The Mantle of Struggle: A Biography of Black Revolutionary Rosie Douglas

By Irving Andre and David Austin

Rosie Douglas, former prime minister of Dominica, had a life unlike any other modern politician. After leaving home to study agriculture in Canada, he became a member of the young Conservatives, under the Canadian prime minister’s guidance. However, after he moved to Montreal to study political science his politics started to shift. By the late sixties he was an active civil rights supporter and when Black students in Montreal began to protest racism in 1969, he helped lead the sit-in. He was identified as a protest ringleader after the peaceful protest turned into a police riot, and served 18 months in prison. 

After his deportation from Canada in 1976, having been named a danger to national security, Douglas participated in political movements around the world building global solidarity. He became a leader of the Libyan-based revolutionary group World Mathaba and supported Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Once back home in Dominica, he led the movement for Dominica’s full political independence from Great Britain, then served as a senator in the post-independence government, an MP, party leader, and finally prime minister. 

Relying on family sources, interviews, newspaper articles, government documents, and Douglas’ own articles, letters, and speeches, Irving Andre has drawn a rich and riveting record of this important Black revolutionary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Nov 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771136211

Irving Andre

Justice Irving Andre is the author of A Century of Dominican Cricket, Strangers in Suffisant: British West Indians in Curacao, and the biographies of Franklin Baron, Dominica’s first chief minister; Edward Oliver LeBlanc, Dominica’s first premier; and Dr. Desmond McIntyre, Dominica’s first surgeon. Between 1990 and 2002, Andre worked as a prosecutor for the Ontario Ministry of Labour, an assistant crown attorney in Brampton, Ontario, a criminal defence lawyer, and a vice-president of the Ontario Licence Appeals Tribunal. In 2002 he was appointed as a judge in the Ontario Court of Justice where he presided as the local administrative judge in the Region of Peel from 2010 to 2012. In 2012, Justice Andre was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice in Brampton, where he currently resides.

Book preview

Cover: The Mantle of Struggle: A Biography of Black Revolutionary Rosie Douglas by Irving Andre.

An intimate portrait of one the most important but underappreciated Pan-Africanists of the post-war period whose intrepid activism linked African peoples throughout the Atlantic world. Andre’s penetrating biography of Rosie Douglas is a must-read account of the soul of African folk to vanquish imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of anti-Black exploitation and domination.

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans:The Making of a Pan-African North America

A long overdue assessment of the life and activism of the extraordinary Rosie Douglas, Andre’s book captures the complexities of the man and the breadth of his achievements, giving him his rightful place among the firmament of the greats who have struggled for Caribbean and Pan-African liberation.

Kate Quinn, associate professor in Caribbean History, University College London

"The Mantle of Struggle chronicles the astonishing life of Dominica’s former prime minister Rosie Douglas, one of the most extraordinary international political actors of the 20th century, who, despite hailing from a tiny outport in the Caribbean, became a hugely influential operator on the world stage. It’s an illuminating portrayal of a son of privilege who was also a man of the people, selfless in his commitment to uplift the wretched of the earth. He was a political revolutionary and anti-imperialist champion of global resistance movements. Imprisoned for his role in the biggest campus rebellion in Canadian history, Douglas was an unrepentant political pragmatist who counted John Diefenbaker, Pierre Trudeau, Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Angela Davis, and Kwame Ture as mentors, associates, and comrades. This is a book of revelations and endless intrigue."

Adrian Harewood, journalist, associate professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University

To fully understand Canada’s antagonism with blackness and Black people, this biography of Rosie Douglas proves to be a necessary and important foundation. From student activist to prime minister of Dominica, Douglas’s life is an example of transnational Black activism and deep insight into the central place of the Caribbean and its intellectuals in shaping the modern world. Irving Andre’s account of Douglas’s life is both instructive and heartbreaking.

