63 Years After Coral Gardens, Jamaica Finally Handed Over the Land Titles

• Land titles transferred to Rastafari Coral Gardens Benevolent Society
• Redress for the 1963 Coral Gardens atrocity
• Handover promised in 2024, delivered on Good Friday 2026
• Part of a wider, still-unfinished reparations package

Government formally handed over land titles to the Rastafari Coral Gardens Benevolent Society on Good Friday, April 3, 2026, as restitution for the 1963 Coral Gardens incident in St James, when police, acting under orders to bring in all Rastas, dead or alive, rounded up and brutalised members of the Rastafarian community. Deputy Prime Minister Dr Horace Chang and Culture Minister Olivia Grange presented the certificates at the annual commemorative anniversary in Albion, St James, alongside National Land Agency CEO and Commissioner of Lands Cheriese Walcott.

The handover closed a gap between promise and delivery that had run for years. Chang had told the same commemoration in 2024 that the Albion Heights property ultimately belongs to the Rastafarian community and that a Cabinet submission to formalise the transfer was imminent, this property has been approved, but the formal handover will take a little more time because the bureaucracy must be at work, he said then. The actual titles arrived nearly two years after that assurance, and 63 years after the atrocity itself.

The land transfer sits inside a broader, still partial redress package. An official government apology for Coral Gardens came in 2017, more than five decades after the event, alongside a reparations trust fund a 2025 Gleaner letter described as now less than J$10 million, and six lots previously provided at Pinnacle. A letter to the editor responding to the 2025 signing ceremony captured the tension in the redress itself: it says we remember, we acknowledge, we are ready to repair, in a culture that owes so much of its global identity, its music, spirituality, language and resistance, to the Rastafari faith, this gesture is not a favour. It is justice delayed, now delivered. The same letter called it a beginning rather than a conclusion, pointing to sacred sites still needing protection and legal gaps still needing to close.

The Coral Gardens land transfer is a narrower, domestic version of a repatriation and reparations movement Rastafarians have pursued for decades on a far larger scale, including the 1,200-acre land grant Emperor Haile Selassie made to the Ethiopian World Federation at Shashamane in the 1950s and 60s, where Jamaican and Caribbean Rastafari families still live today, in some cases without formal legal immigration status more than half a century later. Against that longer, larger, still-unresolved history, the Albion Heights titles represent something rarer: a specific redress claim, formally promised, that a Jamaican government has actually completed.