Those Disastrous, Unforgettable Elections of 1977

THE WHITE FILE For The Punch – 28 February 2011

We often speak of how more than half a century ago, when we were a budding teenager, we used to sit almost at the feet of our mentor the late Cyril St. John Stevenson, and listen to his myriad tales of political revolution and evolution in The Bahamas.

Today we often reflect on how much of what he recited had gone before had a definitive bearing on the existing state of political affairs in the colony.

Back then we were not sitting physically at Stevenson’s feet, but moving about in the print shop of the Nassau Herald on Lewis Street as he banged away on his portable typewriter with its lost “e” key, as he typed scathing editorials condemning the Bay Street demagogues.

He spoke of how sitting House of Assembly politicians like Dr. C. R. Walker and Bert Cambridge could have brought about radical political change had they adopted different political tactics.

Walker and Cambridge were the two members of the House of Assembly for the Southern District of New Providence back in the late 1940s, and were prominent parts of the Citizens Committee, which was organised in 1950 to protest Bay Street’s banning of the movie, No Way Out, which featured Bahamian actor Sidney Poitier for racial reasons.

That grouping had attracted the support of quite a number of the black Bahamian middle class, like the late Justice Maxwell Thompson and could perhaps have made a significant difference in the political outlook of the masses, except that the middle class was prepared to go only so far.

Successive elections, Stevenson used to say, such as the polls of 1949, could have gone dramatically in a different direction, if the will of the masses had been marshalled and directed differently. Stevenson ran for reelection as an independent. The PLP shifted Pindling from New Providence to Andros, where he defeated Stevenson.

Years later, long after he had quite the front line political scene, and when he was getting on in years, we sat quietly with Stevenson as he recounted election after election, attaching special significant to each.

We agreed that perhaps the most celebrated – and most wrenching for many – of all general elections held in the modern Bahamas were the historic polls of 1977, when the electorate was stretched in three political directions. But let us historically backtrack for a spell.

Following the 1967 general elections which ushered in majority rule, the Progressive Liberal Party went on to a landslide victory on 10 April 1968 in an election occasioned by the death of Shirlea Member of Parliament Uriah McPhee.

Not long after that, however, things in the PLP began to sour politically, in fact as early as the PLP’s 1969 convention. Even from then careful observers could detect that St. Agnes MP and cabinet minister Cecil Wallace-Whitfield had his eye on the political crown in the party.

By 1970 premier Lynden Pindling had already fired two cabinet ministers, Warren Levarity and Arthur Foulkes, and at that year’s convention Wallace Whitfield announced that he had resigned from the cabinet. He went on to lead seven other MPs and a number of PLP dissidents in what was known as the Free PLP.

By 1972 there came into being the Free National Movement, which comprised the PLP dissidents, former members of the dismantled United Bahamian Party, and former members of Paul Adderley’s National Democratic Party. Later that year the FNM went into campaign battle against the ruling PLP under the theme, “All Together”.

Fevers ran high in that 1972 campaign, and the FNM contracted public relations experts from Jamaica who had successfully delivered the election in that country for Michael Manley. However, the main issue during the campaign was that of independence the following year, and the PLP, understandably, pushed that emotional issue to the hilt.

That was in September of 1972, and when the votes were counted, the FNM had been defeated dismally. Most dismal of the whole defeat was the fact that every single one of the original eight dissidents – Cecil Wallace-Whitfield, Dr. Curtis McMillan, Dr, Elwood Donaldson, Arthur Foulkes, Warren Levarity, George Thompson, Maurice Moore, and James Shepherd – had lost his seat.

The blow was severe, but a new FNM candidate, Kendal G. L. Isaacs, had won the House of Assembly seat for Fort Montagu. He subsequently became Leader of the Official Opposition. At least for a time, there was peace in the Opposition.

Inevitably, however, by about 1975, there came the famous split in the Opposition, and Cecil Wallace-Whitfield was once more at the centre of it all, surrounded by many who had been with him from the days of the Free PLP.

The other side was formed into the Bahamian Democratic Party. When the 1977 elections were called, both sides offered complements of candidates, some very familiar political faces.

Contesting the election with Whitfield on the FNM side were Bazel Nichols, Frank Watson, Charles Hunt, Clayton Taylor, James Wood, Granville Bain, Audley Kemp, Sterling Quant, Bernard Mortimer, Rudolph Knowles, James Shepherd, and Emerick Knowles.

Additional FNM candidates were James Thompson, Chester Thompson, Peter Galanos, Lucius Moree, Basil Neymour, Oswald Munnings, Warren Levarity, Garnet Levarity, Maurice Moore, Giles Newbold, Edwin Brown, Bill Facquharson and Wideon Pyfrom.

