1. Loving and leaving the new Jamaica: reckoning with the 1960s

Matthew J. Smith

The young are the conveyors of a nation’s history. Small wonder that new governments claim the youth as the principal beneficiaries of their plans for ‘a better tomorrow’. It is widely appreciated that an administration’s successes and failures are best measured by the legacies it leaves for the citizens who inherit that tomorrow. Jamaica’s first decade as a new nation may be reflected in the stories of three young girls: Sybil, Ioni and Maureen.

Two days to go before Independence Day. Jamaica’s children wake up on 4 August 1962 with more visible excitement than the adults. Sybil, not yet ten, joined 1,000 children from Kingston’s schools for a fun day at State Theatre in Cross Roads. The promoter, Dudley McMillan, in a show of festive charity, opened the doors to the country’s future, the city’s youth, for free films and entertainment. Sybil sipped her free Kelly’s flavoured soda and laughed with the other children at the Three Stooges. In the intermission in the morning’s double bill she and her friend Carol performed the English nursery rhyme ‘Two Little Blackbirds’ in an impromptu talent contest. They came second. In the afternoon Sybil and the other children made their way to the national stadium for the youth rally. There she beamed even more brightly as she and a stadium of peers waved their small Jamaican flags affixed to a narrow piece of wood. Some sat on their parents’ shoulders so as to raise the flag higher. Sybil radiated when she got a glimpse of Princess Margaret – so pretty – in the stands beside Prime Minister Bustamante, the Governor-General Sir Kenneth Blackburne and Lady Blackburne. A field of little girls like her in their peasant blouses and bandanas, singing the National Pledge, more moving than the anthem, more committed on that day, hours before Monday’s flag ceremony, hours before they would be referred to as Jamaicans and not ‘subjects’. ‘Linstead Market’ and ‘Sly Mongoose’ followed – all the children singing in unison. They sang for the princess, ‘our princess by our own choice’, said the minister of education; they sang for Jamaica, 20,000 young voices belting out ‘Hip Hip, HOORAY!’ They sang for the future of their island, which was now fused with their own.¹

1964. Two years later to the day, 11-year-old Ioni put on her best dress, nervously getting ready to leave her house. The excitement for the independence anniversary had been building outside her narrow room window on Slipe Pen Road. She heard the noise, the roving cars advertising Independence Day sales at King’s Street stores, Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ blaring over and over again, Prime Minister Bustamante’s independence message filtering through nearby radio sets. All Jamaicans, said the prime minister, must be proud of the progress that has been made in just two short years. It was all out of reach for her, out of mind. Closer were the area boys who sat all day, shirtless, on the road outside her shanty, who seemed to do nothing else but stare out to Maxfield Avenue and chat, chat, chat. The cemetery was not far away and its stillness insinuated the distance from the loud cheers at the stadium. Independence was not marked on Slipe Pen Road. It belonged to another part of Kingston, other people.

Ioni’s mother helped her with her suitcase and she walked out of the front door for the last time, crossing the zinc fences, stopping momentarily on the dirt track to respond to one of the boys:

She took off one of her shoes and showed them to the boys. Quoting her father, a mechanic before he left for England and a known preacher in the community, Ioni looked them in the eye and said, ‘Im say we must shake the dust off we foot when we coming’. Unhurriedly she slipped her shoe back on, took one glance, turned around, then took her mother’s hand towards the vehicle waiting to take them to the Palisadoes airport, then to London.²

Two more years passed. Independence 1966 was meant to bring what was now routine parading, the festival song competition, speeches, fireworks, flags: the requisite fanfare. It was nothing but woe for Maureen Ellis. Maureen was barely three years old when the government bulldozed the shack she and her mother were living in on Foreshore Road that July. The world around her, the only one she knew – a galaxy of decrepit lean-tos – was flat. Foreshore Road and Industrial Terrace were long regarded as the worst eyesores of Kingston’s extensive slums. ‘Den of iniquity’, ‘shantytown’, ‘deprived’, ‘depraved’, ‘embarrassment’ were all words that seemed to follow the very name Foreshore Road. It was also home to hundreds of children like Maureen, the largest proportion of its residents.

When Maureen and her mother were forced out they had nowhere else to go. With other children she made her way to the May Pen cemetery, within view of the home where Ioni used to live. Maureen never visited the stadium and never left Jamaica. Her mother’s suitcase was used only for local travel. After the destruction of their house it was one of the few possessions they had left and whatever else they had was in it.