Rinaldo Walcott, author of On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition

From the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica to Canada and back, Irving Andre’s work has immediately become the benchmark by which both future biographies and political histories of the Caribbean, Black Canada, and Pan-Africanism will be measured. The complexity, movement, growth, and unwavering purpose of Rosie Douglas’s life is brilliantly captured here in depth for the first time thanks to the richness of archival work and wide-ranging interviews. It is a treasure trove for those wishing to learn more about the radical history of the Caribbean and Canada, and Douglas’s often central place in these struggles for genuine decolonization and freedom across both time and space.

Kevin Edmonds, assistant professor, Community Engaged Learning and Caribbean Studies, University of Toronto

"The Mantle of Struggle is a page-turner about the life and memory of Rosie Douglas: revolutionary, activist, civil rights and Black power leader, visionary, and prime minister of Dominica. Irving Andre has done justice to Douglas by writing an insightful, lucid, and detailed book about this extraordinary and compelling Caribbean revolutionary. A vital contribution to Black, Pan-African, Canadian, and Caribbean history and studies, this work is a tour de force, and I thank Irving Andre for it."

Dr. Afua Cooper, Killam Research Chair in African Diaspora History, Dalhousie University

The Mantle of Struggle

The Mantle of Struggle

A Biography of Black Revolutionary Rosie Douglas

Irving Andre

Between the Lines

Toronto

The Mantle of Struggle

© 2023 Irving Andre

First published in 2023 by

Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281

Toronto, Ontario · M5V 3A8 · Canada

1-800-718-7201 · www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for copying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 69 Yonge Street, Suite 1100, Toronto, ON M5E 1K3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The mantle of struggle : a biography of Black revolutionary Rosie Douglas / Irving Andre.

Names: Andre, Irving W., author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230491413 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230491464 | ISBN 9781771136204 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771136211 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Douglas, Rosie. | LCSH: Politicians—Dominica—Biography. | LCSH: Political activists—Dominica—Biography. | LCSH: Dominica—Politics and government—20th century. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC F2051 .A53 2023 | DDC 972.9841—dc23

Cover photograph of Rosie Douglas ca. 1975.

(Photo by Boris Spremo/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Cover and text design by DEEVE

Printed in Canada

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and Ontario Creates.

Logos for institutional funders: The Governemnt of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Creates, The Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Ontario.

Contents

Foreword by David Austin

Preface and Acknowledgements

Part One

1. The Island of Dominica

2. Portsmouth Harbour

Part Two

3. The Heir Apparent Defects

4. A Gathering Storm

5. The Sir George Williams Incident

6. The Prosecution of Rosie Douglas

7. Incarceration

8. Black Radicalism in Toronto

9. Deportation

Part Three

10. Return to Dominica

11. Political Independence

12. Freedom Fighter

13. Domestic Politics

14. The Road to Victory

15. The January 2000 General Election

Part Four

16. Forming a Government

17. Internal Dissension

18. The Final Curtain

19. The Death of Rosie Douglas

20. Rosie’s Legacy

Appendices

I. Statement from the Don Jail, Toronto, December 1971

II. Statement from the Leclerc Institution, January 3, 1974

III. Message of Greetings to the Socialist Party of France, Brest, November 21–23, 1997

IV. Speech on the Swearing In of the Cabinet of the Government of Dominica, February 7, 2000

V. Statement at the 55th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 19, 2000

Notes

Index

Foreword

Roosevelt Rosie Douglas was one of the most important Caribbean political figures of his generation. He was also one the most important Canadian political figures of his generation. He was a Pan-Africanist and an internationalist who fought for a more egalitarian world. Such is his legend that it has been rumoured that he fought alongside Frelimo (the Mozambique Liberation Front) in southern Africa.

Rosie was an enigma from Dominica, and yet his audacity was characteristic of that small part of the world that produced him. He stands alongside figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Claudia Jones, Walter Rodney, Andaiye, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), and many whose roots rest in the Caribbean. He was a rebel who rebelled against his family’s privilege, against expectations and conventions, against injustice, colonization, and servitude—against the established order of things.