Meanwhile on the BDP side the slate included Geoffrey Johnstone, Roland Symonette, Basil Kelly, Tommy Robinson, Orville Turnquest, Arthur Foulkes, Henry Bostwick, Janet Bostwick, Fred Ramsey, Edmund Moxey, Godfrey Pinder, Clifford Cooper, Edward Barrett, Peter Christie, Erwin Knowles, Norman Solomon, Geoffrey Brown, George Baker, Cyril Tynes and Michael Lightbourn.

In the lead-up to nominations, Whitfield’s political right-hand man, Bazel Nichols, ran shuffle diplomacy between the two sides, resulting in tacit agreement that in places such as North End Long Island the FNM would not mount an opposition candidate. The same was to happen in Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera, where the BDP did not send a candidate. The FNM also nominated no candidates in Shirlea and Crooked Island.

Additionally, the BDP sent no candidates in Pine Ridge and High Rock, Grand Bahama; in Inagua; in Kemp’s Bay and Mangrove Cay, Andros; and in South Beach and Grant’s Town in New Providence.

During the campaign, from the political platforms, both the FNM and the BDP carefully aimed their cannons at the PLP, carefully and sensible avoiding any criticism of each other.

In the meantime from his own political platform, the wily PLP leader, Lynden Pindling, poked fun at the severed opposition, noting laughingly that, “they were all together, now they are all apart”.

Otherwise in the opposition camps, some races were extremely painful, because they saw close personal friends opposing each other, because they were running as part of opposing political slates.

Such was the case, for example, of the Delaporte constituency, where close friends Arthur Foulkes and Bazel Nichols were representing the BDP and the FNM respectively. Both were defeated by the PLP’s Philip Pinder. In another such case the FNM’s Frank Watson found himself facing the BDP’s Clifford Cooper, with Paul Adderley as the PLP’s candidate.

Mr. Adderley, who as a PLP was first elected to the House of Assembly in 1961, triumphed in the 1977 polls.

Those 1977 elections had proven not only that at the time the PLP under Lynden Pindling was practically an invincible political fighting machine, but that a fragmented opposition, no matter how astute the leadership, would forever fail in The Bahamas.

For a few years following those elections, there were a few other political spin-offs from the mainstream opposition, but by the 1982 elections, the opposition was once again all together. Seat-wise, there were some gains in 1982, but, most importantly, Janet Bostwick, as an FNM candidate, became the first female ever elected to the Bahamian Parliament.

There were even greater gains in 1987, and eventually, in 1992, the Free National Movement triumphed at the polls, with Hubert Ingraham as the party’s leader.

Interestingly, during those historic 1977 elections, Hubert Ingraham was chairman of the governing Progressive Liberal Party.

Dr. Doris Johnson Helped Shape the Quiet Revolution

(For The Punch – Issue 20 January 2011)

One Saturday in the summer of 1969 when she was serving as the first female cabinet minister in the Progressive Liberal Party government of the late Sir Lynden Pindling, the late Dr. Doris L. Johnson assembled a modest group of persons for the purpose of discussing and eventually publishing a history of the Bahamian people’s stride and struggle to majority rule.

Dr. Johnson had apparently secured financing fro the project from Juan Trippe, who was at the time owner of Pan American World Airways, which flew direct flights between Rock Sound, Eleuthera and New York City. The White Boy was privileged to be part of that team, and his duties were essentially to research, assist with and write several of the informative chapters of the work.

At the end of the day, the refreshing and satisfying result of that summer’s effort was “THE QUIET REVOLUTION IN THE BAHAMAS”, and Doris Johnson was extremely proud of the accomplishment, which was, in fact, the very first chronicle of the political struggle which led to the successful elections of January and a precursor of Bahamas independence in July 1973.

Doris Johnson, who in 1979 was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II, was a truly amazing Bahamian woman who over the years had refused to be pigeon-holed by male chauvinists in The Bahamas, especially by those she may have been aware were her academic and even political inferiors.
1. The White Boy first came to know Doris Johnson when he was a student at St. John’s University and she was a doctoral candidate at New York University, where former cabinet ministers Charles Carter and Sir William Allen also studied.
2. Prior to her studies in New York, the former Doris Sands from Masons Addition attended Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, McGill University’s MacDonald College of Education, Ontario College of Education at the University of Toronto, where she obtained a master of education degree in Administration and Supervision

In New York Doris Johnson also became the supreme catalyst in the movement to establish the Bahamian Students Association, with the late Ernest Strachan, then employed in the French Department of the United Nations, who became the group’s first president.

Doris Johnson, even before she travelled abroad for higher education, was a social and political fighter, particularly with regard to the rights of Bahamian women.

