Dr. Eric Williams: The Father
of a Nation
By Majessire L. Smith, Esq.
It
was 1922 in Trinidad, West Indies. The man known today
as Dr. Eric Williams was a young boy of just eleven
years old—walking down Dundonald Street to Queens
Royal College on his first day of school. He was a
brilliant student and would excel as both a scholar
and an athlete.
Dr. Williams loved his country.
But from a very young age, he could see that changes
were necessary. He saw the unyielding chasm between
the rich and the poor, the haves and have-nots, the
blacks and the whites. In 1932, when Dr. Williams
left Trinidad to study history and politics at Oxford
University, his budding social conscience began to
grow in leaps and bounds. Between his love of historical
research and his new vantage point in England, he
could more thoroughly scrutinize the relationship
between the great metropolitan slave power and the
colonies of the British West Indies. He noted that
years after its abolition, the slave trade had created
great wealth for England making it a great industrial
nation, while the islands of the West Indies had fallen
into political and economic near-ruin. He felt it
was the continued exploitation of the West Indies
by former colonial powers that had led to such desperate
conditions in the West Indies. In his mind, there
was only one remedy, independence for the islands
of the West Indies.
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My
kids and I are underwater chasing sea turtles. It
is winter break, and my family and I have escaped
to the Caribbean island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin
Islands. Back home, folks are braving the cold and
shoveling snow. But here in paradise, another hot,
sunny day beckons us under the sea to the magical
world below the surface.