A photograph of Maureen has survived. It was taken in 1966 by a Daily Gleaner photographer and shows the lone survivor of a personal apocalypse, sat on that old suitcase of her mother’s in the cemetery, forlorn and disconnected. Nothing around her but tombstones and nothing with her but what was below her in the case. Just behind her was an overturned table, perhaps a found item used for shelter from the cold night air. In her eyes a strain to make sense of this forced readjustment. The city’s welfare agency would eventually take in Maureen and place her with other dispossessed children in a special home for children on Haining Road in New Kingston, a short-lived hope for a fresh start. On Christmas Day 1967 the home caught on fire and Maureen and five other children were burned to death.³

******

Sybil, Ioni and Maureen were children of independence, inheritors of what was popularly called the ‘new Jamaica’ who did not all experience its bright promise. They were like many other children and many other Jamaicans trying to make sense of the place they were given in post-colonial Jamaica. They were more than this, reflections of different realities of Jamaica’s early years of decolonisation. These years, in which they experienced joy, resignation and tragedy, were the foundation years of the island’s political self-determination.

How do we remember Jamaica’s 1960s? Whose reality is superimposed on the nation’s history of Jamaica in these years? These three examples are elemental to the picture of these years but in their own ways are subsumed too often under the cloud of the violently divisive 1970s. To say that Jamaica in the 1960s was consumed with hope and unity destroyed by the ideological and turf battles of the following decade is to present an inadequate reflection of what life was truly like in those preceding years. Independence arrived with all the ingredients of disharmony intact.

Political scientist Louis Lindsay’s influential essay ‘The myth of independence’ – dated but still relevant – suggests that the fall of the colonial order had only rearranged the power dynamics in a structure long predetermined by island elites and rulers. An ‘Afro-Saxon’ elite – Lindsay’s term – had assumed power after a gradual transfer from British rule following universal adult suffrage in 1944. Its interests were vested in the continuity of a social order of privilege – colour and class being the most crucial determinants of access (Lindsay, 1975).

The state had crafted a vision of a ‘new Jamaica’ that was offered to the citizens of the island. ‘Newness’ was not only in the dismantling of the appearances of colonialism or the replacement of old ways with new symbols: for example, replacing ‘God Save the Queen’ with the Jamaican national anthem before film viewings in the cinemas. It was to be a consciousness, a mindset that all Jamaicans lived in a ‘new’ era in which they had a stake, rights and regard. Jamaicans had to see themselves as Jamaicans. A pamphlet issued by the government on the eve of independence announced that, ‘Jamaica is one of the world’s most beautiful islands. Jamaicans of all races and colours live together in harmony. Jamaica has produced some of the best athletes in the world’.⁴ The pamphlet further asked the question: ‘What does independence mean?’. It also provided the answer:

A Jamaican attitude was encouraged, a consciously Jamaican way of being, with all the uplifting rhetoric of nationalism. It was an idea long worn even by 1962. There was no cloaking the visible and sensed reality of disenfranchisement that threatened the virtue of the country’s motto: ‘Out of Many One People’, the phrase that even its originator, Norman Manley, admitted (in a speech to his party in September 1962) was an ideal more than a reality (in Nettleford, 1971, p. 313).

Jamaica’s independence came in the context of party divisions and the state and the elite’s fledgling sense of its place and potential. There were multiple visions of the way in which Jamaica and Jamaicans were to face the challenge that lay ahead. A prominent columnist, Vere Johns, wrote facetiously that on 7 August, the day after independence, nothing had changed. All that he had experienced before remained the same and expectations of meaningful difference in the country waned within him.⁶

A contemporary put it more directly: ‘There are very few people with the nerve to question seriously the promises on which we base our case for national existence’.⁷ And in 1963 came another view: ‘Who is to speak for Jamaica? Not the colonials no matter how important they seem, but the young men for whose children we are preparing the new world and the bright promise’.⁸

The party in power in 1962 was the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), having won a general election in April. Its rivalry with the People’s National Party (PNP), the party of Norman Manley, defined Jamaica’s politics then as it does now. The stakes and expectations were different in the 1960s. Independence promises and improved social welfare were de rigueur in the campaign buildup. Whichever party – and leader – won, they would be monitored rigorously by their rival in the years following 1962. They were closely held to this by a politicised public rallied behind one leader or another. The PNP criticised the ruling party for its authoritarian tendencies, evidenced by its treatment of perceived dissent. Bustamante was called ‘Chief’ and his rule and that of his ministers were compared to Duvalier’s Haiti, a democracy in name that was drifting towards abusive power.⁹

