James Carmichael Smith | |
---|---|
Born | 1852 Bahamas |
Died | 1919 London, England |
Nationality | Bahamian |
James Carmichael Smith (1852 - 1919) [1] was a colonial civil servant in the Bahamas and Sierra Leone, founder of the Freeman newspaper, and a member of the Bahamas' Legislative Assembly.
James Carmichael Smith was born in the Bahamas in 1852, the son of an Englishman from Yorkshire and a black Bahamian mother. He was named after the governor of the Bahamas, James Carmichael Smyth. [2] He attended both Boys Central School and Nassau Grammar School and spent almost 5 years at sea. [1]
In 1887, Smith founded the pro-black, anti-establishment newspaper Freeman. [2] [1] He was a market socialist and egalitarian who published numerous books and writings promoting these views during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
He served as postmaster in the Bahamas from 1889-1896. [1] He served in the Legislative Assembly from 1882-1896 representing the Western District of New Providence. [1]
In 1896, he was appointed Assistant Postmaster of Sierra Leone, [1] making him very likely one of a small number of people of colour serving in the British Colonial Service.
He was a Pan Africanist and a strong defender of Black people, made evident in the lengthy exchange he had with the Englishman John Gardiner in 1886 after the latter referred to Black Bahamians as "lazy and good for nothing". He also supported Caribbean integration, promoting the idea of federating the West Indies and charting their own path to prosperity. He was a strong supporter of the Empire but believed in the Self Governance of the British West Indies as a federal province within the Empire.
James Carmichael Smith was among the earliest Bahamians to express Pan African views. In a speech, he gave on 1 August 1887, he focused on the importance of Africa as a central point in which all Black people should unify in the cause of its development: "let us endeavour to become more and more united, and let the children of Africa throughout the Western Hemisphere remember Fatherland or Motherland, let them remember Africa". Continuing this idea he said: "Let us use Africa as the unifying point, and attempt to organize the League of Africa, which should aim to include every human being having a drop of African blood in his veins of which he is not ashamed". He continues: "a league which, after inheriting the blessings of the latest civilization, would undertake the task of carrying or sending those blessings to the people of Africa by the hands of her own children; which would endeavour to teach the unenlightened people of Africa all the arts and manners of civilization, and so fit them to become citizens of free and independent nationalities. This is the special, the high duty of the enlightened children of Africa." [3]
Smith was among the earliest in the Caribbean to express Afro-Caribbean leftism. In 1892, he published The Distribution Of The Produce, a book that criticized the wage competitive system and promoted a wage co-operative system through profit-sharing. He believed the former gave power to one class of people over the other and argued that civilization should be moving in the direction of equality. He published more works in the early 1900s promoting Market Socialism: "Money and profit-sharing; or, The double standard money system" in 1908 and "Abundance and hard times" in 1908, just to name a few. His views were Egalitarian and predate similar views held by the Trinidadian, C. L. R. James.[ citation needed ]
Smith retired to Jersey from Sierra Leone in 1914. [2] He subsequently moved to London, married, and had a daughter. [4] Smith died in London in 1919.
The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a country in North America. It is an island country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Atlantic Ocean. It contains 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and 88% of its population. The archipelagic state consists of more than 3,000 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, and is located north of Cuba and northwest of the island of Hispaniola and the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the U.S. state of Florida, and east of the Florida Keys. The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes The Bahamas' territory as encompassing 470,000 km2 (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space.
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.
Bahamian Americans are an ethnic group of Caribbean Americans of Bahamian ancestry. There are an estimated 56,797 people of Bahamian ancestry living in the US as of 2019.
Bahamian culture is a hybrid of African, European, and other cultures.
Sir Arthur Elibank Havelock, was a career British colonial governor, serving as Governor of Sierra Leone from 1880, of Natal, of Madras, of Ceylon from 1890 to 1895, and of Tasmania from 1901 to 1904.
