Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — July to September 2005

Published: 2 October 2005 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• 7/7 London Bombings Kill 52 in Attacks on British-Jamaican Heartland
• Hurricane Katrina Devastates Gulf Coast on 29 August
• Asafa Powell Sets 100m World Record in Athens
• IAAF Helsinki World Championships: Caribbean Excels
• Hurricane Rita Strikes Texas and Louisiana on 24 September
• UK Anti-Terror Legislation Advances After July Bombings

Introduction: The Quarter That Shook Two Hemispheres

Q3 2005 will be remembered as one of the most traumatic quarters in the modern history of Jamaica’s diaspora communities. In July, suicide bomb attacks on London’s transport network struck at the physical heart of the British-Jamaican presence in south London. In August, Hurricane Katrina produced the largest natural disaster in American history, displacing Caribbean-American communities across the Gulf Coast and testing diaspora solidarity networks to their limits. In September, Hurricane Rita extended the Gulf Coast emergency. Across the Atlantic, Jamaica’s athletes provided moments of national pride at the IAAF World Championships in Helsinki. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 September 2005.

7/7 London Bombings: The British-Jamaican Community Under Shock

At 8:50 a.m. on 7 July 2005, four coordinated suicide bomb attacks struck the London transport network during the morning rush hour: three on Underground trains and one on a number 30 bus in Tavistock Square. Fifty-two civilians were killed and more than seven hundred injured — the deadliest terrorist attack on British soil since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The bombs on the Circle Line between King’s Cross and Liverpool Street, and on the Piccadilly Line between King’s Cross and Russell Square, struck routes carrying significant numbers of south London commuters — including the large British-Jamaican communities of Brixton, Stockwell, Peckham, and Lewisham whose daily journeys to work took them through the attacked stations.

For the British-Jamaican community, the immediate shock was personal: the bombed routes and the affected areas overlapped directly with community geography. Churches, community organisations, and the Jamaican High Commission in London were immediately engaged in supporting affected community members, accounting for those who had been on the attacked services, and reaching families both in Britain and in Jamaica who were seeking information about loved ones. The Jamaican High Commissioner issued statements in the immediate aftermath confirming the community’s grief and solidarity with London’s diverse population.

The political and social aftermath of 7/7 was of immediate relevance to the British-Jamaican community. The subsequent failed 21/7 attacks on 21 July and the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground station on 22 July — a Brazilian man killed by officers who mistook him for a bomber in a case of catastrophic intelligence failure — deepened the community’s anxiety about the relationship between minority communities and the police in a heightened security environment. Stockwell Underground station, adjacent to the heart of the British-Jamaican community in south London, became the geographic centre of a crisis that was simultaneously a terrorist incident, a policing failure, and a test of community-police relations. Tony Blair’s government moved rapidly to introduce new counter-terrorism legislation, including proposals for ninety-day pre-charge detention of terrorist suspects — a proposal that the British-Jamaican community monitored closely as a civil liberties question with particular salience for minority communities.

Hurricane Katrina: Caribbean-American Diaspora in the Eye of the Storm

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on 29 August 2005 as a Category 3 storm. The levee failures that followed inundated eighty percent of New Orleans, producing the largest forced displacement of Americans since the Dust Bowl and the federal government’s most significant emergency management failure in the modern era. The death toll exceeded 1,800; property damage reached estimates of US$125 billion. The images of predominantly Black American residents stranded in the Superdome and on rooftops were broadcast globally and provoked an international debate about race, poverty, and the social contract in the United States.

For Caribbean-American diaspora communities — including the significant Jamaican-American presence in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Gulf Coast region — the Katrina disaster was simultaneously a personal emergency and a community mobilisation. Diaspora giving networks activated within hours of the storm’s landfall; churches and community organisations across North America organised direct aid, housing assistance for evacuees, and fundraising for medium-term recovery. The Jamaican diaspora’s experience of remittance infrastructure — of sending money quickly and reliably to people who needed it — was directly applicable to the Katrina emergency, and diaspora community leaders drew on that infrastructure to route support to displaced community members.

Asafa Powell and the IAAF World Championships

Jamaica’s Asafa Powell set a new 100m world record of 9.77 seconds in Athens on 14 June 2005 — a performance that announced the emergence of a new force in global sprinting and gave Jamaica’s diaspora communities a moment of pure national pride in a quarter otherwise defined by grief and disaster. At the IAAF World Championships in Helsinki in August, Caribbean athletes continued the pattern of excellence that had defined the region’s athletics for three decades. Jamaica’s track and field programme — anchored in the island’s inter-school championship culture and the grassroots development pipeline that had produced Powell and would continue to develop the next generation — was recognised as one of the world’s premier athletic systems.

For diaspora communities dealing with the weight of the quarter’s disasters, the athletics results provided a thread of national cultural connection and pride. Community viewing events for the Helsinki Championships, held in Jamaican community centres and restaurants from Brixton to Brooklyn to Toronto, drew together diaspora members whose immediate emotional context was grief and anxiety about London and the Gulf Coast, but who found in Jamaica’s athletic performances a shared source of pride that transcended the quarter’s traumas. We report next from 2 January 2006.

This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources include Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 October 2005.

Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomes Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com