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The Mantle of Struggle
A Biography of Black Revolutionary Rosie Douglas
Rosie Douglas, former prime minister of Dominica, had a life unlike any other modern politician. After leaving home to study agriculture in Canada, he became a member of the young Conservatives, under the Canadian prime minister’s guidance. However, after he moved to Montreal to study political science his politics started to shift. By the late sixties he was an active civil rights supporter and when Black students in Montreal began to protest racism in 1969, he helped lead the sit-in. He was identified as a protest ringleader after the peaceful protest turned into a police riot, and served 18 months in prison.
After his deportation from Canada in 1976, having been named a danger to national security, Douglas participated in political movements around the world building global solidarity. He became a leader of the Libyan-based revolutionary group World Mathaba and supported Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Once back home in Dominica, he led the movement for Dominica’s full political independence from Great Britain, then served as a senator in the post-independence government, an MP, party leader, and finally prime minister.
Relying on family sources, interviews, newspaper articles, government documents, and Douglas’ own articles, letters, and speeches, Irving Andre has drawn a rich and riveting record of this important Black revolutionary.
Contributors
Irving Andre
Justice Irving Andre is the author of A Century of Dominican Cricket, Strangers in Suffisant: British West Indians in Curacao, and the biographies of Franklin Baron, Dominica’s first chief minister; Edward Oliver LeBlanc, Dominica’s first premier; and Dr. Desmond McIntyre, Dominica’s first surgeon. Between 1990 and 2002, Andre worked as a prosecutor for the Ontario Ministry of Labour, an assistant crown attorney in Brampton, Ontario, a criminal defence lawyer, and a vice-president of the Ontario Licence Appeals Tribunal. In 2002 he was appointed as a judge in the Ontario Court of Justice where he presided as the local administrative judge in the Region of Peel from 2010 to 2012. In 2012, Justice Andre was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice in Brampton, where he currently resides.