Few figures can claim to have done more for freedom, and especially for people of African and Caribbean descent, than Rosie. He was well ahead of his time in terms of promoting Black-Indigenous solidarity and common cause in Canada. As a young university student in the early 1990s, I crossed the Mercier Bridge from Montreal to Kahnawake with Rosie, where he met with several Mohawk leaders whom he knew from the 1970s. It was a reunion of sorts, and I listened keenly as they told old tales of politics and solidarity.

During the 1969 Sir George Williams University (SGWU) protest, Rosie was accused of opportunistically seizing the limelight. Decades later, this position has been revised in appreciation of his ability to strategically use the media to explain the students’ grievances and expose institutional racism.

Rosie was imprisoned for his role in the SGWU incident, but turned his incarceration into an opportunity to expose injustice behind prison walls in Canada. As he wrote in Prison Reform and Dawson College: Decadent Penology vs. Fundamental Change, No human being can be expected to function creatively or otherwise under conditions of barbaric incarceration where the law of the Zoo (without public showing) predominates. Referencing the Attica prison uprising in 1971 and his experience in Leclerc prison in Quebec, Rosie advocated for a movement for transformation and ultimate abolition of prisons.¹ This is perhaps one of the first published references to prison abolition in Canada.

Rosie also called for the inmate right to vote, an end to the exploitation of prison labour and the establishment of a basic minimum wage for inmates, access to adequate medical attention and educational programs, and the right of prisoners to participate in prison decision-making processes.² These are relatively moderate demands by today’s standards. And yet the contemporary conditions within Canada’s prisons and the recent killing of a young African Canadian, Nicous Spring, at the hands of prison officers remind us that these issues continue to haunt the prison system, disproportionately affecting Black and Indigenous inmates. In this sense, the contemporary prisoner justice movement in Canada can be said to rest, at least partially, on Rosie Douglas’s shoulders.

Prison and deportation would have broken most, but Rosie eventually became prime minister of Dominica. But before he landed in office, he led Libya’s Mathaba, a revolutionary anti-imperialist organization. As Irving Andre points out in this meticulously researched book, Rosie used this position to provide vital support to the African National Congress (ANC), Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He also demonstrated solidarity with the Cuban Revolution when many Caribbean and other governments turned their backs on it in fear of US reprisals.

Rosie was not without contradiction. As a young student in Montreal, he was both a Conservative and a radical, a socialite who mixed with the Westmount crowd and the Caribbean domestic workers who worked for them, and a socialist who came under the influence of C.L.R. James. He was a friend to Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker and a foe to Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He loved to linger in those liminal spaces that defied convention and transcended boundaries. The arc of his life brought him from prisoner to prime minister, but death came prematurely, long before he could completely realize his full potential and fulfill all of his promises.

One of the strengths of this book is that it avoids hagiography. We encounter Rosie’s personal and political strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. In the end, we are left with a portrait of one of the remarkable figures of the post–World War II period, someone who fearlessly, and selflessly, fought for freedom. Roosevelt Douglas has not received the attention he deserves, and this biography admirably fills a void in Caribbean, Canadian, and global political history. Here Rosie begins to assume his rightful place, and for this we are indebted to Irving Andre.

David Austin

Tiohtià:ke (Montreal)

Preface and Acknowledgements

Roosevelt Rosie Douglas, who spent thirteen years in Canada, became a prominent Pan-African leader, and in 2000 served as prime minister of his native Dominica, first came to prominence as a ringleader of the February 1969 riot at Sir George Williams University (SGWU), Montreal, which has been the subject of significant scholarly and non-scholarly attention. As a result, Rosie’s life has been examined, oftentimes in excruciating detail, in a veritable avalanche of newspaper articles, scholarly papers, books, documentaries, and television programs.¹

But despite the tremendous scholarly and journalistic attention that Rosie received, there has been a dearth of works about critical aspects of his life. Largely undocumented have been his experiences in Toronto between his 1971 conviction and his deportation nearly five years later, his life and work in Dominica from 1976 to 2000, his policies and achievements during the nine months of his prime ministership, and the political storms that swirled around him in the final weeks preceding his death on October 1, 2000.

