LET US REMEMBER JIM BARRETTE

But they, the pioneers and forerunners were not the beneficiaries of their actions. We are. Almost without exception they were its principal victims; victims of vicious autocrats and officials, the employers whom they served and other agents whom they labelled colonial stooges. These pioneers and forerunners lived and died almost entirely in penury and poverty but their nobility and their fierce patriotism will never die. Jim Barrette was a great popular working class orator. He arrested audiences with the quality, intensity and wide information of his speeches. He was an Oral Historian versed in the experience of his time, going back to the African religious and customary activity which he had engaged in, tagged along by his grandmother. He possessed a vivid and constant and unusual memory for the events and personalities of the 1930's and 40's with whom he had been intensely involved. His descriptions and details almost never varied during years of repetition.

He educated the Workers' Freedom Movement which was formed out of the remnants of the Negro Welfare Association and the Marxist Study Class movement of the 1940's, with the vastness of his experience and his talent for straightforward analysis. He loved working the land and developing products from the crops on the land. He was able, eventually for a time, to do some of that.

Jim Barrette, Christina King and what remained of the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association, and the youth whom they could organise, kept alive the memory of Emancipation Day. Year after year, they made preparations for and celebrated Emancipation Day while the colonial authorities and their well behaved disciples tried to bury the memory of this holocaust with Columbus's so called Discovery Day.

We need to remember them now for their foresight and perseverance. It was Jim Barrette, Elma Francois and their comrades in the North and the Butlerites in the South who planned and carried out the General Strike of June 1937.

While the oilfields and the South were down, or in flames, the Negro Welfare shut down Port of Spain and carried the momentum of the General Strike and Insurrection in the North. They fought many other difficult and dangerous battles, but their determination and heroism never wavered.

In this funeral service for Jim Barrette today we honour his memory, the memory of his comrades now dead and his comrade and companion Christina King. In spite of his times in jail, in spite of the threats from the police and the law which always threatened their lives, Jim Barrette and his comrades were fearless.

They were determined to create a different and better society out of the disgrace and widespread poverty and hopelessness which the British Colonial government tried to impose in their quest for an empire in which the sun never set. But their sun set here in Trinidad with the help of Jim Barrette and countless other unknown and unsung patriots.

In the writings of the great revolutionary Frantz Fanon there occurs the following lines:

"Each generation must out of relative obscurity, discover its mission fulfil it or betray it." Jim Barrette assumed his mission. We salute him with the words: Mission accomplished. Mission accomplished with bravery under heavy fire. May his memory rest among us forever!