I have been to functions, where I happened to have been the only black[i] woman, and therefore an object of curiosity and resentment, nothing more. I could have been alone on a desert island. I have been to other functions where there are two or three of us black women, who make our own conversation among ourselves. Viewed objectively, it is all very amusing, to say, the least of it. And yet they say there is no discrimination . . .

Visit with me the King Street stores, the offices and other business concerns and see how many black women are employed to serve a public, the bulk of whom are distinctly Negroes. They would have as much chance in keeping a bucket of ice cream frozen in a very hot place as in getting jobs at such places . . .  

Visit with me the clubs, the churches, the secondary schools, the various societies, and see how many black men and women there are who occupy prominent positions. Go to church fairs and garden parties and see who have charge of the stalls, go to some churches and see for yourself that a black man has as much chance of being its minster as Kingston Harbour of freezing  . . .           

In July 1938, an advertisement for a medical officer in Jamaica was published in the British Medical Journal, which stated that the candidate must be of ‘European parentage’. In response, Dr Oswald E. Anderson, the Mayor of Kingston, sent a telegram to the president of the League of Coloured Peoples in London in which he stated that the Government fostered ‘race hatred’ (Gleaner 6 July 1938). When some councillors objected to the Mayor’s action and asked him to withdraw what he had had said about the advertisement in public speeches and ‘express regret’, Anderson resigned because he felt it was time to stop ‘pretending that there is no discrimination’ (Gleaner 12 July 1938).

Like Dr Anderson, Amy Bailey, a dark-skinned teacher and political activist, was one of few Jamaicans at the time to publicly speak out against both the white-on-black and the brown-on-black discrimination. In 1937, for instance, she told an audience of female teachers that there were ‘shop clerks, post office clerks, and stenographers who regard it as infra dig to associate with teachers because they are of a different colour’ (Gleaner 13 April 1937). In this article, which was published in the progressive magazine Public Opinion, Bailey first praises Dr Anderson for addressing the elephant in the room. Jamaica’s white and light-skinned elite pretended that discrimination did not exist but practised it by wanting to see ‘every prominent post filled by “importations” . . . [rather than] ‘a coloured[ii] Jamaican’. She then moves on to provide the examples mentioned above to illustrate that discrimination was rife, focussing on the ‘shadism’ practised by both white and black Jamaicans; that is, placing a high premium on white or light skin. Following on, she explains the ‘shadism’ in terms of African Jamaicans’ desire for social elevation. As class and colour were closely entwined, many African Jamaicans wanted to socialise only with light-skinned and white Jamaicans and many dark-skinned Jamaicans tried to ‘lighten’ the colour of their offspring by marrying someone lighter.

Bailey finishes her article with a call for action. In the early 1930s, African Americans in the North staged a ‘don’t buy where you can’t work’ campaign to protest against the discriminatory hiring practices of shops. Bailey asks her readers to follow their example and also encourages them to cease ‘being social climbers, being political sycophants, being supine hypocrites’ and ‘stick together as one people’. Bailey was a follower of Marcus Garvey. In 1914, Garvey set up the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which became the biggest black mass movement the world has ever seen. For Garvey, ‘shadism’ prevented the unity required for African Jamaicans to gain full and equal citizenship. He often spoken out against the snobbism of light-skinned Jamaicans and held up race pride as the best means to overcome ‘shadism’. In this article, Bailey is particularly concerned with the lack of unity caused by ‘shadism’. She disapproves of those who let themselves ‘be used by others as tools for their own ends to the detriment of our people’. In many of her other articles, she encouraged African Jamaicans to take pride in their race. In ‘Inferiority complex’ (Public Opinion 22 May 1937), for instance, she called for an education that would develop ‘our innate self-respect and pride’ and ‘enable us to realize that to be different does not necessarily mean to be inferior’.

Dr Anderson’s resignation happened shortly after Jamaica was plagued by labour riots. These riots mirrored those in other parts of the British West Indies and led to a West India Royal Commission, which investigated the reasons behind the riots and made recommendations for constitutional change that put the region on the road to independence. Jamaica gained its independence in 1962. Even though many of the men and women who were in the vanguard of independence had like Bailey fiercely spoken out against exclusionary practices based on skin colour, discrimination did not cease to exist in 1962. It took, for example, until 1993 before the island had its first dark-skinned prime minister. And today colour is less of an obstacle to social mobility than it was when Bailey wrote her article but it is still a key factor in social attitudes and relations.

Henrice Altink is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of York. She is the author of Destined for a Life of Service: Defining African-Jamaican Womanhood, 1865-1938 (Manchester University Press, 2011), which examines processes by which ideals of black femininity were constructed and internalised in post-1865 Jamaica .

[ii] By ‘coloured’, Bailey means light-skinned African Jamaicans.