The Eric Williams Memorial Collection

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P.O. Box 561631* Miami, Fl  33256-1631* USA* Tel:  305-271-7246* Fax:  305-271-4160

Eighth Annual Eric E. Williams Lecture Focuses on Williams’ Articulation of the Challenges for a Diverse Caribbean  

MIAMI, Fla. October 10, 2006)— Dr. Colin Palmer, the Jamaican-born distinguished historian, waxed warm on his topic with his relevant and thought-provoking delivery at the Eighth Annual Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture on October 6, 2006.  The event was held at Florida International University, as part of its African New World Studies Program Distinguished Africana Scholars Lecture Series.

Palmer is an engaging and self-effacing lecturer, currently the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University.  He holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history.  But it was his sound historical knowledge, bolstered by his recent, hitherto unrevealed, research on Eric Williams that was most notable on Friday night, several times causing the 300-plus audience to erupt in both applause and approbation.  The lecture was singular in its characterization of Williams as prophetic, possessing a single-mindedness of vision and pugnacity in the service of his country and the region that has been virtually unparalleled, even today.  “Where have all the Eric Williams’s and Norman Manleys gone?” asked Palmer rhetorically, all the while focusing on the lecture’s two main points, still of immense timeliness:  meaningful Caribbean political unity and racial harmony.

Citing Williams’ words of more than seventy (70) years ago – “Some form of a Federation is demanded at least by common sense” – Palmer contended that while many of his esteemed elders, e. g. Grenada 's Marryshow and Barbados' Grantley Adams, were the recognized “Fathers” of West Indian nationalism, it was Williams who visualized its expansive nature, incorporating not simply the Anglophone Caribbean in his eloquent and forceful promotion of the idea but also advocating a strong centre for the proposed Federation – an idea that would have reduced his own individual power in Trinidad and Tobago to that of a glorified mayor. This was ultimately, one of the major issues that sounded the Federation’s death knell when Jamaica and others refused to concede.  Williams, the quintessential “Caribbean Man,” was to describe himself to his publisher in 1944. “I should appreciate it if somewhere you can arrange to describe me as a West Indian born in Trinidad rather than as a Trinidadian.  It might seem a trifle, but we West Indians set much store by it.”

While praising the perspicacity of Eric Williams, leader of Trinidad and Tobago's government for 25 years from 1956-1981, Palmer met head on the racial issue facing both that country and Guyana today, comparing the current situation unfavourably with that of the past.  He was definite in his assertion that Williams’ 1958 ‘recalcitrant and hostile minority’ remark, which has been deemed to be racially divisive by some, while “intemperate” had less to do with his view of an entire race – a race that, as the documentary evidence bears out, he actually admired – than it had to do with his denunciation of those who challenged the Federation imperative because of their own insecurities or agenda.

In the lively Question & Answer session that followed, Palmer ably fielded numerous on-point questions, including a contrast of Trinidad and Tobago's Chaguaramas with Cuba's Guantanamo Bay and the vast differences between the two leaders’ handling of such matters.

Numerous US federal and Florida elected officials, including Governor Jeb Bush, proffered courtesy greetings, Mayoral Proclamations, and the silver Seal of the City of Miami.  Many students from area universities were in attendance, as were the Deputy Principal of the University of the West Indies and Trinidad and Tobago Opposition Senator and Olympic sprinter, Ato Boldon.  As in the past, pledges to the Lecture Endowment Fund were actively solicited.

The Memorial Lecture is named in honor of Trinidad and Tobago's first Prime Minister and internationally renowned scholar, Eric Williams.  In addition to his several other achievements, Williams is best known for writing Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944 and translated into seven languages, with an eighth – Korean – planned for this year.  The Russian version will soon be reprinted after almost fifty (50) years.

“The Williams Thesis” was cited in the New York Times Book Review (1997) as continuing to be on “the cutting edge of slave trade research in academic circles.”

The evening’s activities were co-sponsored by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs; the Miami-based Consuls General of Antigua, Barbados, Bahamas, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago; as well as other corporate and community donors.  The Lecture is also supported by The Eric Williams Memorial Collection at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago campus), which was inaugurated by former US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in 1998 and named to UNESCO’s prestigious Memory of the World Register in 1999.

- EWMC -