This biography, the first of its kind, is meant to present a more complete picture of Rosie Douglas. The social, historical, and family forces in Dominica that moulded his life, his early education, his tenure at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, his move to McGill University, his growing radicalization and involvement in the 1969 SGWU incident and subsequent trial and deportation are presented based on the historical accounts of many of Rosie’s old friends and associates. Rosie’s involvement in local politics following his return to Dominica in 1976, his role in the local independence movement, his tenure as the head of the Libyan Socialist International known as the Mathaba, his assumption of the position as head of the Dominica Labour Party (DLP) following the death of brother Mike Douglas in 1992, his changing political views in the 1990s and his dramatic assumption of the reins of political power in January 2000 are all described in stark detail. Rosie’s nine-month tenure as Dominica’s prime minister, which was marked by controversy, acrimony, and, many believe, treachery, is highlighted. Finally, the book examines the controversy following Rosie’s death and his legacy as a Pan-Africanist, socialist, prime minister, and Caribbean leader.

I was motivated to write this book by what Martin Luther King described as the fierce urgency of now. Following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the intensification of the fight for racial equality worldwide, the overarching need to understand the historical struggles that should animate the ongoing struggle for equality has never been greater. In certain circles, Rosie’s imprisonment and subsequent deportation were regarded as a mark of shame, the result of his betrayal of the immigrant’s dream of achieving success in the adopted country. Many still believe that Rosie was responsible for the burning down of the SGWU’s computer centre. The time to correct the historical record is now. The telling of Rosie’s story should help to correct this perspective and document the struggle of one man to advance the cause of racial equality, despite any personal shortcomings he may have had. My knowledge of Rosie’s family history, legal background, and exploration of the intersection of race and the Canadian justice system in previous writings have provided me with the necessary background to write this biography.

This book would not have been possible without the contributions of many people in North America and the Caribbean.

I initially met Rosie in 1976 following his return to Dominica. I became a member of a study group in Roseau called Cadre #1, which was founded partly to advance the cause of political independence in Dominica. Rosie visited our group frequently and made presentations about Marxism, communism, and political liberation struggles, particularly in Africa. Following my departure from Dominica in 1978, I maintained regular contact with Washington-based attorney Gabriel Christian, another member of Cadre #1, and with him founded Pont Casse Press in 1992 as a vehicle to assist in the writing and preservation of Dominica’s history. Following Rosie’s death, I played a limited role in the founding of the Rosie Douglas Foundation to pursue development initiatives in Dominica that reflect his vision. In 2005, I assisted Euphemie McIntyre, née Douglas, in the writing and publication of a book on family patriarch Robert Bernard Douglas (RBD).

In 2012 I received, courtesy of Rosie’s daughter Debbie Douglas, a collection of Rosie’s speeches, documents, and photographs. Since that time, I have interviewed a number of people, many of whom knew Rosie in Dominica in the 1950s and in Montreal and Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s. These include, among others, attorney Gabriel Christian, retired Dominican magistrate Ossie Lewis, former Dominica UN ambassador Crispin Gregoire, former Dominica Cuban ambassador Clarkson Thomas, former DLP representative in Libya Lloyd Pascal, Neville Wade, Joseph Cornelius Otis Hyacinth, Nathalie Sister Nats Charles, former Dominica national cricketer Charles Triniboy Walters, Nathan Bannis, journalist Carlisle Jno Baptiste, Colin James (the proprietor of the Sun newspaper in Dominica), Justice Vibert Rosemay (ret.), film producer Powys Dewhurst, Lester Green, Cekiah Thomas, attorney Bernard Wiltshire, Antoine Wilders Lewis, Dr. Stephen Sabin, Dr. Claude Makouke, Dr. Julien Mérion, Frampton Benjamin, Joseph Emanuel Mannie Dick, Lennox Farrell, and Faye Johnson.

