The 1937 riot in Inagua, the Bahamas

The upheavals in the form of mass riots and strikes during the 1930s in the British West Indian colonies did not occur on a similar scale in the Bahamas. The Nassau Riot in 1942 during the following decade was a short-lived spontaneous outburst by a group of disgruntled laborers. Black Bahamian leaders failed to convert the riot into a political movement but an analysis of the disturbance (Saunders 1985-1986) showed that it occurred against the background of narrow socio-economic and political policies then rampant in the Bahamas. Five years before the disturbance in Nassau, an incident erupted on Inagua, a remote island in the southern Bahamas. Following shortly after the Trinidad and Barbadian riots, the disturbance became known as the 'Inagua Riot.' This paper will explore the causes of the 1937 disturbance in Inagua. Such an analysis involves the examination of the disturbance and the immediately prior to it. To date no detailed examination of the disturbance has been published.1 The incident is rarely mentioned in general histories (Albury 1983: 200; Craton 1962). Colin Hughes and Philip Cash (Hughes 1981: 19; Cash 1979: 239-240) contended that it was essentially a clash of individuals. Hughes gave the incident only a footnote and stressed that there were no similarities with the mass actions of the West Indian riots (Hughes 1981: 19). Cash devoted more attention to the event and concluded that the events of the island of were given an importance unwarranted by the actual happenings... (Cash 1979: 240). Margery Erickson, wife of Josiah (or Jim) with his brothers revived the salt industry in in the 1930s, attributes the trouble to personal animosity of certain Inaguans whose own livelihood was threatened by the new prosperity and who resented Jim's effort to improve Inagua (Erickson

Criminology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Wife · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Demography · History · Law · Geology

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