Walter Rodney and Black Power: Jamaican Intelligence and US Diplomacy

Abstract

On October 15, 1968 the government of Jamaica barred Walter Rodney from returning to the island. A lecturer at the Jamaica (Mona) campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Rodney had been out of the country attending a black power conference in Canada. The Guyanese-born Rodney was no stranger to Jamaica: he had graduated from UWI in 1963, returning there as a member of the faculty at the beginning of 1968, after doing graduate studies in England and working briefly in Tanzania. Rodneys second stint in Jamaica lasted all of nine months, but it was a tumultuous and amazing nine months. It is a measure of the mark he made, within and without the university, that the decision to ban him sparked major disturbances, culminating in a rising in the capital city of Kingston.