Maurice Bishop

Maurice Rupert Bishop was born in Aruba on the twenty-ninth of May 1944 to Grenadian parents. He read law in London at Gray's Inn and returned to Grenada in 1970 to practice. In 1973, with Unison Whiteman, he co-founded the New Jewel Movement — a left-nationalist organization that contested the rule of Sir Eric Gairy, Grenada's first Prime Minister and an increasingly erratic autocrat.

On the thirteenth of March 1979, while Gairy was in New York at the United Nations, the New Jewel Movement seized power in a bloodless coup. Bishop became Prime Minister of the People's Revolutionary Government — the first leftist government in the English-speaking Caribbean. He was thirty-four.

His four years in office produced an unusual record. Literacy rose from approximately fifty percent to eighty percent through a national literacy campaign organized on the Cuban model. Free secondary education was established for the first time in Grenadian history. Free medical care was extended to the entire population. The international airport at Point Salines — built with Cuban labor and financed in part through Cuba and Libya — was, the U.S. government claimed, a Soviet military project; declassified documents subsequently established that it was, as Bishop maintained, a tourism-oriented commercial airport.

In October 1983 a faction of the New Jewel Movement led by Bishop's deputy Bernard Coard placed him under house arrest. A crowd of supporters freed him on the nineteenth of October and accompanied him to Fort Rupert, where he attempted to restore his government. He was arrested again by army units loyal to Coard and executed by firing squad against the wall of the fort. He was thirty-nine.

The United States invaded Grenada six days later, on the twenty-fifth of October 1983. The New Jewel Movement was dissolved.

He is honored here as the Caribbean statesman who, for four years, governed.