The Three Times An Anti-Chinese Riot Took Place In Jamaica

In 1918, the first of 3 Anti-Chinese riots took place in Jamaica. It began in Ewarton, St. Catherine between a Chinese grocer who found his black employee in bed with a police officer. The Chinese grocer brutally beat the black man but a rumour spread that the Chinese and his friends had killed the black man and pickled his corpse which then instigated the riots. 20 years later, in 1938, the Labour Riots gave birth to the uprising of looting and arson attacks on the Chinese grocery establishment. Then the trifecta occurred in 1965 when three Chinese brothers brutally attacked their black Joyce Copeland over the purchasing of a radio. There is also another version of the latter event where it is rumoured that the Chinese man was having an affair with said black employee. Still, a riot broke out.  

 

Additional Knowledge

BOOKS

  • Freedom’s Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica By Colin A.Palmer

  • Lawyer Manley: First Time Up by Jackie Ranston

  • Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972 by Obika Gray

  • The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics edited by Diana Paton and Matthew J. Smith

  • The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and Democracy in the Labour Movement Hardcover by O. Nigel Bolland

  • The Third World in the Global 1960s by Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A Scarlett

  • Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 1960-70: Internal Security in a Developing Country by Terry Lacey

FICTIONAL BOOKS

  • Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

  • Pao by Kerry Young

  • The Pagoda Hardcover by Patricia Powell

ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

  • Romancing Jamaica: Chinese-Jamaican Women and Nationalist Aesthetics by Amrita Bandopadhyay

  • The Anti-Chinese Riots of 1918 in Jamaica by Howard Johnson

POETRY

  • Encounters: Voices and Echoes : Poems from a Chinese-Jamaican Experience by Easton Lee

  • From Behind the Counter: Poems From a Rural Jamaican Experience by Easton Lee

ARTICLES

  • Those Major Anti-Chinese Riots in Jamaica by Shalman Scott published in the Jamaica Observer on Feb. 11, 2018

SPEECHES

  • Lessons from the Past: Chinese-Jamaican Relations by Victor Chang on November 26, 2017 at the Chinese Benevolent Association

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