The Coral Gardens incident in western Jamaica in April 1963, in which Rastafarians were assaulted, arrested and their locks shorn, was held up as proof of the PNP’s suspicions. This was politics and there was exaggeration in it. But it does give a sense of the volatility that existed on both sides. By the end of Jamaica’s first year of independence, the government’s rivals were delighted to argue that no signs of improvement were evident, that it had only deepened the challenges the poor island faced. Consider this 1964 poem by Sybil with humorous reference to the first verse of Jamaica’s national anthem:

Political realities connected with the daily hardships faced by most Jamaicans, particularly those in the overcrowded capital. A demographic increase in the decade worried politicians and made the situation in Kingston tough. Migration into Kingston and St Andrew from rural parishes contributed to a ballooning population with few options for social improvement.

Government promises flowed. New Jamaica would benefit all Jamaicans and everyone would receive adequate housing – in time. But the old places, the squatter lands that spread wide in the west, were frequently referenced as proof of failure. The island’s elite classes were embarrassed by them, denigrating them as ugly reminders that the country was not as modern as it proclaimed. In 1966 the government moved in and demolished the shacks on Foreshore Road. The shanties had housed children, hundreds of them, like little Maureen Ellis, forced to move out with their families.

By 1966 the intensity of the gangs in the tightly connected network of ghettoes had become a troubling concern. Political rivalries were to blame for pushing Jamaica’s independent future, a future in construction for its children, to a new level of violence. In Denham Town, Trench Town, Foreshore Road and Back-O-Wall gangs, which once used to support politicians in their bids in the last election, were now unleashed, recruiting and executing their force on the young.

Vere Johns was incredulous in a commentary on the situation that emerged after the bulldozing and the beginning of a political battle in which the parties were building a cadre of enforcers: ‘Who organized these “gangs” in the city’s west?’, he asked, continuing:

Elsewhere, he issued a call against the effect of this on the youth: ‘What manner of citizens of the world these children make, but future inmates in the island’s prisons and mental asylum?’¹² Having earlier called Jamaica ‘a motherless child’, he here extended the metaphor further.¹³

The government responded to these tensions with a state of emergency, imposing a strictly enforced curfew in the west. The result of this, in the medium term, was a tenser situation in the island’s capital. Social lines were drawn more starkly along geographical lines. These were not, as yet, the garrisons that they would become. But the seeds were sown. By 1966 Edward Seaga, who had earlier announced his entry into politics with an impassioned speech in parliament on the haves and have-nots, spoke on the radio about the situation unfolding in Kingston’s heart:

Norman Manley was equally upset and worried about where the country might be headed. In his own radio address he stated: ‘Jamaica is still two nations – the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. The social structure is still dominated by the plantation big man system, is still governed by the master and servant plan for mankind. The gap gets wider not narrower’.¹⁵

The response to this situation was an increasing desire to leave. Migration has always been a part of Jamaica’s reality. But in the 1960s those like Ioni and her family who left for England did so not only because of the promise that existed in other places but with the view that Jamaica was ‘harsh and cruel’, to use Ioni’s father’s words. Migration in previous decades had been, among other things, a safety valve for the island. Demand for Jamaican labour encouraged the massive movement to England before – and especially after – the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in England in June 1948.¹⁶ This remained steady in the 1950s.

The impact was beginning to dip as Jamaica readied for independence. The British Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 imposed new regulations on Commonwealth citizens entering the UK in a manner that was criticised by opposition leader Hugh Gaitskell in the British parliament as ‘cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation’ (Woodspring, 2016, p. 30). The act limited the number of Jamaicans migrating to the UK to only those, like Ioni’s father, who obtained an employment voucher. Jamaicans worried over the implications of this and also of losing their British passport status and the rights they believed it bestowed on them over the Jamaican one.