I am greatly indebted to Ian Carrington, who gave me a significant amount of information about his close friend Rosie and their activities in Toronto during the 1970s. In 2019, Carrington introduced me to Guyana-born political economist June Ward, with whom Rosie established a common law relationship that lasted throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He maintained a special personal and political friendship with her until his death in 2000. I subsequently interviewed Ward on numerous occasions and she shared with me an impressive trove of documents, newspaper articles, photographs, and Rosie memorabilia that she had collected and preserved for almost fifty years. Additionally, I benefited tremendously from many interviews with her regarding Rosie’s activism in the 1970s.

I have benefited from interviews, documents, photographs, and articles from various members of Rosie’s family, including Euphemie McIntyre, Kim Douglas, Debbie Douglas, Tiyani Behanzin, Cabral Douglas, Sean Douglas, Dr. Eisenhower Douglas, and Adenauer Washway Douglas. I also benefited from insights of the late Major Twistleton St. R. Bertrand, who knew Rosie from the day he was born.

I must also thank Professor David Austin and Dr. Amanda Perry for their important suggestions following a review of the manuscript; my friend Gabriel Christian for his useful comments; my editor, Tilman Lewis, for his detailed attention; and my wife, Kathy, for her invaluable work on early transcripts of this book and for her critical support.

Part One

1

The Island of Dominica

In 1961, Roosevelt Rosie Douglas, the twenty-year-old son of businessman, wealthy landowner, and politician Robert Bernard Douglas (RBD), had the audacity to pick up a telephone on the miniscule Caribbean island of Dominica and place a call to the Ottawa office of Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, whom he had never met. Diefenbaker returned the call a month later. Douglas complained to the prime minister that he had applied to study agriculture in Canada but had not received the required clearance from immigration. Within weeks, Rosie travelled to Canada and, following a stint on a farm, enrolled at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph to fulfill RBD’s dream of his second son becoming an agriculturist to manage his six-hundred-acre Hampstead Estate. Upon graduation, rather than return to Dominica as RBD had envisioned, Rosie made his way to Montreal to study political science and ultimately became embroiled, in February 1969, at Sir George Williams University (SGWU; now Concordia University), in the most famous, or perhaps infamous, campus riot in Canadian history.

Rosie’s thirteen-year sojourn in Canada—in which he moved from student to Black Power advocate, student agitator, communist, national security threat, and finally, deportee—has often been portrayed as a kind of political morality play; one in which Rosie squandered a bright political future as Diefenbaker’s protege to become what many perceived to have been a dangerous radical agitator. He would go on, on the international stage, to function as an emissary of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, invigorating liberation struggles in Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, and improbably become prime minister of Dominica in 2000.

In the aftermath of the 1969 incident at the SGWU, media attention focused to a significant degree on Rosie Douglas, the avowed leader of the incident who had only recently arrived in Canada. Very few Canadians had heard of the British colony that was his homeland. The tiny island had a population of approximately sixty thousand people, the majority of whom were descendants of formerly enslaved people, and was one of the most impoverished Caribbean islands.

Rosie’s improbable history began in Dominica, the island on which Christopher Columbus had set foot on November 3, 1492. The geography and topography of the 298-square-mile island made it rather unattractive for colonial exploitation. Columbus presented an image of it by crumpling a piece of paper to portray its mountainous and rugged nature. Its steep mountains appeared to collapse breathlessly into each other, while numerous streams, reportedly numbering 365, provided a steady source of water. Exotic birds, wildlife, flora, and fauna displayed themselves in a tropical tapestry of red, green, yellow, pink, and orange not seen in other islands. The volcanic nature of the island and the presence of a boiling lake created an atmosphere that was at once captivating and foreboding. In ensuing centuries, Europeans were drawn to the island, described as possessing a fatal gift of beauty that defied virtually every colonial attempt to develop it. European settlement on the island was hampered primarily by the mountainous terrain and the ferocious struggle waged by the Kalinago people (previously referred to as the Caribs) to maintain sovereignty over the land. Inexorably, however, Europeans established a foothold on Dominica, one that they consolidated over the next two centuries.

