By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 6, 2019 — My Facebook “reminder” today is a photo posted by my “sister” Lisa Marie Bethel that she shared with me last year on this date, May 6, 2018. Lisa is one of the daughters of Sir Arthur A. Foulkes, former Governor General of The Bahamas, and she had a front-row seat in the “theatre of my life” during my youthful years when Sir Arthur, who is my mentor, rescued me from possibly ending up in prison.
My admiration and respect for Sir Arthur is well known by persons who have followed articles I have written during my long journalistic career. I have told the story many times of how I met Sir Arthur for the first time in May of 1960 when I joined the staff of the Nassau Daily Tribune as a trainee reporter and he was my immediate boss as The Tribune’s News Editor.
On numerous occasions, I have given credit to Sir Arthur and The Tribune’s late Editor and Publisher Sir Etienne Dupuch for laying a very strong foundation for whatever skills I currently possess as a journalist, but Sir Arthur was also an important mentor in my life when I was prone to make impetuous decisions while actively involved in the Black Power Movement during the struggle for majority rule in the 1960s.
Racism in The Bahamas at that time paralleled the painfully oppressive racist policies that were enforced by law in the southern states of the United States, and given The Bahamas’ close proximity to Florida, Bahamians who frequently travelled to Miami experienced first-hand the degradation of not being allowed to eat in restaurants in downtown Miami and be guests in “white’s only” hotels.
In fact, similar racist policies were rigidly entrenched in The Bahamas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so much so that Sir Etienne Dupuch, a member of the House of Assembly — who was black, but was accepted in Nassau’s white society because of the awesome power he exercised as Publisher and Editor of one of the major daily newspapers in the country – moved an anti-discrimination resolution in the House on January 23, 1956.
Although Sir Etienne’s anti-discrimination resolution would not have had any “legal authority” had it been approved by the House, by using an effective parliamentary ruse, the then Bay Street Boys government engineered parliamentary rules to ensure that it never came up for a vote. In a manner of speaking, however, the anti-discrimination resolution triggered the momentum that led to the elimination of openly racist policies in public places in The Bahamas.
Within days after the resolution was moved in the House, the British Colonial Hotel and other hotels in Nassau that did not accept blacks removed the “colour ban.” It was not until 1962, however, that the most egregious insult to black Bahamians – the “white’s only” admissions policies of the Savoy Theatre on Bay Street – was changed. Prior to that, new movies were first screened at The Savoy for one week before being shown at Over-the-Hill theatres, starting at the Capitol Theatre on Market Street and subsequently at The Cinema, on East Street; Paul Meeres Theatre, on lower Market Street; and the Wulff Road Theatre.
And the Censorship Board — or whatever this group of racist individuals called themselves — made certain that movies that could serve as an impetus to spark a black revolt were not shown in The Bahamas. This was the case with the movie “Island In The Sun”, starring Harry Belafonte, James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, Dorothy Dandridge, Michael Rennie and Stephen Boyd.
Miscegenation was rampant In “Island In The Sun,” released in 1957. Belafonte played the role of David Boyeur, a young black man emerging as a powerful politician in a fictitious Caribbean island with a similar colonial history as The Bahamas.
Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia: “The film is about race relations and interracial romance set in the fictitious island of Santa Marta. Barbados and Grenada were selected as the sites for the movie based on the 1955 novel by Alec Waugh. The film was controversial at the time of its release for its portrayal of an interracial romance.
“The film follows several characters, black, white and mixed race, and their relationships. It also chronicles the social inequality between the British who colonized the island and the native population. Maxwell Fleury (James Mason) is a white plantation owner’s son who suffers from an inferiority complex and makes rash decisions to prove his worth. He is tormented by jealousy of his wife Sylvia (Patricia Owens), and he is envious of his younger sister Jocelyn (Joan Collins), who is being courted by the Oxford-bound Euan Templeton (Stephen Boyd), a war hero visiting the governor of the island, his father Lord Templeton (Ronald Squire). There is also an interracial romance between Margot Seaton (Dorothy Dandridge), a mixed-race drugstore clerk, and Denis Archer (John Justin), aide to the governor.”
Undeniably, the story on which “Island In The Sun” is based almost mirrors the prevailing political and societal environment in The Bahamas at the time it was released in 1957, just one year after the predominantly black Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) won six seats in the House of Assembly and Sir Etienne moved his anti-discrimination resolution in the House of Assembly.
