From Selma to St. George’s: The Transatlantic Currents of Liberation between the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the Caribbean

From Selma to St. George’s: The Transatlantic Currents of Liberation between the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the Caribbean

Gabriel J. Christian, Esq.

(11 October 2025) — The struggle for Black freedom is an unbroken conversation across oceans. It is the voice of Africa carried on the trade winds to the Caribbean, reborn in the hymns of plantation fields, and rising again in the marches of Montgomery and Selma. The Caribbean was never a spectator to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement—it was its partner, its moral mirror, and often its prophetic forerunner. From the days when enslaved Africans in Dominica and Jamaica seized their liberty with their own hands, to the twentieth-century battles of workers, students, and scholars, the Caribbean and African America have been two wings of the same bird, each rising only when the other beats in unison.

In April 1802 the Black soldiers of the 8th West India Regiment stationed at Fort Shirley, Dominica, rose in defiance of the British Empire. They had been conscripted from the ranks of the enslaved, drilled to serve an empire that denied their humanity, yet in the moment of revolt they reclaimed it. Their insurrection was not the first in Caribbean soil, for maroon wars and plantation uprisings had already shaken the region, but it was the most dramatic revolt of armed Black soldiers during the slave era. By seizing the fort and turning imperial muskets toward their oppressors, they compelled Britain to emancipate all enslaved soldiers in its service—a reform that would, in time, move inexorably toward the general emancipation of 1834. The moral thunder of that act echoed far beyond Dominica; it spoke to abolitionists in Britain and America alike that Black men, disciplined and organized, could stand as agents of their own deliverance.

A century later another generation of Caribbean soldiers, heirs to that legacy, found themselves in the mud of Europe. Over fifteen thousand volunteers from the British West Indies Regiment labored and fought during the First World War, expecting that loyalty in battle would win equality in peace. Instead, they met discrimination, insult, and denial of pay. In December 1918, at Taranto in Italy, the men of the 9th Battalion refused further humiliation, mutinied, and were joined by others across the camp. The British crushed the rebellion but could not extinguish its spirit. Out of the anger of Taranto was born the Caribbean League, a secret brotherhood of non-commissioned officers who resolved that the Black man should govern himself in his own land. When these soldiers returned home, they carried revolutionary fire in their hearts; their experience fed the strikes, unions, and nationalist movements that would later overturn colonial rule. A British memorandum of 1919 confessed the truth: Nothing we can do will alter the fact that the Black man has begun to think and feel himself as good as the white.

Emergence of 20th Century  Black Revolutionary Leaders

That awakening was given form and purpose by Marcus Mosiah Garvey of Jamaica, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association transformed scattered consciousness into a global movement. Founded in 1914 and carried to Harlem in 1916, the UNIA united millions of Africans and their descendants under the banner of One God, One Aim, One Destiny. Garvey taught that no people could be free who were ashamed of themselves, that political independence must rest upon economic strength, and that the Black man must see himself not as a colonial subject but as the child of a mighty civilization. His parades through Harlem, the printing presses of the Negro World, and the Black Star Line that sailed under the red, black, and green gave visible shape to a dream of redemption.

Garvey’s words crossed every border. Among those who heard him in New York was a young Vietnamese named Nguyễn Ái Quốc—later Ho Chi Minh—who absorbed from Garvey’s lectures the gospel of anti-imperialism and national self-determination that would later guide Vietnam’s own liberation. Thus, the African struggle inspired Asia’s, proving that freedom knows no color line. The UNIA became the first truly global organization of Black people; it built branches across the Caribbean, Central and South America, Africa, and Europe, teaching racial pride where shame had been a weapon of control.

Nowhere did Garvey’s call find a more eloquent champion than in Dominica’s J. R. Ralph Casimir, poet, teacher, and organizer of the island’s UNIA division. Casimir served as agent for the Negro World and the Black Star Line, corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Marcus Garvey himself, and bound the small mountain island into the great circle of Pan-African thought. It was Casimir who arranged Garvey’s visit to Dominica on October 30 1937, when the prophet of Black self-reliance urged his audience to lift their thinking and thus change their condition from neo-slavery to liberation. Casimir’s life work linked the literary, political, and spiritual strands of the freedom struggle: his poetry sang of dignity, his essays argued for self-government, and his organizing joined the Caribbean village to the world. Through him the archipelago became an extension of Harlem, and the cause of Dominica an echo of Ethiopia.

These movements of mind and action laid the moral groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement that would later transform the United States. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched through Selma, he did so in a world already prepared by the example of Garvey and his Caribbean apostles. King’s visits to Jamaica offered him refuge and revelation; among a people of his own color exercising authority with confidence and grace, he saw a vision of the future he sought for America. As Andrew Young recalled years later, Jamaica was the first place he and King saw Black people commanding airports, hotels, and ministries—a living rebuttal to the myth of Black inferiority. The calypsonian Slinger Francisco, The Mighty Sparrow, caught that spirit in his ringing anthem Martin Luther King for President, hailing King as a world figure whose mission transcended nationality.

