Vendors Were Told to Stand Their Ground Against Bulldozers. Their Lawyer Meant It Literally

• Attorney Bert Samuels urged vendors to form a human wall
• He said no formal compensation had ever been offered
• A 200-foot alternative site behind the market went unanswered
• Demolition was already scheduled within days

As demolition of the Constant Spring Market loomed, attorney-at-law Bert Samuels advised vendors to create a human wall of defiance until they were fairly compensated for their property by the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation, a considerably more confrontational strategy than the constitutional court challenge this publication has already covered failing in the same case.

Samuels was direct about what vendors had, and had not, received by that point. They are insisting that justice means there must be compensation for their shops. And we invite the KSAMC to come to the market tomorrow to measure the people’s shops, look at what is to be demolished, and compensate them for it, he said. I wouldn’t be moving. Stand your ground until you get compensation. He confirmed vendors had not, to that date, been offered any formal compensation at all.

Samuels also pointed to a specific, unresolved alternative that had gone unaddressed throughout the dispute: 200 feet of land right behind the market, where another market could be built, an option he said the KSAMC had never given a satisfactory answer to, even while acknowledging vendors had to respect the court’s ruling that had already lifted their injunction.

Kingston Mayor Delroy Williams confirmed the practical endgame regardless of Samuels’s stand-your-ground appeal: vendors would be given until the weekend to vacate, with demolition set to begin March 8. The gap between Samuels’s defiant public messaging and the mayor’s fixed demolition date illustrates how limited a vendor’s remaining legal options actually become once an injunction has been lifted, human resistance and public pressure being essentially the only tools left once the courts have ruled.

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