For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the European powers, particularly the French and English, battled for supremacy over Dominica, until in 1763, they signed a treaty giving the English control.¹ By this time, a French-based creole (or kweyol) had become the main means of communication among the enslaved Africans, many of whom were owned by mulatto plantation owners from Guadeloupe and Martinique. The treaty, however, did not end the hostilities between the two countries, and towards the end of the eighteenth century, a French expeditionary force took control of Dominica; it eventually relinquished control of the island in 1803. By then, the plantation system, which relied on enslaved labour from Africa to produce sugar and other crops, had become firmly entrenched in Dominica. Slave owners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries included English planters as well as French owners of modest plantations, particularly in the northeast and southeast parts of the island.

While there were significantly fewer plantations, and enslaved labourers, in Dominica than in other West Indian islands, such as Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, or even St. Lucia, the treatment of enslaved workers on many Dominican plantations was no less brutal. Indeed, enslaved Dominicans fled the plantations in droves for decades and established settlements in Dominica’s rugged interior. Periodically, the colonial authorities conducted extermination campaigns against the runaways or neg mawon, and, as in a notorious campaign in 1814, brutally and publicly executed maroon leaders whom they had captured. The British abolished slavery in their West Indian colonies in 1834 and introduced a period of apprenticeship to guarantee the former slave owners a steady supply of labour. When this period ended in 1838, a large number of formerly enslaved people distanced themselves from the plantations and moved to various parts of the islands where they established their own modest gardens. One of these pioneers was Dorville Douglas, Rosie’s paternal grandfather, who moved to a small village in the northeastern part of Dominica.

In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in Dominica, two developments dominated Dominica’s future. The first related to the economic and political ascendancy of the light-complexioned business and professional elite, based in the capital city of Roseau, who were derisively known as Mulatre Wozeau. During slavery, many of their antecedents had played an important role in the plantation economy by owning their own plantations and providing commercial and personal services to those who operated them. Additionally, many were the product of intimate encounters between white slave owners or overseers and Black or light-skinned women, many of whom assumed the airs and pretentions of the whites on the island. By the 1860s, members of the Mulatre Wozeau dominated the island’s Legislative Council, to a point that the local loyal representatives of the British government sought to neutralize what they perceived to be a Mulatto Ascendancy by reintroducing Crown colony government, in which all legislative and executive power reposed in the hands of the local colonial representative.²

Second, the vast majority of formerly enslaved people languished in a state of perpetual poverty throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, from which there were few avenues of escape. The British government granted £20 million in compensation to former slave owners, but none to formerly enslaved people. Initially, religious organizations, rather than colonial authorities, established schools in Dominica for formerly enslaved people and their children. The colonial government did not provide any financial help to formerly enslaved people for housing, to establish small holdings, or to provide markets for their produce. On the contrary, it enacted vagrancy laws and legislation proscribing the theft of produce from the plantations to ensure that formerly enslaved people had no option but to sell their labour, for minimal wages, to their erstwhile owners or their representatives.

As a result, many formerly enslaved people and their children resorted to leaving Dominica to work in various islands. Dominican labourers travelled to Trinidad, Santo Domingo, British Guiana, and French Guiana for employment. Between 1890 and 1920, American labour recruiters hired as many as seven thousand Dominican labourers to work on the building of the Panama Canal.

The economic disparity between the labouring population and the established elite, and the attempt of the British to deprive Dominicans of representative government, spawned a great deal of radicalism in Dominica towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. The mixed race middle class fought a protracted campaign for representative government, which culminated in the historic Dominica Conference in 1932, where Dominican leaders hosted political leaders from many British West Indian colonies.

