jamaica in July 1914, the UNIA aimed to achieve Black nationalism
through the celebration of African history and culture. Through the UNIA, Garvey
also pushed to support the "back to Africa" movement, and created the Black Star
Line to act as the Black owned passenger line that would carry patrons back and
forth to Africa. He also fostered restaurants and shopping centers to encourage black
economic independence. In addition to his support of Pan-Africanism, Marcus Garvey
was a Black nationalist and believed in racial separatism. This made him a
controversial figure in and out of the Black community, especially as he challenged
major thought leader W.E.B Du Bois.
In 1922, Marcus Garvey was charged with mail fraud in connection with a ship on the
Black Star Line, Orion. Further pressure from J. Edgar Hoover and his department's
investigations, negative press, and complaints from stock holders soon led to Garvey
gaining a reputation as a swindler. He also gained much criticism when he met with
white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey was convicted of the mail fraud
charges and sent to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. While serving his prison sentence
President Calvin Coolidge commuted his remaining time amidst protests from Black
Americans. In 1927, he was deported from the United States to Jamaica, where he
continued his UNIA work and political activism before moving to London in 1935. He
died on June 10, 1940, after multiple strokes.
 Paul Bogle

Paul Bogle was born into slavery in Jamaica sometime between 1815 and 1820. After
slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean in 1838, he was among thousands of
Jamaican freed people who, in search of independence from the grinding demands
of plantation labor, relocated to their own independent freeholds. Bogle, along with
black artisans and small farmers, settled at Stony Gut, a hilly area in St. Thomas in the
East, bordering Spring Garden and Middleton sugar estates and about three miles
from Morant Bay. With his freehold of around five acres on which he raised livestock
and cultivated sugar, cotton, ground provisions, and tree crops, Bogle was better off
than the majority of laborers who still had to look to the estates for their livelihood.
Bogle's dynamic leadership role in the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, a protest against
poor economic and social conditions in Jamaica, indicated that, although he had
limited formal education, he was literate, articulate, and occupied an important
position among the free people in the parish of St. Thomas in the East. As a taxpayer,
he qualified for the highly restrictive property franchise, and he supported George
William Gordon, a radical, free, colored (of mixed European and African ancestry)
man who challenged the political hegemony of the plantocracy in the parish. Indeed,
it was largely because Bogle mobilized the small freeholders from Stony Gut and
other postslavery settlements that Gordon was elected to the Assembly and to the
Vestry, the unit of local government, in 1863.
Paul Bogle remained steadfast in his support for Gordon, despite the political
machinations against him by the magistrates and the governor, Edward Eyre, who
was severely criticized by Gordon for his incompetence in dealing with the island's
affairs, particularly his neglect of the hardships that confronted the people. In early
1865 the relationship between Gordon and Bogle was further cemented when Bogle
was ordained by Gordon as a deacon in the mainly black Native Baptist Church,
which had a more radical agenda on social issues than the European directed
religious groups on the island.

In August 1865 in Morant Bay, Paul Bogle addressed a public meeting, which Gordon
had organized in support of other meetings that concerned the social and economic
hardships faced by the people. Issues included the high taxation on imported staples
when a series of droughts and floods had ravaged local provision growing and the
denial of political rights. The meetings also protested against the insensitivity of the
political administrators, who blamed the people's poverty on their supposed
indolence and mocked their requests for access to unused lands held by the Crown.
Bogle led a delegation of small farmers from the meeting to Spanish Town, a distance
of nearly forty miles, to present their grievances, but the governor refused to meet
with them.
In September 1865 social relations in St. Thomas in the East became more strained
when the planters secured the transfer from the parish of Thomas Witter Jackson, a
colored stipendiary magistrate who had opposed the corrupt rulings of planter
magistrates against the laborers. Through the network of Native Baptist chapels in St.
Thomas in the East, Bogle organized meetings that highlighted the chronic injustice
in the lower courts, as well as the vexed issue of access to land that would have
empowered the people who received low and irregular wages on the estates. After
Lewis Miller, Paul Bogle's cousin and coreligionist, was brought before the court in
Morant Bay on October 7, 1865, for trespassing, the issues of land and justice were
fused. Bogle led his followers into Morant Bay as a show of solidarity with Miller.
Before Miller's case was heard, Bogle and others prevented the police from arresting
another man whose comments had interrupted the court. Two days later, the police
went to Stony Gut with a warrant for Bogle's arrest. They were resisted, however,
and on October 11, 1865, Paul Bogle led his followers, some armed with sticks and
machetes, into Morant Bay where, after sacking the police station, they clashed with
the militia outside the courthouse where the Vestry was meeting. Eight of Bogle's
followers were shot and killed before the militia was overpowered. The courthouse
was set on fire, and eighteen from the militia and magistracy were killed escaping the
burning building.
The governor declared martial law, and the rebellion was brutally suppressed. More
than four hundred people were hung, including Gordon and Bogle. Several hundred
others were indiscriminately whipped, and many of the villages were burned.
In 1965 the Jamaican government elevated Paul Bogle to the status of a national
hero for his struggles against the oppression of the colonial state in the early
postslavery period.
 George Gordon
George William Gordon, the son of Scottish planter Joseph Gordon and a slave woman
whose name is unknown, was born into slavery around 1820. Gordon's father kept him
nominally in servitude until the general Emancipation Act freed slaves in 1834, encouraging
his interest in books and figures and sending him as a teenager to live with James Daly, a
businessman in Black River, Jamaica. Gordon mastered commerce, and by 1842 he was a
successful merchant and produce dealer in Kingston.