The Caribbean likewise gave to the global movement one of its boldest sons, Roosevelt “Rosie” Douglas of Dominica, whose life bridged the radical ferment of the 1960s and the quest for political power at home. Having gone to Canada to study agriculture, Douglas first joined conservative politics but turned revolutionary after witnessing the racism endured by Black and Indigenous peoples. In 1968 he co-chaired the historic Congress of Black Writers at McGill University, where the leading minds of the Black world—Stokely Carmichael, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, James Forman, Harry Edwards, Alvin Poussaint, Ted Joans, Richard B. Moore, Michael X, Robert Hill, Darcus Howe, Burnley “Rocky” Jones, Anne Cools, Barbara Jones, and others—met to forge a common philosophy of liberation. That gathering was the spiritual heir of the UNIA congresses and a bridge to the anti-colonial struggles that would soon sweep Africa and the Caribbean. Douglas’s later career, chronicled in The Mantle of Struggle, carried the same conviction: that the destiny of the Black world lay in unity and service, not division and despair.

Dr. Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, scholar of Capitalism and Slavery and From Columbus to Castro, translated these ideals into statecraft. Having taught at Howard University during the Second World War, he chaired the 1943 Caribbean Conference that first articulated the blueprint for regional federation and self-government. As Prime Minister, he brought the formerly excluded African and East Indian masses into the machinery of power and laid the industrial foundations of the modern republic. His daughter, Erica Williams Connell, has continued that legacy through scholarship and preservation of his archives, reminding new generations that freedom demands memory as well as courage.

The fire lit by Garvey, King, Douglas, and Williams also burned in the hearts of a younger generation whose imagination was stirred by the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the rise of Black Power, and the call of Pan-Africanism. Among them was Maurice Bishop of Grenada—lawyer, orator, and revolutionary—who saw in the struggles of Selma and Soweto, in the example of Cuba and the call of Kwame Nkrumah, a single battle against the chains of colonialism and neo-colonial domination. Educated in the ferment of London and radicalized by the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Bishop returned to the Caribbean convinced that political independence without social justice was hollow. When he and the New Jewel Movement seized power in 1979, he declared that the Grenada Revolution would prove that small nations of African descent could chart their own course in education, health, agriculture, and culture, free from imperial dictates.

For four short years Grenada became a laboratory of Caribbean self-determination, a beacon of literacy drives and people’s assemblies. Yet that bright experiment was extinguished by betrayal within and invasion from without. Bishop was murdered by those who mistook ideology for wisdom, and Grenada was bombarded by forces that feared a successful example of Caribbean socialism. Nevertheless, his vision endures—as both inspiration and warning. Bishop’s effort, despite his human errors and the treachery of comrades who turned against him, represented the logical extension of the Civil Rights Movement’s demand for dignity into the sphere of global political economy. His martyrdom reminds us that freedom is never secure until the people themselves possess the power to defend and sustain it.

In our own era the mantle of transatlantic leadership is borne by Ambassador Curtis A. Ward of Jamaica, whose career in diplomacy and law exemplifies the mature flowering of the Black Atlantic tradition. As Ambassador to the United Nations Security Council and later Expert Adviser on  the Counter-Terrorism Committee, Ward demonstrated that Caribbean intellect and integrity could shape world policy. As twice-elected Chair of the Maryland Governor’s Commission on Caribbean Affairs, and founder of the Caribbean Research and Policy Center, he forged alliances linking Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean in the common work of development. His publication The Ward Post continues the lineage of Garvey’s Negro World and Casimir’s correspondence, offering the diaspora a forum for rigorous thought and unity of purpose.

Yet even as these examples shine, a new danger has arisen: the spread of narrow and divisive doctrines that pit the children of the diaspora against one another. The so-called “Foundational Black American” movement, with its nativist contempt for Caribbean and African brethren, is nothing but the old master’s trick of house slave against field slave dressed in modern clothes. It is a clever instrument of those who fear a united people—an effort to shatter the historic trend toward unity that has been the lifeblood of every advance we have made. By denying shared destiny, it reduces our noble heritage to the chatter of naïve podcasters, and turns serious minds from building schools and industries to trading insults on screens. It is, in truth, a form of spiritual enslavement.

This divisive thinking betrays the moral clarity of Justice Thurgood Marshall, whose jurisprudence in Brown v. Board of Education tore down the legal walls of segregation and extended democracy to all. It finds its dark reflection in the reactionary philosophy of Justice Clarence Thomas, who would turn back the clock to the days when law served hierarchy instead of justice. To reject the universalism of Marshall and embrace the narrow tribalism of Thomas is to abandon the very essence of the civil-rights revolution. It is to forget that the purpose of our struggle was never domination by one group, but liberation for all.

The true heirs of Garvey, King, Douglas, Casimir, Williams, Bishop, and Ward know that our task is larger than identity politics. It is the creation of a moral civilization where every human being, whatever his origin, may stand free and unafraid. The Black Atlantic, forged in suffering, must not now dissolve into sects and slogans; it must stand as the vanguard of a renewed humanism. Our military heroes, from the mutineers of Fort Shirley to the airmen of Tuskegee and the soldiers of the RAF, fought not only for race but for the right of all peoples to live without chains. Their courage instructs us still: unity is strength, and strength in the service of justice ennobles the world.

From the forts of Dominica to the streets of Selma, from Taranto’s barracks to Garvey’s Harlem, from the parliament of Port of Spain to the revolutionary squares of St. George’s, the river of our history runs unbroken. It carries in its current the wisdom of soldiers and scholars, the faith of preachers and poets, the labor of farmers and factory hands. Its destination is a world where Africa and her Diaspora stand together with all humankind in the fellowship of freedom. To that indestructible unity we pledge ourselves anew—for only together shall we rise, and only united shall we remain free.

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