All of this produced a great deal of anxiety. In the very months that construction workers laboured overtime to make the stadium ready for the August independence celebrations, extraordinarily long lines formed daily in front of the passport office on Harbour Street, where Jamaicans sought to obtain British passports before the Curb Bill took effect in July. The ‘Beat the ban’ push was large. Hundreds made their voyages to London, so many in fact that extra BOAC flights were commissioned. More security was called in to assist with the ticketing.¹⁷

The subsequent enforcement of the act drew more attention to the United States, another receiver of large numbers of Jamaican immigrants and also a place with discriminatory migration laws. The McCarran Act (Internal Security Act) of 1950 imposed a quota system on migrants to the US, a move that affected Jamaicans.¹⁸ The issue that Jamaica’s leaders had to contemplate was how migration fitted in with the direction in which the new nation was heading. Both Bustamante and Manley understood that with the rising population there was a need for migration. The two of them travelled separately to the United States to plead the case for a repeal of the McCarran Act, which, they argued, discriminated against Jamaicans (and for that matter Trinidadians) unfairly.

Equally resonant was the view that migration was robbing the country of its professional sector – the women and men on whose shoulders the future of the country could be developed. One observer noted in 1963 that migration had cost the country much more than it gained. Calling the Curb Bill a ‘very big blow to Jamaica’, the observer nonetheless saw benefit for the country: ‘We now need all the resources at our disposal: the doctors, lawyers, teachers, tradesmen … and in effect everyone who would contribute their various skills in the interest of a stronger and more abundant Jamaica’.¹⁹

There was also a cynical view. Some were upset at Jamaicans’ willingness to seek migration overseas. They called it a colonial mentality. That Jamaicans did not believe in their country, seeking their opportunities elsewhere and giving of their skills to a place that would never be their own. One local writer stated that ‘the notion that Jamaicans must migrate to find opportunity is a product of colonial mentality. Independent Jamaica must create opportunities for her people’.²⁰ Norman Manley, a patriotic Jamaican, rebutted the negative implication in this view vigorously: ‘Is it the colonial mentality of England that sends more Englishmen abroad every year than all migrants who come to England?’²¹

This was a clearly complicated issue made even more so by the troubling events of 1966 already described. That year coincided with the eventual removal of the McCarran Act. President Lyndon Johnson, under civil-rights pressure, signed the Hart Cellar Act in 1965 – something he promised he would consider when he visited Jamaica during independence celebrations in 1962. The effect of this was astounding. Jamaican migration to the United States shot up dramatically and would remain high for the rest of the decade.

Worry remained that Jamaica was suffering a troubling brain drain. A nationalist consciousness in the mid to late 1960s, carried forward by radical youth, Rastafarians, critics of empire and leftist politicians, and, simultaneously, an expressive revulsion towards European and North American ideologies, in the context of civil rights and the Vietnam War, fuelled a deeper attachment to the country among some Jamaicans. Whatever its problems, Jamaica was their country and needed its people. One proposed solution to this was to encourage professional Jamaicans to return.

Some did return and their fortunes were mixed. In 1962 a Jamaican technician in England was sufficiently moved to go back home, following the example of African immigrants he knew who had done just that. His reality was harder than he had imagined it would be. Frustrated over employment conditions, he told his story to a local paper, vowing to go back to England at his first opportunity, to be ‘anywhere but here’.²²

This example may not have been typical. Others returned from abroad, weary of the anonymity of life in a foreign place, and likewise pulled by the rousing national spirit – enhanced by 1964, when Jamaican culture, particularly Ska music, began to mark its own space on the pop music scene. Figures for return migration in these years are hard to come by, but there is some indication that it was important. To this is added the flow of remittances into the island, already an important element by then. By 1963 more than three million pounds had been sent back to Jamaica by migrants in the UK.²³

No condition made the desire to leave greater than the deepening political tribalism and violence which worsened after the 1967 election that returned the JLP to power. Following strikes by teachers, journalists, bus operators, nurses and students and most notably the October 1968 protest by students at the University of the West Indies in response to the government’s banning of the lecturer Dr Walter Rodney, participants left in droves, signalling the tensions with which young Jamaica was dealing. As ever the situation was worst in Kingston. A newspaper commentary in 1969 had this to say:

Taken together these circumstances did little to persuade Jamaicans abroad to return. In fact, it only strengthened the desire to leave. By 1970 Jamaicans were the largest number of migrants per capita entering the United States.

The new leader of the PNP, Michael Manley, in his 1969 New Year’s address to the country said Jamaica was in a state of crisis. An escalating cost of living and growing fatigue with the JLP had created a bitterly divided society. The political tensions – more violent by then than ever before – and the crime problem had betrayed the ideals of independence, according to the younger Manley: ‘The man who has not got the price of a plane ticket is no better off than the man who has not got a passport’.²⁵ He argued that new Jamaica ‘needed something new’.

