ON THE DEATH OF RICHARD JACOBS by Dr. James Millette

I come to the virtual gravesite of my friend and comrade, William Richard Jacobs, to commemorate his life and to console his family and friends on his recent demise. I have known Richard for just about fifty years beginning with an early visit to Trinidad and Tobago shortly after the upheavals of 1970. He was working on a Masters in political science, focused for the most part on the development of trade unionism in that country; I was helping with the supervision of his dissertation.

From that time onwards he and I developed a close personal and working relationship at a time when Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean were deeply involved in wrestling with the challenges of a newly won independence. Events had shown that the honeymoon period of the independence experience for Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and indeed for an increasing number of West Indian states, was rapidly coming to an end.

As a result, beginning in 1965, and ending with the fall of the Grenada revolution in 1983, the newly independent West Indian countries experienced a secular radicalization of which Richard was very much a part. For many years Richard was, at first, a graduate student and thereafter a faculty member on the St. Augustine campus. In that period he immersed himself in the radical trade union movement which was emerging as the main opposition to the conservative political status quo represented by the Peoples National Movement (PNM) and the Democratic Labour Party (DLP).

He played a stellar role in rebranding and reorganizing the West Indies Group of University Teachers (WIGUT), and in interacting with the progressive trade union organizations which were becoming acutely aware of the role they were beginning to play in the national, regional and international politics of the post-independence period.

In Trinidad and Tobago itself, his major political contribution had to do with the role that he played in challenging the ascendancy of the Trinidad Islandwide Canefarmers Association(TICFA) which was notoriously deferential to the large companies which were still dominant in the agricultural economy dominated by sugar. Between 1973 and 1975 he and I, and other militants, campaigned for and finally achieved the organization of a new representative organization for canefarmers, the Islandwide Cane Farmers Trade Union (ICFTU).

For most of that period mass meetings were held in areas of the country overwhelmingly inhabited by Indians, who also happened to be as poorly represented in the political environment as they were in the workplaces to which they belonged. The records of one of those meetings, reported in MOKO, the weekly newspaper of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), highlights the address that Brother Richard Jacobs delivered to a crowd of about 2000 persons at scale Number 2 in Barrackpore, deep in sugar plantation country.

Those of you who know Richard would know that if what he said was significant -and it was- how he said it was equally significant. This address, delivered on Saturday, January 13, 1973, almost exactly on his 28th birthday, endeared him to the crowd, many of whom said that he reminded them of Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, the leader of the 1937 riots and strikes that all but brought the Crown Colony system to its knees.

In these circumstances the growing significance of the ICFTU was measurable not only in terms of its trade union, but also in terms of its political impact. In due course, the Union became a crucial part of a trade union conglomerate, and a nascent labour oriented political party, the United Labour Front (ULF).

From that date, February 18, 1975, the modern political party system in Trinidad and Tobago has emerged, though not in the form in which it was then envisaged. The ULF replaced the DLP and was itself replaced by the United National Congress (UNC). It is an understatement to say that this experience was like a political preparatory school for Richard. His writings, his speeches, his work all pointed to a future as a radical activist moving closer and closer to revolutionary political praxis. His moment came in 1979 when, on March 13 of that year, today’s date, the Grenada Revolution occurred.

Shortly thereafter Richard accepted an invitation from the Peoples Revolutionary Government (PRG) to become its ambassador to Cuba, a post he occupied for more than two years after which he was posted to the Soviet Union.

He was there when the Grenada revolution was subverted and then destroyed by the United States invasion. Thereafter he turned to the service of countries like Zambia, Namibia and South Africa, recently independent or struggling for independence.

His is an experience unrivalled in the post-independence period of Caribbean political history. His is a life fully lived in the teeth of the struggles waged to realize the real promise of independence. He will be long remembered.