NJAC was the only party that did anything for black ppl , after the black power up rising , poor less educated black ppl started tuh get better jobs, but before that, poor black was relegated tuh menial jobs.
iz old ppl i used tuh hang with when i was home and i learned a lot of what the island was like before, so if i lying, then is after them, BC i got it directly from the horses mouth.
All yuh must remember that 1970 was 8yrs after the Brits left. Eric in charge tried to bring this "all a we is one society" without rocking the status quo. As a lil boy in st Joseph everything appeared to be normal. My world was from Wasa where I lived to St. Joseph RC. Blacks, Whites, Spanish, Fr. Creole, Portuguese, Indians, Chinese, Douglas(plent, plenty) all coexisting happily. All of us young boys playing together. Going theatre, swimming in the river. Go up the mountain for mango. Any time the trade winds carry the tassa drums. INDIAn WEDDING!!!! we find it. Happiness. The adults, drinking and talking and occasionally partying(carnival, parang, football, cricket, sportsday, harvest day). But the tides of change was taking places all along. Lil children like us did not see that, because adults protecting we from the realities.
The society in term of business/economic was still as pre-independence. The bank have all the whites and fair-skinned ppeople(no malice,please), East Indian always had businesses(supermarket, rumshopss galore and probably 90% of the agriculture. So were chinese and some Portuguese. Blacks had very few business. Seamstress, Tailor,shoemaker, market vendor and any kind ah wuk in the government.
But economically TT was in the doldrums. JA was better off than TT. Tourism and bauxite was king and queen. Most of the oil in TT was depleted. Trouble in the making. BP, Shell and Texaco wanted out. They did not want to invest in off shore. Now, where the gov't getting money to pay civil servants and sugar and farmers. Al that time black conciousness evolving in a militant form. NJAC with Geddes and them challenge the status quo. We want, black tellers, black carnival queen, black miss TT, etc,etc and BOOM. TT explode.
People on the whole were migrating to US much more, but the event caused many whites to migrate faster. For me the events in itself were bitter sweet. The black conciousness of the 70s was enlightening for me and many of the people around, but it made some whites, even close friends very uneasy. I did not show them any malice because they and their parents never, never shown me or our friends any malice. Those whites who remained live thru the 70's and adjusted to the new "world order". Some of their children had the biggest afros in town. imagine me an Afro can't even grow an afro as big as them. i jealous too bad. But what I go do. I grew to accept my picky head and moved on.
This new f---king generation is uncontrollable. I honestly want to know if they understand black conciousness. to me them doh care about that. That is old people thing. The number 1 priority for them is a gun and fast money. I don not have a solution for them.