Edward Wilmot Blyden was an Americo-Liberian educator, writer, diplomat, and politician who was primarily active in West Africa. Born in the Danish West Indies, he joined the waves of black immigrants from the Americas who migrated to Liberia. Blyden became a teacher for five years in the British West African colony of Sierra Leone in the early twentieth century. His major writing were on pan-Africanism which later became influential throughout West Africa, attracting attention in countries such as the United States as well. His ideas went on to influence the likes of Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah.
Afro-Caribbean leftism refers to left-wing political currents that have developed among various African-Caribbean communities in the Caribbean, the United States of America, France, Great Britain, or anywhere else they have chosen to settle.
James Carmichael Smith may refer to:
Afro-Bahamians are an ethnicity originating in The Bahamas of predominantly or partial native African descent. They are descendants of various African ethnic groups, many associated with the Bight of Biafra, kingdoms, the Oyo Empire, and the Kingdom of Kongo. According to the 2010 census, 92.7% of The Bahamas' population identifies as mixed African descent.
White Bahamians are Bahamian citizens of European ancestry, most of whom trace their ancestry back to England, Scotland and Ireland. Bahamians of European descent are sometimes called "Conchs", a term that is also applied to people of White Bahamian descent in Florida. White Bahamians were a majority in the 18th century, but now constitute less than 10% of the Bahamian population.
Sierra Leonean Americans are an ethnic group of Americans of full or partial Sierra Leonean ancestry. This includes Sierra Leone Creoles whose ancestors were African American Black Loyalists freed after fighting on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War. Some African Americans trace their roots to indigenous enslaved Sierra Leoneans exported to the United States between the 18th and early 19th century. In particular, the Gullah people of partial Sierra Leonean ancestry, fled their owners and settled in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands, where they still retain their cultural heritage. The first wave of Sierra Leoneans to the United States, after the slavery period, was after the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the American Community Survey, there are 34,161 Sierra Leonean immigrants living in the United States.
Henry Smeathman (1742–1786) was an English naturalist, best known for his work in entomology and colonial settlement in Sierra Leone.
Sir Leslie Probyn was an administrator for the British Empire.
For a history of Afro-Caribbean people in the UK, see British African Caribbean community.
Robert Smith FRCSE (1840–1885) was a Sierra Leonean medical doctor who served as an Assistant Colonial Surgeon in Sierra Leone during the late nineteenth century. Smith was the first African to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh after completing his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Francis Smith was a Sierra Leonean Puisne Judge in the Gold Coast. He was the second Sierra Leonean to qualify as a barrister after he passed the bar at Middle Temple on 26 January 1871.
The Sierra Leone Creole people are an ethnic group of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown. Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.2 percent of the population of Sierra Leone.
Sir Samuel Rowe was a British doctor and colonial administrator who was twice governor of Sierra Leone, and also served as administrator of the Gambia, governor of the Gold Coast and governor-general of the West Africa settlements. He was known for his ability to form pro-British relationships with the local people. He was in favour of a vigorous programme of expansion from the coast into the interior in response to French activity in the Sahel region, at times in opposition to Colonial Office policy.
The Colony and Protectorate of Sierra Leone was the British colonial administration in Sierra Leone from 1808 to 1961, part of the British Empire from the abolitionism era until the decolonisation era. The Crown colony, which included the area surrounding Freetown, was established in 1808. The protectorate was established in 1896 and included the interior of what is today known as Sierra Leone.
The Smith family is a Sierra Leone Creole family of English, Jamaican Maroon and Liberated African descent based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The Smiths were first-generation Sierra Leone Creoles of Gold Coast Euro-African and Caribbean origin who settled in Sierra Leone during the early 19th century. There are several descendants of the family in the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as in the Ghanaian cities of Accra and Cape Coast. Several members of the family were active in business, women's education, civil administration, the arts, medicine, poetry, the judiciary, cultural studies, Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial activism.