Abstract
Between 1951 and 1979 one man dominated Grenadian politics. Eric Gairy was born in 1922 near Grenville to a poor family; his father was an estate foreman and his mother a maid. Gairy left for Trinidad in 1941 to find work, moving on to Aruba to work as a clerk in the oilfields. It was there that he first became involved in trade unionism and was eventually deported in December 1949, accused of agitating the refinery workers. The Grenada Gairy returned to was clearly divided by race and wealth: the rich, white, colonial elite represented 0.9 percent of the population and the poor, black majority 78.2 percent.1 Maldistribution of land was one of the main grievances of the majority of Grenadians: 98 percent of the farmers owned 53 percent of the land and 1.45 percent owned 44.68 percent of the land.2 Using his organizational skills and knowledge of Grenadian society, Gairy took up the cause of some evicted worker-tenants and won sizable compensation from the landowner.
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Notes
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Tony Thorndike, Grenada: Politics, Economics and Society (London: Frances Pinter, 1985), 30.
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Gregory Sandford, The New Jewel Movement: Grenada’s Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Services Institute, 1985), 18. Gairy arrived at the figure 54 by simply doubling the 27 charges laid against him by the NJM previously.
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Pedro Noguera, The Imperatives of Power: Political Change and Social Basis of Regime Support in Grenada from 1951–91 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 80.
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© 2007 Gary Williams
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Williams, G. (2007). Prelude to a Revolution. In: US-Grenada Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609952_3
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