Published: 2 April 2007 | Jamaica Homes News
Key Takeaways
- Obama Announces Presidential Bid on Springfield’s Historic Steps
- Nancy Pelosi Becomes America’s First Female House Speaker
- UK Marks 200 Years Since the Abolition of the Slave Trade
- Portia Simpson Miller Completes First Year as Jamaica’s First Female PM
- Bush Announces Iraq Troop Surge of 20,000 Additional Soldiers
- Jamaica Election Expected Before Year-End as Golding’s JLP Challenges
Introduction: A Quarter of Political Firsts
Q1 2007 delivered, in quick succession, a set of political milestones that had direct significance for Jamaica’s diaspora communities: a Black senator’s presidential candidacy announcement, the first female Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and the bicentenary of the legislation that had abolished British participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Each event landed differently but with comparable weight in communities whose historical consciousness runs deep. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 31 March 2007.
Obama’s Presidential Announcement: The Diaspora’s Political Earthquake
Senator Barack Obama’s announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, delivered on 10 February 2007 from the Old State Capitol steps in Springfield, Illinois — where Abraham Lincoln had given his ‘House Divided’ speech in 1858 — was experienced in Caribbean diaspora communities with an intensity that surprised even those who had been following his rise since his 2004 Democratic convention keynote address. The location was deliberately chosen: the Lincoln reference, the Springfield setting, the ‘improbable hope’ framing of Obama’s speech — all were calibrated to invoke the broadest possible historical context for a candidacy that was, self-evidently, without precedent in American political history.
In the Caribbean diaspora communities of New York, London, and Toronto, the announcement was the occasion for a political conversation of unusual depth. Was a Black American actually capable of winning the Democratic nomination? Was the Democratic Party’s primary electorate — older, whiter, more institutionally aligned with the Clintons than with any newcomer — actually ready for this? And was the broader American electorate ready? These were not abstract questions for communities whose members had spent decades experiencing the gap between America’s democratic promise and its racial realities. The answer that Obama’s candidacy was offering — that the promise could close the gap — was one that diaspora communities wanted to believe but were not yet ready to assume.
Hillary Clinton had announced her own candidacy in January 2007, immediately positioning the Democratic primary as a race between a former First Lady with decades of political experience and relationships and the junior senator from Illinois whose principal asset was the political moment he embodied. For Caribbean-American community organisations, the choice between Clinton and Obama was genuinely difficult: Clinton had deep institutional ties to Caribbean community political networks built through the 1990s; Obama represented a historic possibility that no amount of institutional relationship could fully match.
Nancy Pelosi: First Female Speaker and Caribbean Community Significance
Nancy Pelosi’s election as Speaker of the House of Representatives on 4 January 2007 — following the Democrats’ sweeping gains in the November 2006 midterm elections, in which they retook both chambers of Congress — made her the first woman and the first Italian-American to hold the position, which places its occupant third in the line of presidential succession. For Caribbean-American communities in Pelosi’s San Francisco district and beyond, her speakership was a milestone in American political history that resonated across the gender and racial lines of communities with strong traditions of women in leadership.
The new Democratic Congress’s priorities — a minimum wage increase, ethics reform, student loan reform, and oversight of the Bush administration’s Iraq war policy — aligned substantially with Caribbean-American community policy priorities. The federal minimum wage increase — the first in a decade, from $5.15 to $7.25 over two years, passed in May 2007 — had direct positive impact on the low-wage sectors where significant numbers of Caribbean-American workers were employed.
The Slave Trade Bicentenary: Memory, Mourning, and Pride
25 March 2007 marked the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Abolition Act, which had received Royal Assent on 25 March 1807 and which had abolished British participation in the transatlantic slave trade. The bicentenary was marked across the United Kingdom with a programme of events, exhibitions, and official commemorations that produced a public reckoning with British involvement in the trade of a scale and directness that had no peacetime precedent. For British-Jamaican communities, the bicentenary was an occasion for profound historical reflection: the slave trade had defined Jamaica’s demographic and cultural formation; its abolition had been the result of a campaign in which formerly enslaved Africans, abolitionist Quakers and evangelicals, and the broader public conscience had all played roles.
The bicentenary’s political dimension — including Prime Minister Blair’s statement that he was ‘deeply sorry’ for Britain’s role in the slave trade, which fell short of the formal apology that some Caribbean community organisations had called for — generated debate about reparations, acknowledgement, and the terms on which historical responsibility for the trade should be understood. Community organisations ran their own programmes of events: lectures, community discussions, school visits, and cultural performances that placed the bicentenary in the longer context of Caribbean historical experience and the community’s contemporary presence in British society.
Portia Simpson Miller: Jamaica’s First Female PM at One Year
Portia Simpson Miller completed her first year as Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister in March 2007, having assumed the PNP leadership and the prime ministership on 30 March 2006 after PJ Patterson’s retirement. Her first year had been characterised by a distinctive leadership style that emphasised compassion, community connection, and personal accessibility — qualities that her supporters saw as genuine expressions of her values and her critics occasionally dismissed as populism without enough economic rigour. Her government’s economic management was under scrutiny from opposition leader Bruce Golding’s JLP, with Jamaica’s high debt ratio and crime levels the primary areas of criticism.
The Jamaica election — required before the end of 2007 in constitutional terms, though the exact timing was the government’s choice — was the dominant political story of the coming months. Remittances through Q1 2007 maintained the approximately US$2.0 billion annual pace, with Easter transfers providing the quarter’s seasonal boost. We report next from 2 July 2007.
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 April 2007.
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