Michael Manley offered himself as that ‘something new’. In a speech to students at the Wolmer’s Boys School in May 1970 he pushed the same message, another call to the island’s youth, another vow to change their world with their help: ‘I am in no doubt in my own mind that the will of this country needs to be summoned to a great effort of reconstruction … [T]he younger generation are critical of the world that their fathers have made. My plea is to get involved … more than ever before this country needs the energy the enthusiasm and the new ideas of youth’.²⁶

******

Manley’s impassioned call for a transformation revolved around the word ‘love’. His slogan, repeated then and ever more frequently in the early years of his administration in the early 1970s, was ‘The word is love’. And what sort of love? One love? Love for one another and for country? Love for the children who will reap the world made by their forebears? The appeal of love as an ideal in Jamaica echoed a common Rastafari greeting, ‘Love my brothers and sisters’. Manley’s appropriation of it was a conscious gesture towards the influence of Rastafari consciousness – principally through reggae music – on a new generation of Jamaicans, like the students at Wolmer’s School, whom he claimed to represent. Manley brought into the political sphere a popular notion of unity and togetherness as a rhetorical device to suggest an end to the violent political division that had come to define Jamaican electoral politics. But it never transcended the status of political device.

Ten years after independence Michael Manley became prime minister on 1 March 1972, promising to use love to reconstruct the nation. The promise he gave was a reversal of the losses of the past decade, the misplaced and departed hope of the 1960s, the creation of another ‘new Jamaica’. Jamaica’s 1960s ended that February night when he became the country’s new leader. The details of the achievements and failures of Manley’s Jamaica were carried by the young, those who lived it, loved it and left it. The seeds sown in the 1960s blossomed into full bloom in the 1970s. Crime and political violence worsened to frightening levels and in greater numbers Jamaicans left with no intention of ever returning. ‘This is how our world ends’, wrote a columnist in 1976, when hundreds took flight and the country was under its second state of emergency since independence, ‘not with a bang but with a visa’.²⁷

The title of this chapter is influenced by Roger Mais’s classic reflection from 1950, ‘Why I love and leave Jamaica’. Mais’s work captured the conflict between attachment and departure that has long haunted Caribbean history and is pronounced in the Jamaican experience. In that text he offers these lines: ‘Shall I have regrets about leaving Jamaica? No. … If I should know regret it would be a betrayal and a denial of [my values] that have only met with sneering and contempt in this country of my birth, or have met with an odious kind of patronage, which is worst of all’.²⁸

Mais’s defence of his leaving touched on that perpetual ambivalence of intentions that has remained a constant in Jamaican life. Leaving does not bring about a resolution. Those who depart know well that their personal histories, tied so tightly with Jamaica’s history, are a partial narrative in a larger story of the search for freedom. Migration cannot by itself satisfy the reckoning. Mais left for England, which for him, in the words of his friend George Lamming, turned out to be like ‘stale porridge’. He would return to Jamaica, where he died in 1955.

The decision to stay also offers no lasting calm. The country’s problems continued to multiply and with the passage of time these overwhelming circumstances have forced a reconsideration of the personal and national journey. Edward Baugh, a Jamaican poet, in his brilliant poem ‘Choices’, written decades after Mais, envisions a conversation between a Jamaican who left and one who stayed. Each has an unsettled sense of the virtue of their choice, made pellucid in the poem’s final lines: ‘I wouldn’t say I would never leave, | but if that’s what they calling ambition, | then for now I sticking with love’.²⁹ The 1960s were expected to change that tension between leaving and loving Jamaica, to tip the balance towards love. Independence was expected to deepen attachment to Jamaica and the island’s commitment to its people. Perhaps that was expecting too much. Critics had said in 1962 that the country was not yet ready for independence – a comment that still echoes. Whatever the reasons why the 1960s did not achieve what it promised, their effects – love, loss and leaving – the stories of the children of the new Jamaica, must be told if today, half a century later, we are to understand what they truly meant.

Bibliography

Baugh, E. (2013) ‘Choices’, in E. Baugh, Black Sand: New and Selected Poems (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press), p. 58.

Francis, V. (1998) With Hope in their Eyes (London: Nia).

Government of Jamaica (1962) Independence: What it Means to Us (Special Collections, University of the West Indies Mona Library).

Johns, V. (1962) ‘Vere Johns says’, The Star, 8 Aug.

Lindsay, L. (2011 [1975]) ‘The myth of independence: middle-class politics and non-mobilization in Jamaica’, Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Working Paper no. 6., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1822826 [accessed 5 Feb. 2019].

