“In October 1804 (Dessalines) had himself crowned Emperor. Private merchants of Philadelphia presented him with the crown, brought on the American boat the Connecticut. His coronation robes reached Haiti from Jamaica on an English frigate from London. … the Negro monarch entered into his inheritance, tailored and valeted by English and American capitalists, supported on the one side by the King of England and on the other by the President of the United States.”
– pg. 370, THE BLACK JACOBINS, by C. L. R. James, second edition, revised, by Vintage Books in 1963.
– On April 14, 1947, a black man played in the baseball major leagues of the United States for the United States for the very first time. His name was Jackie Robinson, and he played for the then Brooklyn Dodgers in a game against the Boston Braves at Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn.
Robinson had to endure serious discrimination and bigotry in order to integrate baseball. The integration of baseball created many opportunities for African American baseball stars to make big money.
It is important to remember that in 1947, the National Football League (NFL) was a little more than two decades old, and not considered a national industry of substantial clout in the United States.
The National Basketball Association (NBA), to which most African American athletes now aspire, was just beginning, and struggling, in 1947. Baseball was the thing in 1947, hence the substantial import of Jackie Robinson’s trailblazing.
The historic Rosa Parks incident, in which she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, an incident which has come to be considered the beginning of the modern black civil rights movement, did not take place until 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson’s history making.
In that same year of 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers won their first World Series, defeating the New York Yankees in seven games. The victory of the Dodgers was celebrated in British Honduras, especially in the old capital, Belize, where the majority of the population was black.
New York City, the financial, media and population capital of the United States, has five boroughs – Manhattan, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island and Brooklyn. Until the 1970’s, Brooklyn was the borough where most immigrant British Hondurans lived. In fact, Brooklyn is the most West Indian of all the New York City boroughs. Branch Rickey, the owner of the Dodgers, knew what he was doing.
When the black power phenomenon hit Belize in 1969, the reaction of the white supremacy propagandists here was to argue that UBAD leaders were importing an “American problem” into Belize. White supremacists in this region have always considered it very important to keep the black populations in the Caribbean and Central America separated from each other, and separated from the African American population in the southern part of the United States – the Confederate states which fought a civil war from 1861 to 1865 trying to maintain the institution of slavery.
The original and frightening problem for the regional white supremacists was the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and triumphed with the independence of the Western Hemisphere’s first black republic in 1804. This is planet earth’s only recorded history of a successful slave rebellion. The young United States benefited from the Haitian Revolution, because France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, beaten by the black Haitians, decided to sell the so-called Louisiana territory to the United States and concentrate on the Eastern Hemisphere. (The so-called Louisiana territory includes most of the Southern states in the United States).
The United States refused to recognize the independent Haiti until 1862. The British and Spanish slaveowners in Jamaica and Cuba, respectively, Caribbean islands which are near to Haiti, increased the pressure on their slaves, but the British could not control the Jamaican maroons (escaped slaves).
In the American South, the slaveowners brutally crushed major slave revolts between 1804 and 1862 led by leaders like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner.
Chattel slavery was abolished in British Honduras in 1834. The white upper class in the colony reacted to the 1847 Caste War in the Yucatan by opening up the Corozal and Orange Walk districts to Mexican refugees from both sides of the Caste War. The colony was changed forever. Descendants of the Caste War refugees have become the majority in Belize, and Roman Catholicism, introduced in British Honduras after the Caste War, has become dominant in Belize not only in religion, but also in education.
At the time when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947, black British Hondurans had begun to migrate to the United States for different reasons. Their first destination was New York City, after World War II, and then there was a movement west to Chicago.
Jackie Robinson meant a great deal to black Belizeans at home and abroad. There is no black American problem which is not also a black Belizean problem. Belize is the only Caribbean state with a land bridge to America. Dr. Jerome Straughan has documented that we have been going there from the nineteenth century. Today, we drive there; we sail there; and we fly there. Jackie Robinson belongs to all of us who came out of slavery in these parts of planet earth. May he rest in peace.
Power to the people.