In 1844, Gordon entered public life, winning a seat in the Jamaican Assembly for the parish
of St. Thomas in the Vale. Ironically (given his later career) he contested the seat as a
defender of the Established Church, against the sustained campaign of the Baptists and
other dissenters who advocated its disestablishment. At the same time, Gordon benefited
from the support of the planters in the parish where his father, who was also a member of
the Assembly, had connections to coffee and sugar properties. Although the younger
Gordon strongly supported the planters' immigration proposals in the Assembly, he, given
his own slave background and his very close attachment to his mother, strenuously opposed
proposals of the 1840s to reintroduce whipping. Further, in 1848 and the following year,
Gordon joined other coloureds of the Assembly in their "nationalist" opposition to the
planters' reckless retrenchment strategies to effect the restoration of protection for colonial
produce. This stance cost Gordon the planters' support, and he declined to seek re-election
to the Assembly in 1849.

Gordon returned to the Assembly in 1863 for the parish of St. Thomas in the East, with the
solid support of Paul Bogle and other small freeholders. They looked to Gordon as a genuine
spokesperson for their interests, and he launched a broadside against the administration of
Governor Edward Eyre and the local Magistrates in the parish who, with Governor Eyre's
unqualified support, victimized Gordon in an attempt to silence his strident criticisms of
their administration and of the established church.
Nonetheless, Gordon continued to speak out vehemently against injustice and the political
elites' disregard and contempt for the peoples' hardships, which were worsened by the
dramatic decline in the sugar industry (a primary source of employment) and the ravages of
drought and floods that destroyed provision crops. It was clear for all but the blinkered that
people were starving and ground down by high taxation on imported food, the supply and
cost of which was further affected by the American Civil War.

In 1865, Gordon's speeches in the Assembly and at public meetings focused on the
deteriorating social state of the island and the failure of the Assembly and the Governor to
address the matter. Against Gordon's passionate protests, legislators instead approved the
reintroduction of whipping for predial larceny, at a time when many were starving.
Furthermore, when the Crown neglected the peoples' plea for access to tracts of unused
crown lands and the local administration cruelly dismissed poverty as the result of laziness,
Gordon's speeches at public meetings in various parts of the island pointed to the absence
of work, low wages, injustice in the courts, the denial of political rights and the general
insensitivity of the political administration. Gordon organized one such meeting in Morant
Bay in August 1865, where his political allies, including Paul Bogle, echoed his sentiments
and applied them to the corrupt local administration of that parish. Planters in the vestry at
Morant Bay had frustrated Gordon's efforts to expose the inadequacy of their poverty relief,
and later prevented him from taking up an elected post as churchwarden because he was
not a practicing member of the Church of England, even though the small freeholders had
elected him. These tensions boiled over into the Paul Bogle-led rebellion in Morant Bay on
October 11, 1865, and despite the absence of dispassionate evidence linking Gordon with its
planning or execution, Eyre blamed his most determined political detractor's speeches and
political associations for inspiring the rebels. Accordingly, Eyre had Gordon arrested in
Kingston and transported to Morant Bay, where he was tried under martial law, found guilty
of high treason, and was hanged on October 23, 1865.

