Background
Maurice Rupert Bishop was born on 29 May 194 in Aruba.
government official politician
Maurice Rupert Bishop was born on 29 May 194 in Aruba.
He received his secondary education in Grenada and his university training in Great Britain, where he successfully qualified as a barrister.
While in London, he was active in the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, aimed at securing civil and political rights for Great Britain’s migrant population.
Bishop returned to Grenada in 1970, when the Black Power movement was gaining momentum. In May 1970 Bishop helped found a discussion group called FORUM, made up predominantly of young radical intellectuals and professionals. This evolved into the Movement for the Advancement of Community Effort (MACE), which emphasized political education among the urban pooor. Bishop became spokesperson for the country’s poor, organizing protests against the government of Eric Matthew Gairy.
Bishop decided to merge MACE with the Committee of Concerned Citizens, which was composed primarily of younger members of the country’s entrepreneurial population, to form the Movement for Assemblies of the People (MAP). Then in March 1973 Bishop decided to merge MAP with a movement called the Joint Endeavour for the Welfare, Education and Liberation of the People (JEWEL), which had organized a farming cooperative and experienced some success in political mobilization of the country’s agricultural workers—Gairy’s base of support. The new party was named the New Jewel Movement (NJM) and began an immediate campaign of strikes and sending petitions to London to oppose Gairy’s efforts to achieve independence without holding an election.
Despite what appeared to be mass opposition. Britain agreed to grant inde¬pendence to Grenada under the Gairy regime. To protest, Bishop and the NJM organized a massive demonstration of 10,000 persons in November 1973. Two weeks later, leading members of the NJM, including Maurice Bishop, were taken into custody and severely beaten. All the party’s leaders were jailed on February 7, 1974, when the country received its independence. Several party members, including Bishop’s father, Rupert Bishop, were killed.
In the face of continued political persecution, Bishop and the NJM joined a Peoples Alliance with the Grenada National Party, headed by Herbert Augustus Blaize, and the United Peoples Party, which represented interests of the Grenadian business class, in order to contest elections in 1976. The Alliance won 6 of 15 seats in the Grenadian house. Bishop was named official Leader of the Opposition.
The NJM began to embrace a much more leftist ideological position after the 1976 election, and this led to fractures in the Alliance as well as to resignations among the party leadership. In the face of the Gairy government’s efforts to destroy the NJM, the party developed a clandestine insurrectionist wing called the People’s Army. In March 1979, when Gairy left the country, the People’s Army, led by Bishop, seized power.
Popular outpouring of support for the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), Bishop’s new regime, was tremendous. Bishop and the NJM immediately rejected the Westminster form of political party government as inappropriate and made efforts to replace it with a system based on more direct participation by the people.
Bishop implemented a program described as “anti-imperialist, non-aligned, pro-socialist.’’ This translated into strong support for nonalignment, and a particularly close relationship with Cuba and friendly ties with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, all of which began to provide the country with economic and military assistance. Despite its socialist rhetoric, the Bishop regime maintained a moderate domestic economic policy which kept intact a large private sector and maintained trade ties with the West.
The intensification of relationships between the PRG and the Communist bloc brought economic and political retaliation by the U.S. government, especially under President Ronald Reagan. This contributed to internal conflict within the Bishop government, which escalated in the latter half of 1983, leading to a split between Bishop and his supporters, and those led by Finance Minister Barnard Coard. Bishop’s refusal to share party and government leadership with Coard led to his arrest, an act that brought massive outpourings of public support for Bishop. After he and a female companion were set free by a crowd of demonstrators, a military contingent killed Maurice Bishop, along with a number of his government ministers and nearly 100 demonstrators.
These events provided a rationale for a U.S. military invasion of Grenada that was supported by several Anglophone Caribbean states.