Maurice Rupert Bishop was a Grenadian politician and revolutionary who seized power in a coup in 1979 from Eric Gairy and served as Prime Minister of the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada until 1983, when he was overthrown in another coup by Bernard Coard, a member of his own government, and executed.
Background
Maurice Rupert Bishop was bom on May 29, 1944, on the Caribbean island of Aruba, the youngest of three children of Rupert Bishop and Alimenta Le Grenade. His parents had relocated from Grenada to Aruba during his childhood. In 1950, the family returned to Grenada and his father launched a series of successful businesses that provided a comfortable upper-middle-class life.
Education
As a child, Bishop attended local private schools on the island and enrolled at Preservation College, an elite Catholic secondary school where Bishop was a good student. At 19, Bishop left Grenada and went to London where he studied law at Gray's Inn and was accepted into the legal profession in 1969.
Career
Like many other Caribbean leaders who studied in London, Bishop became involved with the West Indian Student Union and the Standing Conference of West Indian Organizations, both of which advocated the independence of British colonies in the Caribbean and were a source of political activism for West Indian students living in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Bishop was also influenced by the civil rights struggles taking place in the United States, the emergence of the radical Black Power movement, and the works of Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro (Heine 1991; Hintzen and Will 1988; Lewis 1991). He joined the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination during his London years.
When Bishop returned to Grenada in 1970 he had become a thoughtful individual with established political views about social justice and ways to improve his native land. He developed a successful law practice on the island and became interested in its politics. Like many other Grenadians, he was concerned with the dysfunctional and repressive government of Sir Eric Matthew Gairy. Gairy and his Grenada United Labor Party (GULP) had dominated Grenada's politics for almost three decades. Gairy had become the island's first premier after the island was declared an associate state by Great Britain in 1967.
By 1976 Bishop was out of jail and had grown extremely disenchanted with the state of affairs in Grenada. He saw no choice but to build a coalition between the Grenada National Party and his NJM. Although his party did not win control of the government, Bishop became the opposition leader in the Grenadian parliament. Bishop was also appointed minister for information and culture and minister for foreign and home affairs by his party's leadership. His new positions gave him a sense of frustration about the political system in the island; the party in power was corrupt and they had not fostered the level of social change that Grenada needed and that he expected. He grew disenchanted with the political system and realized that it was going to be impossible to make any meaningful changes from within the system. As a result, he broke off the alliance with the National Party and started a more aggressive and militant approach within the NJM, which led to the creation of a People's Army. On March 13,1979, when Gairy was out of the country, Bishop and 43 other members seized power in a fairly quiet military coup that gave him firm control of the government and had substantial support from the people.
Politics
Bishop became involved in the founding of several groups interested in the political and social realities of Grenada. These groups worked to develop better living conditions for the people of Grenada. One of these groups was the Movement for Assemblies of the People (MAP), which tried to empower poor people in their fight for social justice. By 1973, MAP had evolved into the New JEWEL (Joint Endeavor for Welfare Education and Liberation) Movement (NJM). This movement was organized very much like a formal political party and challenged Gairy's policies.
By the end of 1973, when Great Britain was considering granting Grenada independence, Bishop became a vocal leader who favored holding elections for the position of prime minister. Instead, Gairy, who wished to become prime minister without free elections, launched a powerful campaign to silence the opposition and allowed a group of supporters to launch a militia known as the Mongoose Gang to intimidate and kill his detractors. After holding a highly successful rally to protest the lack of free elections in November 1973, opposition leaders including Rupert Bishop, Bishop's father, were killed by the Mongoose Gang. Bishop was jailed, and when Grenada received its independence on February 7, 1974, Gairy became the prime minister.
The nature of Bishop's regime as prime minister of Grenada has been the object of many distortions and misrepresentations. The People's Revolutionary Government, which Bishop set up after the revolution, was organized along a socialist ideology. While Bishop believed that the people of Grenada would be best served by a socialist government, his political ideologies were extremely moderate and he did not engage in major redistributions of income. In fact, he built partnerships with the private sector and did not take control of their private holdings. The People's Revolutionary Government only took control of land deeds from people who owned more than 100 acres of land and were not using it for agricultural purposes. During the first months after the revolution, Bishop asked for the assistance of the U.S. government in securing funding for many of his development initiatives. After they refused to support him, Bishop felt forced to turn to socialist governments such as Cuba, the U.S.S.R., and Nicaragua.
His association with socialist countries, his refusal to hold elections, and the passing of restrictions on freedom of the press generated much criticism of Bishop's government. He defended himself by saying that such restrictions were temporary "dislocations" needed by any new revolution (Kinshasa 1984). The United States publicly criticized Grenada for its leftist government. When Bishop sought funding to build a modern international airport for the island with the assistance of Cuba, the U.S. government became concerned that the airport was going to be used by Soviet and Cuba armed transports. While the United States saw Bishop as a dangerous socialist, members of his cabinet disagreed with him because they thought that he was not radical enough. By September 1983, Ber-nard Coard, his deputy prime minister and a close childhood friend, and other members of the central committee of the People's Revolutionary Government disagreed with Bishop about the direction he was taking the revolution (Thomas 1983). The economy had deteriorated and his colleagues thought that Bishop had lost his ability to lead and had failed to implement a "firmer" form of Leninism (Desmond 1984). They decided that Bishop had to share power with Coard in order to make the revolution move ahead with its economic goals.
Bishop grew suspicious of his colleagues and spread a rumor that they were planning to kill him. In response to what they perceived as insubordination, his colleagues placed Bishop under house arrest on October 13. Six days later, on October 19, two members of his cabinet and two business leaders organized a crowd who went to the prime minister's home and freed him. Bishop led the crowd to Fort Rupert where they intended to gain control over the armed forces. He fired on the military but they shot and killed him and ten members of his cabinet. Coard and 14 other members of the government were accused of Bishop's assassination and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison without parole.
On October 25, 1983, Ronald Reagan ordered the U.S. military to invade Grenada. He justified the invasion by saying that the United States needed to protect American medical students studying in Grenada whose well-being had been endangered by the turmoil following Bishop's assassination. The United States assisted in the dissolution of the People's Revolutionary Government and in the restoration of Gairy as prime minister. Despite considerable criticism by the international community, the United States justified the invasion by saying the Bishop government was a threat to the Caribbean.
Connections
Maurice Bishop married nurse Angela Redhead in 1966. They had two children, Nadia (b. 1969) and John (b. 1971). Angela emigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with both children in 1981, while Bishop was still prime minister. He also fathered a son, Vladimir Lenin (1978–94), with his longtime partner Jacqueline Creft (1947–83), who was Grenada's Minister of Education. Creft was killed alongside Bishop at the confrontation at Fort Rupert on 19 October 1983. After his parents' deaths, Vladimir joined his half-siblings in Canada, but was stabbed to death in a Toronto nightclub at the age of 16.