Determined to bring to Parliament the issues of Universal Adult Suffrage, but not allowed to speak in the precincts of the House of Assembly, she was able to persuade House members to assemble in a nearby Magistrate’s Court to hear her impassioned plea for women’s rights to vote. That was in 1959.

The following year the House passed an Act granting that right. In 1961 the former Ruby Ann Cooper became the first Bahamian woman to register to vote, and all Bahamian women were eligible to vote in the general elections of 1962.

That was the same year Doris Johnson completed her doctoral studies in New York, and she was back at home in time to accept the Progressive Liberal Party’s nomination to contest one of the House of Assembly seats in Eleuthera, thereby becoming the first Bahamian woman to run for Parliament.

She lost that bid, but an important historic point had been made.

Three years later Doris Johnson was part of a strategic PLP delegation which travelled to New York to address the UN’s Committee of 24 on the issue of parliamentary imbalance in The Bahamas. It was there that she encountered the president of her alma mater, Virginia Union, who enticed her to become a teacher at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

She accepted the challenge, and taught there for fewer than two years, until duty called early in January 1967 when majority rule prevailed and the PLP became the government.

The new premier, the late Sir Lynden Pindling, caused Doris Johnson to be appointed the first female senator in the history of the colony. Following the 1968 elections which the PLP won by a tremendous landslide, she was not only re-appointed to the senate but was made leader of government business in that chamber.

Doris Johnson subsequently became the first female cabinet minister, eventually Minister of Transport. She resigned from the cabinet in 1973, the years of independence, and was elected president of the Senate.

The fervour of her a seemingly unquenchable thirst for education and more education with a view to imparting to others was matched only by her fierce and fiery devotion to the cause of the rights and privileges of Bahamian women, and on that mission she was able to inspire thousands of sisters around the islands to kindle similar flames.

In her time Doris Johnson had made her mark as the first Bahamian female candidate in an election, parliamentarian, the first female to become a cabinet minister, and the first elected president of the Senate.

Back in November of 1973, after her appointment to the top senate post, in an editorial the Nassau Guardian gushingly wrote:

“The tread is firm, the smile serene, and the torso buxom. Medium of height, in ample sturdiness, stands the new president of the Senate. At 52, this may well be her crowning glory in a long, varied and tempestuous career.
“Ten years ago the appointment of DR. Doris Johnson to be President of the Senate would have been absolutely unthinkable. Yet time marches on, and today we do live in changed and changing times.
“Dr. Johnson, probably now at the pinnacle of public achievement, has reached there through unrelenting involvement with public causes, sheer hard work to improve herself educationally, and a dogged determination to press on when those of faint heart and less resolve would have stopped and turned back.
“Way before the pre-1967 days of booming prosperity and political deprivation, when the progressive and liberal forces took counsel and then action to hasten the downfall of that consortium knows as the Bay Street Boys, Dr. Johnson was, as it is said, in there doing her bit.
“As a result she experienced some trying times – as did others engaged in the same endeavour. Her interests in many cases stretch beyond mundane politics to arcane matters. For she is equally at home leading a gospel meeting, or professing the tenets of Moral Rearmament. And she has been an untiring worker for women’s rights in The Bahamas.”

The mother of one son, Gerald, Dr. Johnson was an avid Baptist, attending Bethel Baptist Church on Meeting Street, where she cultivated special spiritual and political relationship with the pastor, the late Rev. Dr. H.W. Brown. Indeed it was she who often impressed upon Dr. Brown the need for him to lend his supportive voice to the PLP’s cause during rallies on the Southern Recreation Grounds.

In many ways Doris Johnson was woman before her time, a renaissance Bahamian woman whose entire life was one of upward mobility. She was sort of an embodiment of Robert Browning’s line that “a man’s reach much exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

She totally understood the cause and the mission of the Progressive Liberal Party, perhaps better than some of the front line movers and shakers, and in that regard, particularly in the earl;y days, had a special bond with Sir Lynden Pindling. She was easily among the most classical of the party’s speakers both before and after the quiet revolution.

For example, in 1972, the year before independence, when she was invited to address the Tiger Bay Club of Miami, this was how she summed up that revolution:

“The peaceful revolution of 1967 and 1968 has become the subject of discussion for many students of history. We have shown the world that physical violence is not the only force which changes and overturns corrupt and undesirable regimes, and that armed might and gangsterism ought not to be condoned as a way of life in our impatience to bring about change.
“There is another and more potent factor which men must take into account and deal with effectively, and that is the factor of the human spirit in the ultimate quest of freedom, and it is perhaps in this area that The Bahamas, the birthplace of the new world, might eventually play a role in the world of today.”

That was almost four decades ago, and that was vintage Doris Johnson, a truly, truly remarkable Bahamian woman . . . for what it’s worth.