There was no way that the Bay Street Boys, who by then had established themselves as the United Bahamian Party (UBP), would have allowed “Island In The Sun” to be shown in The Bahamas at that time. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if it was ever screened in a movie theatre in The Bahamas.
But even though the rank and raw racism that denied blacks the right to see a movie at the Savoy Theatre no longer existed, this change had minimal impact on the elimination of racism generally with regard to the behavior and thinking of the majority of white Bahamians. It was this racist obstinacy that galvanized my commitment the Black Power Movement in the 1960s.
I started travelling to Miami several times a year from the mid-1950s after my Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence Fox built a home at 1510 N.W. 69th Terrace in Liberty City, which was considered at the time to be an upscale suburban area of Miami for progressive blacks. Indeed, my late sister, Elthreada Brown McPhee, graduated from Miami Northwestern Senior High School, where she enrolled after spending a couple years at Government High School in Nassau before moving to Miami to live with Aunt Amanda and Uncle Lawrence.
During those visits to Miami in the 1950s — several times as a member of the Junkanoo group taken to Miami by the late Clarence Bain to participate in the Orange Blossom Classic Parade, held annually in December – my exposure to the widespread racism that existed in that city at the time no doubt nurtured my determination to fight racism at home with every fiber of by being.
In doing so in The Bahamas in the mid-1960s, I came perilously close to committing some illegal acts that could have landed me in jail, and unquestionably, if it were not for the sage and “fatherly advice” I received from Sir Arthur, I would not be sitting here in Washington, D.C., writing this article, but rather I would be experiencing the same difficulties many of the former “residents” of Fox Hill Prison are facing as they struggle to survive in our “unforgiving Christian Nation.”
Sir Arthur left The Tribune in 1962 after running and losing as a PLP candidate in the Far East Constituency of New Providence, and he and several other members of the National Committee for Positive Action (NCPA), an activist group within the PLP, established the Bahamian Times, which made invaluable contributions editorially to the PLP’s eventual historic election victory on January 10, 1967.
I joined Sir Arthur at Bahamian Times in 1965, and almost of a daily basis when he found out about Black Power activities, he would remind me that I had another means of making my contribution to the progressive movement as a journalist rather than “engage” in physical activities, in my attempts to “live up” to the H. “Rap” Brown nickname some of my contemporaries gave me, based on the radical contributions made to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement by well-known black activist H. “Rap” Brown.
Fortunately, I eventually heeded his advice, and shall forever be grateful to Sir Arthur for steering me in the right direction professionally as well as in my personal life.
So, when saw that today’s Facebook reminder initially posted by his daughter Lisa Marie Foulkes last May, I was compelled to again reshare, not only because it provided me with another opportunity to comment of how important Sir Arthur has been in my life, but also because the other two individuals in the photo are Dr. Eugene Newry and his wife Mrs. Francoise Torchon Newry.
I was assigned to the Embassy of The Bahamas in Washington, D.C. as Press, Cultural Affairs and Information Manager during Dr. Newry’s recent tenure as Bahamas Ambassador to the United States; however, we have been friends from his activist days in the PLP with Sir Arthur the other members of the NCPA. He was a regular at the office of The Bahamian Times on Andros Avenue in the Grove and even back then, he was known to be an erudite scholar who spoke several languages.
After the PLP won the 1967 election, Premier Lynden Pindling arranged for me to go to London for one year’s journalistic training at the London Evening Standard, and while I was in London, Sir Arthur made official visits as Minister of Tourism to London and Paris and took me along with him on his trip to Paris. One of the highlights of that trip was a reunion with Dr. Newry and his wife Francoise, who were living in Paris at the time.
Dr. Newry and I quite naturally had a remarkably good working relationship when we were both at the Bahamas Embassy in D.C. I did not get the opportunity to see him when I was in Nassau promoting my novel WOES OF LIFE in November of 2017, but doing so is high on my list of “things to do” on my next visit to Nassau, which hopefully will be sometime later this year.
Let me once again thank my “Sister” Lisa Marie Bethel — who is the wife of Attorney General Carl Bethel and, of course, sister of Minister of Labour Dion Foulkes – for providing me with the opportunity to take such an enjoyable trip down “memory lane.”
