Trevor Munroe

Trevor St George Munroe (born 10 December 1944) is a Jamaican political scientist, labour activist, and politician.

Biography

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Munroe attended high school at St. George's College (Class of 1959) and later studied political science at the University of the West Indies, Mona. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he obtained the D.Phil in political science for a landmark study of the process of decolonization in Jamaica between the 1930s and 1960s, published as The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization in 1972.^[1]

On his return to Jamaica in the late 1960s, he became involved in the political ferment that followed the Rodney Riots of 1968. Munroe founded a trade union, the University and Allied Workers' Union, initially to represent janitorial and service staff at the UWI. In 1974 he founded the Workers' Liberation League (WLL), an explicitly pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist organization. In 1978, working with Elean Thomas and others,^[2] He transformed the WLL into the Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ), and served as its general secretary.^[3]

The WPJ dissolved in 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[4] After the elections of 1997 Monroe was appointed an independent senator by Prime Minister Percival Patterson. In 2002, he was reappointed to the Senate as a member of the People's National Party.

References

1. The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization: Jamaica, 1944-62, Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1972.
2. Johnson, Buzz (31 July 2004). "Elean Thomas: Writer with a message of human rights". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 September 2011.
3. World Marxist review, Volume 30, Issues 1-6, p. 35.
4. Alexander, Robert J.; Parker, Eldon M. (September 2004). A History of Organized Labor in the English-speaking West Indies. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 56–57. ISBN 978-0-275-97743-6. Retrieved 31 August 2011.