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Reading Time 4 minsMarch 31, 2021 Raising Malcolm X: Louise Langdon Norton, Malcolm’s Grenadian Mom (Part I)* Malcolm X’s contributions to American civil and political rights and pan-African causes are well-known. What is not sufficiently highlighted in the many narratives about Malcolm X is the role of his parents, particularly his very educated activist Grenadian mother who nurtured him and imbued in him a lifelong political and ethical skill set, the basis of a political education that would inform his future direction. In 1917, Louisa Langdon Norton, a young Grenadian girl, migrated to Canada to live with her uncle in… Read More »Raising Malcolm X: Louise Langdon Norton, Malcolm’s Grenadian Mom (part I) – Martin P. Felix

Reading Time 2 minsMarch 30, 2021 In The Illustrated Story of Pan (Second Edition), Kim Johnson delivers on his promise of “a book akin to a photo album.” It feels personal. In fact, a photograph of my father, Selwyn Henry, is featured in an early chapter called “The Audacity of The Creole Imagination.” It is a 1950s snapshot of the Casablanca Steel Orchestra. He is a boy among men, all wearing costumes emblazoned with symbols of the French, playing a tenor pan. In a flash of grey, black, and white tones, my family becomes your family. But The Illustrated Story… Read More »Making Meaning From Memory! –Simone Dalton

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Reading Time 2 minsFirst published, March 8, 2021. Republished March 8, 2022 “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.” While March is celebrated as Women’s History Month in the United States since 2016, March 8 is a special day in this most special month. It is celebrated globally as International Women’s Day (IWD). Originally organized by the Socialist Party of America, the celebrations first took place in February 1909 and were called International Working Women’s Day.  What began as a suggestion in 1910 following an International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, grew into an international celebration… Read More »Happy International Women’s Day 2022

Reading Time 8 minsMarch 8, 2020 Big Drum Nation [BDN]: The role of Jamaican women as heads of most households and their, contributions to Jamaican sporting prowess, seeming growth in business leadership and, commanding role in shaping ideas through popular culture and the arts in general, does not seem to be commensurate with their subordinate positions in the realm of political power. To what do you trace this disparity? Sandra Coppin Mbodj [SCM]: Although women head most households in the country, the culture is still very much male-dominated. As such, it is reflected in positions of power such as in politics. We… Read More »Women’s Liberation Impossible Without National Liberation – Sandra Coppin Mbodj

Reading Time 5 mins Reprinted from the Daily Gleaner (Jamaica) Published Sunday | March 7, 2021 Verene Shepherd March is Women’s History Month. So this latest ‘Reparation Conversations’, done in collaboration with the Centre for Reparation Research at The University of the West Indies, outlines some reasons why Caribbean women deserve reparation. Verene Shepherd recalls the conditions of enslavement that gave rise to resistance to slavery as justification for the call for redress. Critical are the revelations in the Claims for Compensation supplied by Ahmed Reid from the UCL database, which demonstrate that British women were beneficiaries of the system… Read More »Happy International Womens Day 2021

Reading Time 7 mins#IntWorkersDay #GrenadaHistory #Guyana #History #IndianIndentureship “Like an individual, a society can only know itself and its future when it explores its antecedents. We can have little notion of where we are going if we do not consciously appropriate our  past and make it a part of our living present and our future”-Selwyn R. Cudjoe International Workers’ Day is the perfect moment to call up Tuesday, January 11, 1848, the day when hundreds of drum-beating, shell-blowing, and tree branch-waving “labourers” took a protest demonstration to the Town of Sauteurs. Coming within ten years of the legal termination of… Read More »May Day: January 11, 1848 – The “Foreday Morning” of working Class Consciousness in Grenada – Caldwell Taylor

Reading Time 7 minsAnother October, another sterling contributor to the Grenada Revolution to mourn and remember…  Like Maurice Bishop and all others who made the Revolution happen in 1979, the Coards’ contribution to the realization of everything behind the eternal theme ‘Forward Ever, Backward Never’ simply cannot be erased… Like the Revolution they helped build, their contributions will be better appreciated henceforth, more for what they were and still are actually worth, than what those still bent on diminishing them would have preferred to have been their lasting legacy…    Another October is here and there’ll be the usual revisiting of events that led to the various sins of commission and omission and the Grenada Revolution’s implosion; and… Read More »Phyllis Coard was always much more than a husband’s faithful wife! – Earl Bousquet

Reading Time 4 minsThe Mighty Swallow, Sir Rupert Philo, has certainly made his musical mark on me as I followed his music starting in my teenage years of the 1970s.  Thanks to radiostations like Radio Guardian in Trinidad, CBC Radio in Barbados and Radio Antilies in Montserrat, youths like myself, in rural Carriacou, Grenada, who had no access to purchasing records, got the opportunity to listen, learn, sing and dance to this Antiguan calypsonian’s music. The 1970s was truly a time of an awakening of Caribbean awareness through the music and the AM radio stations. Swallow was among the many,… Read More »Memories of the Mighty Swallow–James N. Cox

Reading Time 3 minsMarch 1, 2021 Although February 2nd is recognized as World Wetland Day, the increasing importance of this issue globally may well support arguments to extend this recognition to the entire month. The Day marks the signing of the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Convention) in the Iranian city for which it is named, on February 2, 1971. Over the past five decades, the majority of Caribbean countries eventually became signatories to the Ramsar Convention, with many having designated Ramsar Sites. These include marshes, swamps, and bogs. There are several such sites with specific concerns to… Read More »World Wetlands Day 2021 — Martin P. Felix