Mais, R. (1950) ‘Why I love and leave Jamaica’, typescript, Roger Mais Collection, University of the West Indies Mona, Special Collections, http://contentdm64-srv.uwimona.edu.jm/cdm/ref/collection/RogerMS/id/1626 [accessed July 2019].

Manley, N.W. (1971) ‘Independence: the assets we have’, in Rex Nettleford (ed.), Manley and the New Jamaica: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1938–1968 (London: Longman), pp. 313–17.

Phillips, M. and T. Phillips (2009) Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: Harper Collins).

Woodspring, N. (2016) Baby Boomers: Time and Ageing Bodies (Bristol: Policy Press).

_________

1 This account is inspired by information in ‘Princess opens the stadium’, Daily Gleaner, 5 Aug. 1962, 1; ‘Dancing and singing at youth rally’, Daily Gleaner, 8 Aug. 1962, 3; ‘Children’s treat at State’, Daily Gleaner, 8 Aug. 1962, 7.

2 This account is inspired by information in George Thurst, ‘The dust under her feet’, Public Opinion, 14 Aug. 1964, 11.

3 This account is inspired by information presented in ‘The little girl who was bulldozed: death by fire’, Public Opinion, 29 Dec. 1967, 1. See also, ‘Six infants die in Christmas Day fire’, Daily Gleaner, 27 Dec. 1967, 1.

4 The Government of Jamaica, ‘Independence: what it means to us’, 1962, Special Collections, University of the West Indies Mona, Library.

5 Ibid.

6 Johns (1962), 7.

7 Public Opinion, 2 March 1963, 1.

8 Public Opinion, 5 Jan. 1963, 1.

9 See, e.g., the poem by Sybil, ‘Heil! Chief!’, which takes a swipe against Bustamante’s leadership style (Public Opinion, 7 Sept. 1963, 9).

10 Sybil, ‘Eternal father’, Public Opinion, 21 Dec. 1963.

11 ‘Vere Johns says’, The Star, 3 Aug. 1966, 6.

12 ‘Vere Johns says’, The Star, 18 July 1966, 10.

13 ‘Vere Johns says’, The Star, 17 Aug. 1965, 9.

14 Edward Seaga, radio broadcast reprinted as ‘West Kingston—to know it is to love it’, in The Star, 30 Aug. 1966, 4.

15 Norman Manley radio broadcast reprinted as ‘Jamaica in a mess’, Public Opinion, 1 April 1966, 3.

16 There were 492 West Indian immigrants, mostly Jamaicans and Trinidadians on board. The arrival of the Windrush is often regarded as the symbolic beginning of the post-war Caribbean migration to the United Kingdom. On the importance of the ‘Windrush generation’ see, e.g., Phillips and Phillips (2009) and Francis (1998).

17 See, e.g., ‘Airport barring of migrants for Minister’s probe’, Daily Gleaner, 9 Jan. 1962, 1; and ‘Migrant-rush for UK’, The Star, 23 March 1962, 21.

18 ‘The Internal Security Act of 1950’, Documents of American History II (http://tucnak.fsv.cuni.cz/~calda/Documents/1950s/Inter_Security_50.html [accessed 17 Jan. 2018]). For Jamaican reactions, see, e.g., Colin Legum, ‘The truth behind the Migrants Act’, Public Opinion, 14 Dec. 1963, 7.

19 Legum, ‘The truth behind the Migrants Act’, 7.

20 This view was quoted in Norman Manley, ‘Colonial mentality’, Public Opinion, 7 April 1966, 4.

21 Ibid.

22 George Thurst, ‘Frustration begins at home’, Public Opinion, 2 Nov. 1963, 11.

23 Paul Scully, ‘Our losses from migration’, Public Opinion, 14 Dec. 1963, 6.

24 ‘Jamaica is a dangerously sick and divided country’, Public Opinion, 28 Nov. 1969, 1.

25 Michael Manley radio broadcast published as, ‘We are in a state of national crisis’, Public Opinion, 10 Jan. 1969, 6.

26 Michael Manley speech to Wolmer’s Boys School, published as ‘Jamaica needs the energy and new ideas of youth’, Public Opinion, 22 May 1970, 6.

27 Malcolm Sharp, ‘Styles of departure’, Daily Gleaner, 12 Aug. 1976, 8.

28 Mais (1950).

29 Baugh (2013), p. 58.