One hundred years later, in 1965, the Jamaican Government elevated George William
Gordon to the status of National Hero for his passionate advocacy for the poor in the
immediate post-slavery period of Jamaican history.
 Nanny of the Maroons
Nanny, a national heroine of Jamaica, was the leader of the Windward Maroons, ex-slaves
living in interior communities in the eastern or windward area of Jamaica during colonial
times. As such, her history is integrated with that of the Maroons, warriors fundamental to
the history of resistance in the Caribbean. Next to the Guianas, Jamaica had the largest
Maroon community in the British-colonized Caribbean, with Portland, St. Thomas-in-the-
East, St. Mary, Trelawny, and St. Elizabeth being the parishes with the largest centers of
Maroon settlement. Marronage, derived from Maroons, signifies flight to the forest or
mountains (or by sea to other territories) and the formation of Maroon communities. The
height of marronage activity came after 1655, when the English captured Jamaica from the
Spaniards. Between 1655 and 1739, when the first Maroon War ended, Maroon Towns had
been established firmly at Accompong (St. Elizabeth), Trelawny Town (the Leeward Maroons
in the Cockpit country), Scott's Hall (St. Mary), and at Crawford Town, Nanny Town, and
Moore Town in the Blue Mountain range of eastern Jamaica (the Windward Maroons).

Nanny has emerged as the most important female figure in the history of the liberation
struggles in Jamaica. Her name (properly Nanani ) was derived from the Akan (Ghanaian)
word meaning "ancestress" and "mother," and this establishes her ethnic origin. It is widely
believed that she was born in Africa in the late seventeenth century and was transported to
Jamaica with captives via the transatlantic trade. There are differing views about whether or
not she arrived in Jamaica as an enslaved woman or as a free black woman with enslaved
people of her own. Some say she was married to Cudjoe, a Maroon leader, others to a man
named Adou. Nanny's exploits in eastern Jamaica in the eighteenth century are both real
and legendary, although, as a historical figure, she has more visibility than the majority of
black women in pre-emancipation Jamaica. For some, she exists as a shadowy, mythical
figure with supernatural powers; an Obeah woman (meaning she would have been a
practitioner of the religious belief of African origin involving folk magic practiced in some
parts of the Caribbean) whose pumpkin seeds, after only a few days of being planted,
sprouted miraculously to feed her starving people, and whom bullets from British muskets
could not harm, for she had the power to catch them in a certain part of her anatomy
(following that genre of writing that represents female resisters as unsexed amazons).

But Maroon historiography details her real existence and contribution to Jamaican
resistance history. She is credited, both in the oral and written history, with employing
guerilla tactics—especially between 1724 and 1739—to help her people to defeat the
British, uniting the Maroon communities in Jamaica, and negotiating land for her people as
part of the 1739 treaty with the British. Her original base, Nanny Town, was destroyed by
the British in 1734. Moore Town (or New Nanny Town) then became the primary town of
the Windward Maroons. As a military leader, her historical presence predictably diminished
in the post-treaty period. She is believed to have died around 1750.
 Sam Sharpe
Samuel Sharpe, a Jamaican National Hero, is best known as the chief organizer of the 1831–
32 Emancipation War that hastened the passing of the British Abolition Act in 1833. In
keeping with a historiographical trend that gives little visibility to the individual enslaved,
biographical details on Sharpe are sketchy. Historians generally agree, however, that he was
born around 1801, his parents having arrived in Jamaica from Africa between 1787 and
1801. Sharpe himself was a Creole (that is, born in Jamaica). He was named after the lawyer
Samuel Sharpe, Esquire, his enslaver. He had a brother, William (who accompanied him
when he decided to give himself up in 1832), and a nephew who worked at a printer's shop
in Montego Bay. His mother survived him, but his father died years earlier. He was married,
but (not unusually) his wife, whose father was among the rebels, lived on another property.
According to a letter in the Jamaica Advocate in 1896, he had a daughter who married a Mr.
Gaynor; and Mrs. Gaynor and her daughter, Mrs. Scott, were living in Montego Bay in 1896.