Poverty and political instability created a great deal of race and class consciousness in Dominica even in the decades before the rise of the Black Power movement, which Rosie would become a convert to in the 1960s. In the late 1890s, coloured politicians and newspapers warned about a race war in Dominica. In 1893, residents of the southeastern village of La Plaine rioted over their obligation to pay taxes without any political representation. The colonial police opened fire on stone-throwing protesters and fatally wounded four of them.³

In the early twentieth century, two developments engendered the growth of an incipient Black consciousness in Dominica. The first occurred with the advent of World War I, during which hundreds of poor Dominican men enlisted in the British army. Their exposure to racism, which resulted in their relegation to labour battalions, sensitized these men about racial prejudice and oppression.⁴

The return of the veterans coincided with another development that increased Black consciousness in Dominica. It commenced with the teachings of Jamaican Marcus Mosiah Garvey, whose philosophy of Black pride and empowerment resonated not only throughout the length and breadth of the United States in the 1920s but also in Dominica, particularly among the country’s returning World War I veterans. Led by bookbinder, author, and poet Joseph Raphael Ralph Casimir, the local Garveyite movement grew in Dominica from a few dozen members in 1919 to hundreds by the early 1920s, with the founding of local branches of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

While male labourers dominated UNIA’s membership in Dominica, a few well-known members of the Mulatre Wozeau also joined the movement, likely seeking the financial benefits to be derived from such membership. Growing up in the harbour city of Portsmouth during the 1940s and 1950s, Rosie was exposed to Portsmouth residents who belonged to the Garveyite movement, including druggists Cyril Sandford Henry Stowe and Tyrell Michael Bertrand and shopkeeper Isaiah Hector. Indeed, the latter two had their establishments on the same street where the businesses of Rosie’s father stood and were close acquaintances of RBD.

Dominican Activism in the Diaspora

Before Rosie’s birth in 1941, Dominicans in the diaspora had taken up the mantle of leadership in the fight for Black equality in the United States and Africa. The first notable Dominican to assume that role was attorney George James Christian, a primary school teacher who went to London, England, in 1899 to enrol in Gray’s Inn, where he qualified as a lawyer three years later. While still a law student, Christian joined the UK-based Pan-African Association, and following his graduation, he migrated to Ghana, where he settled in the Sekondi region. There, he established a thriving law practice, in addition to becoming an elected member of the local legislature and co-founding a college in the area.⁵ Christian died in Ghana in 1940.

Harold C. Burton, born in Dominica in 1888, attended the Dominica Grammar School and St. Mary’s College in Trinidad before migrating to the United States in 1904. Graduating from the New York Electrical School and the International Correspondence School in Mechanical Engineering, he worked as a plumber and electrician in New York from 1928 to 1941.⁶ Burton campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt as governor of New York shortly after his arrival in the United States, and became a lifetime card-carrying member of the Republican party. He held the position as leader of the 7th Assembly District for thirty years and as second vice president of the New York County Republican Committee for several years.⁷ Burton also became the Republican party’s nominee for representative of the 22nd District in 1948 and 1954. In 1964, he joined other Black Republicans in refusing to support avowed racist Senator Barry Goldwater for president. Burton stated, Goldwater is against everything Negroes stand for. He is against civil rights, he is against social security and he is against the Supreme Court.⁸ Burton died in 1971.

Another Dominican, Conrad S. Peter, became a well-known activist in Harlem, New York City, in the early twentieth century. A British soldier, he migrated to the United States in the early 1920s and participated in numerous Black causes. In 1968, he founded New York City’s Afro-American Day Parade, which took place every September. In the September 1973 parade, a crowd of half a million spectators lined Adam Clay Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem to witness some 350 Black groups take part in a parade with approximately 200,000 participants. Described as a march for black survival, the groups included organizations of senior citizens, the Medina Temple #19 of the Prince Hall Shriners, scout groups, the New York City Mission Warriors Drum and Bugle Corps, and many others. Asked about the reason for the parade, Peter told a reporter, This day is to salute our ancestors and pay homage and tribute to our motherland.⁹

Dominican Austin G. Alexander, who migrated to the United States in the 1930s, also became a respected activist in Harlem following his sojourn in the US Army during World War II. During his military career, Alexander received several campaign medals, two commendations, and a National Defense Medal. He died in 1969 at the St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, New York.

