Norman Washington Manley was a National Hero of Jamaica, chief architect of Jamaican independence.
Background
Norman Washington Manley was born to mixed-race parents in Roxborough in Jamaica's Manchester Parish on July 4, 1892. He spent his early years on an impoverished logwood property and there gained an understanding of country people.
His father, Thomas Albert Samuel Manley was a small businessman born in Porus, Manchester, Jamaica in 1852. His mother, Margaret Shearer, was the daughter of a mixed-race woman and her Irish husband, a pen-keeper.
Education
He won a half-scholarship to Jamaica College, a secondary school in Kingston. In 1914 he won a Rhodes Scholarship and was admitted to Jesus College, Oxford, to study law.
Career
In 1915 he enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery. He returned to Oxford in 1919 and was admitted to the bar in 1921. During his war service and at Oxford he witnessed racial discrimination and so learned its meaning.
In 1922 Manley returned to Jamaica, where he gained prominence as a barrister. The economic distress of the late 1920's and the 1930's drew him into public service. Manley helped form the island's first large cooperative, the Jamaica Banana Growers Association, which challenged the U. S. owned United Fruit and British-owned Elders and Fyffes companies. Manley's efforts produced a contract favorable to the cooperative and acceptable to United Fruit. A social welfare fund established by the president of United Fruit was later administered by a company Manley created, Jamaica Welfare; in the 1940's it pioneered in social development in Jamaica.
By 1938 Manley was convinced that fundamental social change required political action, and so he organized the People's National Party (PNP) to campaign for the elimination of property requirements for voting and to win self-government. Slowly he built a mass base and thereby introduced organized politics into Jamaica.
An organized labor movement also developed, and one wing allied itself to the PNP. The PNP lost the 1944 election to Alexander Bustamente's Jamaica Labour Party, but it won power in 1953.
As prime minister from 1953 until 1962, Manley created many of the administrative and financial situations necessary for independence. He supported Jamaica's entry into the West Indies Federation in 1958 but held a referendum on withdrawal in 1962 when federal and Jamaican interests clashed. In elections later that year the PNP lost, and when Jamaica became independent Manley was leader of the parliamentary opposition. Manley retired in February 1969.
As a young man, he married his cousin Edna Manleyin 1921. They had two children together. Their second son, Michael Manley, went into politics and rose to become the fourth Prime Minister of Jamaica. The elder son, Douglas Manley, became a university lecturer, politician and government minister.