In 1831 Sharpe was working in a nonfield capacity at Cooper's Hill on the outskirts of
Montego Bay in the western parish of St. James. He was, therefore, among that group of
enslaved that historians characterize as the "slave elite." Converted to Christianity, he
became a deacon in the First Baptist Church in Montego Bay, now the Burchell Memorial
Baptist Church. He encouraged enslaved people to strike for wages after the Christmas
holidays of 1831 and to resort to armed resistance if their demands were not met. When
word came that the whites were planning to break the strike, arson and violence erupted.
The ensuing rebellion was, according to a petition to the Jamaica House of Assembly in
1832, one "unparalleled in the history of the colony, whether for depth of design or the
extent of misery and ruin which it has entailed on the inhabitants." Not only did Sharpe plan
and fight in the war, but he organized subleaders on every plantation or cluster of
plantations—revolutionary cells—more effectively to fight the war. The British suppressed
the rebellion brutally, killing about 1,000 enslaved rebels during the war or after, through
judicial decree.
On April 19, 1832, Sharpe was tried and sentenced to hanging for his role in the war. The
testimonies of nine enslaved people who gave evidence against him (and that appear in the
records of the Jamaica House of Assembly) confirmed the objectives and strategies of
Sharpe's war as well as his deep involvement. James Stirling testified that "[Sharpe] gave me
an Oath not to work after X'mas." Edward Barrett confirmed: "Sharpe said we must sit
down, we free and we must not work again unless we get half pay"; and Edward Hill
reiterated the freedom mission of the rebels: "Sharpe told we all we going to get free; he
sent Edward Ramsay to Thomas Reid at Mahoney to swear all the people [to an oath on the
Bible]."

At the end of Sharpe's trial, the following sentence, signed by John Coates and others, was
handed down:

That the said Negro man slave named Samuel Sharpe be taken from hence to the place
from whence he came and from thence to the place of Execution at such time and place as
shall be appointed by His Excellency the Governor and there to be hanged by the neck
until he be dead.

According to the historical accounts, Sharpe, age thirty-one, dressed in a white suit, walked
in a dignified manner to the gallows on May 23, 1832. After a short speech, he prayed, then
declared: "I now bid you farewell! That is all I have to say." Sixteen pounds ten shillings,
Sharpe's estimated value, was eventually paid as compensation to his enslaver.
 Norman Manley
Norman Washington Manley stood in the forefront of modern Jamaican public life from the
late 1930s until his death in the late 1960s. He advocated the cause of workers, founded the
People's National Party (PNP), and planned and guided the transfer of power from colonial
rule. He prepared his compatriots for independence, which came in 1962, and left a legacy
of faith and confidence that allowed the people of Jamaica to be the architects of their
destiny. After almost five centuries of colonial rule, three of these under slavery, this was no
small accomplishment.

Manley laid foundations for Jamaica's two-party system, and with it an enduring form of
democratic governance. He taught the Jamaican people the sanctity of the rule of law and
imbued them with a will to freedom via self-government and nationhood. In addition, he left
them with an understanding of the interdependence of politics and labor, of immigration
and race, and taught the significance

of intellect and imagination, of formal knowledge and artistic culture, to the shaping of a
people emerging out of slavery and still struggling against colonialism. In his final public
address, in 1969, he charged his Jamaicans to meet the challenge of "reconstructing the
social and economic life of Jamaica," a charge that was to take on enduring relevance in the
decades that followed, particularly with the hegemonic presence of the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and globalization.

Manley was born in rural Jamaica, the son of a produce dealer who was "the illegitimate son
of a woman of the people" and a mother who was a postmistress (postal clerk) and an
"almost pure white woman" (a "quadroon" in the color-coded hierarchy of postslavery
Jamaican society). He had two sisters and a brother. During his primary and secondary
schooling, he developed into a brilliant, hardworking, argumentative, articulate, and
intellectually curious young man, with (in his own words) "an unquenchable belief in
excellence." He was "almost wholly unconscious of my country and its problems…. colour
meant little to me. I did not, could not, allow it to be an obsession since I was totally without
any idea of 'white superiority.' It was not so much arrogance but a highly developed critical
faculty. The only superiority I accepted was the superiority of excellence and I suppose I
knew what I was good at but found it easy to recognise and respect quality even when I
knew I could not equal it."

