A pioneering Pan Africanist, Garveyite and poet from the Caribbean Island of Dominica, JR Ralph Casimir (1898-1996) played an important role as agent and organiser in the eastern Caribbean for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Black Star Line.
For more than half a century, he fearlessly confronted not just colonial rule but his island’s elites. This talk, based on her lovingly written biography, by his granddaughter Kathy Casimir MacLean, explores Casimir’s political and personal life, and sheds much light on little known aspects of Dominica’s march to independence.