At a Glance
Kingston 1917, the 1938 Uprisings, and the World That Formed a Labour Lawyer
Richard Hart grew up in Jamaica at the moment when the labour uprisings of 1938 were transforming the political landscape of the British Caribbean in ways whose consequences would determine the character of the independence movements for the following decades. The 1938 strikes and disturbances — which swept through Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, British Guiana, and other territories in a wave of labour unrest that combined economic grievances with political demands for self-government — were the events that demonstrated to the British colonial administration that the Caribbean status quo was unstable and that some form of political accommodation would be necessary to prevent more serious disorder.
The response to the 1938 uprisings — the Moyne Commission investigation, the constitutional reforms that followed, the establishment of elected legislatures with significant local authority — opened the political space within which the independence movements developed. Hart's engagement with these developments was from the inside of the labour movement that had produced them: his legal training gave him the specific tools of the labour lawyer, and his political formation gave him the socialist analysis of the plantation economy's inequalities that connected the specific demands of the labour movement to the broader programme of social transformation that genuine independence would require.
His founding membership in the People's National Party connected him to the formal political dimension of the independence movement at its most progressive moment — when the PNP's programme was explicitly committed to independence and to the transformation of the economic structures that colonial rule had built. The PNP of the late 1930s and early 1940s was, in its intellectual and political ambitions, one of the most remarkable organisations in the history of Caribbean political life, and Hart was among the most consistently radical of its founding members.
Building the Regional Labour Movement
Hart's labour work extended well beyond Jamaica into the broader English-speaking Caribbean, and his role in building the labour federations and regional solidarity networks that connected the independence movements of different territories was one of his most important contributions to Caribbean political development. The regional dimension of Caribbean labour organisation reflected his conviction — shared by the most far-sighted figures in the Caribbean independence movement — that the independence of individual islands would be insufficient without the regional economic cooperation and solidarity that could give small Caribbean territories the collective strength that they lacked individually.
His work with the Caribbean Labour Congress — the regional organisation that attempted to build solidarity across the English-speaking Caribbean labour movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s — was one of the most ambitious attempts to develop this regional dimension in practice, and the specific legal and organisational skills he brought to this work gave it a coherence and a continuity that more purely political initiatives could not always sustain. The Caribbean Labour Congress's eventual decline, partly under the pressure of Cold War anti-communist politics and partly under the centrifugal forces of individual territorial independence, was one of the more consequential failures of the regional Caribbean project, and Hart's participation in its building and his witness of its decline gave him a specific understanding of what regional solidarity required and why it was so difficult to maintain.
The Expulsion and the Cold War Caribbean
Hart's expulsion from the PNP in 1952 — along with Frank Hill, Ken Hill, and Arthur Henry, who are also represented in this section — was one of the most revealing events in the history of Caribbean Cold War politics. The expulsion was formally presented as a response to communist influence within the party, but its actual driver was the American pressure on Caribbean political parties to distance themselves from their most radical members — the same Cold War dynamic that was simultaneously destroying Cheddi Jagan's government in British Guiana and limiting the political possibilities available to progressive movements across the region.
The "four H's" — as Hart, Frank Hill, Ken Hill, and Arthur Henry were sometimes collectively known — represented the most consistently socialist current within the PNP, and their expulsion was the PNP leadership's decision that the costs of maintaining them in the party outweighed the benefits. For the expelled members, the expulsion was a demonstration of the limits of the moderate social democracy that the PNP mainstream was moving toward — a demonstration that genuine socialist transformation was not compatible with the American-aligned political order that Caribbean independence was going to have to operate within.
Hart's response to the expulsion was consistent with his career's broader pattern: he continued in labour and legal work, maintained his political commitments, and eventually turned the historical documentation of what had been accomplished — including the documentation of his own expulsion and its context — into the scholarly work that became his most enduring contribution to Caribbean intellectual life.
The Historical Work: Documenting What Others Forgot
Hart's historical writings — produced in his later years, when the specific events he had participated in were receding from living memory — were among the most important contributions to the understanding of Caribbean labour history that any participant-scholar has produced. His specific combination of firsthand knowledge — he had been there, had participated in the events he was describing, had known the people whose decisions had shaped the outcomes — and scholarly discipline gave his historical work a depth and a specificity that purely academic historians could not have achieved.
Towards Decolonisation and Rise and Organise documented the role of the labour movement in Caribbean independence in ways that the conventional political histories — which focused on the formal independence negotiations, the constitutional changes, and the electoral achievements of the independence parties — had neglected. He showed how the organising done in the fields and the factories, in the trade union halls and the labour federation meetings, had created the working-class constituency and the social pressure that made the formal independence settlements possible. He gave back to the labour movement the credit for independence that the conventional narratives had assigned primarily to the political parties and their leaders.
Ninety-Six Years: The Long View of a Caribbean Life
Richard Hart died on 29 December 2013, in London, at the age of ninety-six. He had been born in the Jamaica of the First World War, had participated in the founding of the Caribbean independence movements in the late 1930s and 1940s, had been expelled from the party he had helped to build for being too radical, had continued in labour and legal work for decades, and had eventually produced the historical record of what the movements he had participated in had accomplished. He had worked on that historical record into his nineties — still writing, still documenting, still insisting that the labour movement's contribution to Caribbean independence deserved to be remembered and understood.
His ninety-six years gave him a perspective on Caribbean political history that very few people possessed: the perspective of someone who had been present at the beginning, who had watched the full arc from the hope of the independence movements to the disappointments of the post-independence states, and who had maintained across that arc the consistent conviction that genuine Caribbean liberation required a working-class politics that the mainstream independence parties had been too willing to abandon under Cold War pressure. He is one of the most important figures in the history of Caribbean progressive politics, and one of the least well-known outside the specific communities whose history he documented and whose struggles he participated in.