In 1914, before joining his two sisters and brother in London, where they were already
studying, Manley went to visit with a maternal aunt in Penzance. She had been married to a
Methodist parson from Yorkshire, who had spent almost five years in Jamaica but had since
died, leaving her with nine children. There he met Edna Swithen-bank, his cousin and future
wife. He described her as "a little girl of 14, a strange, shy and highly individualistic person,
quite unlike the rest of her family and unlike anybody I had ever known."
His studies at Jesus College, Oxford, were interrupted by war service from 1915 until 1919.
He enlisted as a private in the Royal Field Artillery, refusing to be made an officer and
fighting instead with the rank and file of "cockneys with a view of life all their own." To
these men, he was to become something of a referee and sage. Three years of active service
on the Western Front (including the battles of Somme and Ypres) brought him both sorrow
(his brother was killed in action) and glory (he was decorated with a Military Medal for
bravery in action).
Manley resumed studies at Oxford in 1919, and he was called to the bar on April 20, 1921.
That same year he married Edna, who was to become a well-known sculptor. He then spent
some time in the London chambers of S. C. N. Goodman, followed a number of famous
advocates "all over the Court," and "learnt not only technique but style; and I learnt that to
watch a man in action—good, bad, or indifferent—was the quickest and surest way to learn
what to do and what not to do and how to do it." He returned to Jamaica in August 1922,
"with a clear sum of £50, a wife, a baby and a profession." He was to develop a legendary
expertise in the practice of his profession, rising to prominence as an advocate and
acknowledged leader of the bar in Jamaica and the British West Indies. Manley's legal career
was, however, to be subordinated, at great personal sacrifice (according to his colleague
Vivian Blake), "to the major effort of his life, securing the independence of Jamaica and
earning for him[self] the popular title Father of the Nation. " Indeed, Norman Washington
Manley is clearly the foremost architect of modern Jamaica.

None of his accomplishments, as Norman Manley so well knew, were achievable without
the establishment of appropriate and serviceable institutional frameworks to facilitate and
foster the growth and development of individuals in communities. Such communities, he
felt, had to be informed by a civic responsibility that would render citizens proud to be
citizens, so that they would be imbued with the knowledge and understanding not only of
the rights of individuals, but also of their obligations as part of a community, society, or
nation.

As is evident in his numerous speeches and informal utterances, Manley possessed a deep
understanding of the need to shape institutions that could cradle, nurture, and finally
develop a vision of freedom, self-reliance, self-worth, and opportunity for all Jamaicans. It is
no surprise, then, that he provided a transformational leadership (which included the
enduring idea of being part of a wider Caribbean) that put into place the relevant
institutions that could serve as an infrastructure for shaping a new society. That society, he
believed, would in time liberate itself from what he said was the sort of "dependency which
allowed no definite economy of our own, with no control over our own markets, no
representatives of an authoritative character that can speak for ourselves and our own
interest in the councils and debates that will take place" in the world at large.

Between 1955 and 1962, when the People's National Party held power, Manley (first as
chief minister and then as premier), gave priority to agriculture, education, and
industrialization. Thousands of small farmers received subsidies, and new markets were
opened. The democratization of the once elitist system of secondary education was begun,
along with an increase in scholarships. Primary schools were built; public library facilities
were extended to all parishes; and the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation was established. A
stadium was built to help foster sports, and the Scientific Research Council was established.

Manley was also the first political leader in the English-speaking Caribbean to give arts and
culture a portfolio. He wanted to reverse the systemic denigration of African culture and the
force of the Eurocentrism that had frustrated native expressions and threatened the quest
for cultural certitude among the majority. As far back as 1939, Manley is recorded as saying
"The immediate past has attempted to destroy the influence of the glory that is Africa, it has
attempted to make us condemn and mistrust the vitality, vigour, the rhythmic emotionalism
that we get from our African ancestors. It has flung us into conflict with the English
traditions of the public schools and even worse it has imposed on us the Greek ideal of
balanced beauty." Interestingly, this speech came in the wake of his wife's prophetic and
iconic piece of sculpture titled Negro Aroused.