Dr. Cecil Duverney contributed greatly to fighting racial discrimination in New York perpetrated by the state’s law enforcement agents, following an encounter with two white officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) in 1976. Like many of his compatriots, Duverney travelled to Curaçao in the early 1940s to work in the oil industry. He moved to New York in the late 1950s and subsequently enrolled in medical school. He graduated as a doctor a few years later and worked in a Long Island hospital.

On April 14, 1976, Dr. Duverney, who suffered from hypertension, experienced a reaction from his medication while driving on the Southern State Parkway. Officer Thomas Strum stopped him and, rather than assist him, handcuffed Duverney and placed him in his cruiser. Officer Vincent Prajka arrived at the scene. Strum told him, I got me a nigger dude. While en route to a police station, Strum told Duverney, You niggers always cause a lot of trouble. Duverney referred to the officers as white bastards. Thereupon Strum struck him in the mouth. The officers then drove him to the parking lot of a precinct ironically named Babylon barracks and struck him repeatedly in the face while he was handcuffed.¹⁰ The officers eventually charged Duverney with drunk driving and assaulting police. A senior officer requested that the arresting officers transport him to a nearby hospital for medical attention. They took him to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Inslip, where he was kept overnight while chained to a cot.¹¹

Following the dismissal of the charges against him, Dr. Duverney did something that was rare at the time: he sued the two police officers for US$10 million for assault and battery, unlawful and malicious imprisonment, and malicious prosecution.¹² Following an eight-day trial, the grand jury ruled in his favour and found the senior officer liable for violating Duverney’s civil rights. During the trial, Dr. Berner Newman, a former director of the Suffolk County police laboratory, testified that there was a strong possibility that the police had tampered with a sample of Duverney’s blood taken from him by the police, in a cynical attempt to support the charge of drunk driving. Dr. Newman testified that either other blood was substituted or alcohol was added. Twenty nurses and doctors from the Good Samaritan Hospital testified that Duverney did not appear intoxicated when the police brought him to the emergency room. The jury accepted the evidence and awarded Dr. Duverney US$1.2 million, which his lawyer hailed as the largest amount at the time for the violation of the civil rights of a person by the NYPD. On October 30, 1978, the US Court of Appeals upheld the award.

Another Dominican who made a significant contribution to Pan-Africanism was Vivian Edward George Dalrymple, who was born in 1918 and later changed his name to Edward Scobie. Fair complexioned with aquiline features, Scobie grew up, by Dominican standards, in comfortable surroundings. He attended primary school in Roseau and the prestigious Dominica Grammar School in the early 1930s. A gifted sportsman, he represented the school in both cricket and football and, by 1941, had earned places on the island’s national cricket and football teams. Scobie was exposed to Pan-Africanism in Dominica before leaving the island in 1942 to join the Royal Air Force, where he attained the rank of flight lieutenant in Bomber Command. Scobie founded a Negro Magazine called Checkers in England in 1948 and another called Flamingo one year later. He returned to Dominica in 1960, where he immersed himself in journalism and politics until his departure for the US in the 1970s.

Christian, Burton, Peter, Alexander, Duverney, and Scobie may not have interacted or collaborated after they left Dominica, but their radicalism was nurtured by their experiences in the country, and Rosie was familiar with Scobie, who became immersed in Dominican politics in the early 1960s. Rosie Douglas would similarly gravitate towards a rendezvous with Black radicalism, partly because of his first-hand knowledge of the economic and social disparities in Dominica.

2

Portsmouth Harbour

Dominica boasts two towns: the capital, Roseau, in the southwest, and Portsmouth in the northwest. In many respects, Portsmouth served as a gateway for Dominicans seeking to travel by sea to regional and international destinations, as well as seafarers visiting the island. As early as 1857, Blunt’s American Coast Pilot, a bible for yachters, noted that the town’s natural harbour was a popular refuge for food and water.¹

Dominicans who lived in the island’s interior trekked regularly to the town to sell their produce and purchase staples such as salt, sugar, flour, salt fish from Canada, and the ubiquitous