Ronald Wilson Reagan — Republican, conservative and white — isn’t very popular among many black Americans. But on the 100th anniversary of his birthday, there is one group of black people who are sure to celebrate.
They live on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. One year before Reagan trounced former President Carter in the 1980 presidential election, Grenadians had a regime change of their own.
But theirs wasn’t done courtesy of the electorate. A group of Marxists who called themselves the New Jewel Movement ousted Prime Minister Eric Gairy and declared Grenada a socialist state. A man named Maurice Bishop became the prime minister; Bernard Coard, Bishop’s close friend since high school, became deputy prime minister.
It took only four years for the commie duo to have a falling out. Coard’s faction placed Bishop under house arrest in October of 1983. Bishop’s supporters raided the house and freed him. They proceeded to Fort Rupert, where Grenadian army units loyal to the Coard faction confronted them. After a brief gunbattle in which the Coard faction prevailed, Bishop, his mistress and several others were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned to death.
The Coard faction then imposed martial law and a dusk-to-dawn, shoot-to-kill curfew. Teenage Grenadian “soldiers” patrolled the island carrying AK-47s. Convinced that American students attending the medical school in St. George’s were in danger, Reagan ordered American troops to invade the island. Within days, the Coard faction had been ousted.
I got firsthand details about this business in August of 2003, when DeWayne Wickham, founder and director of the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies, sent me and two other journalists to Grenada. Our mission was to write a detailed story about how Grenadians felt 20 years after the American invasion.
One of the people we talked to was newspaper publisher and editor Leslie Pierre. In 1981, the Bishop-Coard regime closed down Pierre’s newspaper, the Torchlight. The editor had ruffled some feathers by printing a story sympathetic to Rastafarians who were critical of the New Jewel Movement. Not to be deterred, Pierre started another paper called the Grenadian Voice. The Bishop-Coard regime slapped him behind bars.
“I knew I wouldn’t get out unless the Americans invaded the island,” Pierre told us. It’s a good thing for Pierre and other dissidents on lockdown courtesy of the New Jewel Movement that Reagan, not Carter, was president of the United States in October of 1983. Pierre might be in prison still.
Pierre and the other dissidents were freed immediately after the Coard faction got the boot. Once he was freed, Pierre said, Grenadians told him stories of how some Grenadians invited American soldiers into their homes for meals. Others simply shouted, “We love you!” to American troops as they passed by.
(It was while recalling the latter incident that Pierre showed his humorous side by telling the tale of how American soldiers at one point stopped him and his wife days after he was freed. The soldiers had them lie on the ground, causing consternation to Pierre’s flustered wife. The ever-calm Pierre said to her, “Tell them ‘We love you.’”)
The graffiti I saw on some walls in St. George’s might be gone now, but I remember it vividly. Someone had spray-painted “Thank God for U.S. and Caribbean heroes of freedom.” Next to it were the words “Thank you, U.S.A., for liberating us.”
Reagan, often criticized by many of his fellow Americans who happened to be black, delivered an island of black people from the clutches of Marxist thugs. You can rest assured that he’ll be remembered in Grenada on Feb. 6, 2011.
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