Other transformational institutions were also established. The Agricultural Development

Corporation and the Industrial Development Corporation were a part of Manley's vision, and
they survive in one form or another to this day. So were the financial institutions, including
the Bank of Jamaica, which were conceived by Noel Nether-sole, Norman Manley's trusted
chief lieutenant. A legislative program produced the Beach Control Act, the Facilities for
Titles Act, the Land Bonds Act, the Land Development Duty Act, the Jamaica Standards Act,
and the Watersheds Protection Act. Manley's empowerment of Parliament as the forum of
the people's accredited representatives and as a major instrument of democratic discourse
and of intellectual vigor was one of his great achievements. The Farm Development Program
and the Jamaica Youth Corps, which both addressed the needs of rural and urban youth,
made it possible for unemployed young men and women to realize their potential and
become active citizens of their country.

Manley's institutional devising went beyond the outward signs of formal physical structures
into the inward grace of human development. The neglect of this aspect of good
governance since his death has presented a challenge as his successors to return to the
blueprint he prepared for a self-respecting nation and a regenerative society, which he
envisaged his country had to become in order to cope with the turbulent changes of an
unpredictable world.

Manley's vision can be seen in Jamaica Welfare Limited, a community development

modality for social and individual human development, established in 1937. The people,
"the mass of the population," were a priority for Manley, and all institutional frameworks
were intended to foster their retreat from the marginalization of the colonial era. Jamaica
Welfare was to be nonpartisan, people-centered, and national. Unfortunately, Manley felt
he had to resign his chairmanship of this institution when the People's National Party—itself
transformed by the early 1940s from a movement into a full-blown political party—
demanded his full attention. He was therefore disappointed greatly when, after 1962,
Jamaica Welfare was replaced by a new community development program named the
"Hundred Village Scheme," which he felt betrayed the principles on which the institution
was founded.

If Jamaica Welfare Limited (later the Social Welfare Commission, and still later the Social
Development Commission) demonstrated an institutional breakthrough towards the
creative shaping of a new Jamaica, so did the founding and development of the People's
National Party (PNP). Envisioned as an instrument of organized politics, political continuity,
and democratic governance, this institution has stayed its course, if only because it was
firmly rooted in some of the finest attributes the Jamaican people have shown themselves
to possess. The PNP was a genuinely new beginning for Jamaica, and it has served as a
model for similar political organizations, both at home and in the wider Caribbean. The
party itself, thanks to its articulated mission statements, the vision of its founding leader,
and the rationality of its internal organization, has survived the vicissitudes of being both in
power and out of power (as the "Opposition").

The remarkable thing about the institutions Norman Manley helped to found was that they
were neither monuments to self nor cold edifices of steel and mortar parading in high-rise
splendor. Rather, they were created on the organic idea of the ultimate "independence of a
self-governing Jamaica, which to him meant the liberation of the Jamaican people from
centuries of psychological and structural bondage, the non-negotiable claim to human
dignity and self-respect, self-definition as (full-fledged) members of the human race, and the
attainment of power which comes to a people only on the conviction that they are the
creators of their own destiny."

Paradoxically, Manley's efforts to have the British West Indies integrate into a federation
failed after a short trial run from 1958 to 1961, when he was forced to call a referendum
that resulted in the rejection of the short-lived West Indies Federation. "The people have
spoken" was his immediate response of respectful concurrence, as it always was on his
losing subsequent national elections. Nonetheless, Jamaica achieved independence in 1962,
ending 307 years of British colonial rule. And Manley's vision of an integrated region, with a
common history and contemporary problems, was to find a continuing manifestation in
what is now the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM).

Manley gave to Jamaica and the wider Caribbean (itself a part of the African diaspora), the
full power and force of a giant intellect and the sense and sensibility of a fertile creative
imagination. His personal courage and profound decency transcended narrow partisan
politics, though he admitted to having a quick "flaming temper" which took him "half a
lifetime to learn to control … with its place … taken by a sort of arrogant indifference which
was constantly mistaken for the real me." He nonetheless remains a role model for all
leaders of African ancestry in the Americas, if only because of his single-mindedness and
dedication, his financial disinterestedness in the pursuit of public duties, and his personal
integrity. His remarkable intellectual powers and gift of advocacy underlay his total
commitment to the betterment of the material and spiritual welfare of the people of
Jamaica. It is small wonder, then, that the government and people of his country bestowed
on him the rare honor of "National Hero" soon after his death.