Good morning to you all and thank you for this kind invitation to speak to you this morning.

Each year, the question arises about the relevance of the date 10th January 1967.   Amongst many of the members of my party who are younger than I am, some of them your age, the question is about the relevance of the date.  This is a strange place to be because the answer is so obvious and yet I can understand how those who now live in the world of relative comfort of today can find it difficult to understand how things were and why we should never allow it to happen again.

Prior to 1967, people of African descent had never run the Commonwealth of The Bahamas.  You take that for granted today but that was not the case before 1967.

You might say, that can never happen again and you may be right but one of the ways that we can ensure that it never happens again is to make sure that you know the history of the country in which you live.

Sir Durward Knowles, a white Bahamian and the Olympic gold medalist, who is the Co Chair with Sir Orville Turnquest of the One Bahamas Committee has apologized to black Bahamians on no less than four occasions for the treatment he said was meted out to Black Bahamians by some white Bahamians prior to 1967.  This was a profound act on his part.
 

His act was of the same importance as the apology of the British government for the slave trade.
In our history there are only two more important dates: Emancipation of the Slaves on 1st August 1834 and the Independence of our country on 10th July 1973.

You all experienced a profound electoral change last year in the United States of America.  Bahamians young and old were excited that a 46 year old African American by the name of Barrack Obama was elected President of the United States.  You saw the emotions which this excited in both whites and blacks in the U.S.  Some people had thought they would never see the day that the humanity of people of African descent would be acknowledged to the extent that it had by the election of Mr. Obama to the U.S. Presidency.

If that excited feelings of pride in you then imagine what the young Bahamians  of 1967 felt on the day that Lynden Pindling became the first man of African descent to head a government of The Bahamas.  We have had a Parliament since 1729.  We have been a settled colony since 1648.  The first man of colour Stephen Dillet was elected to office in 1834 and he had to try three times before they allowed him to take his seat in the House.  The country was run by people of European descent from its settlement in 1648 until 1967.

There were plenty of naysayers after it happened.  Some Bahamians like Stafford Sands actually picked up stakes and left the country so profound was the shock.

You know about Barrack Obama.  He was a comparatively young man at 46 when he became President.  He was the son of an immigrant to the United States.  He was the product of a mixed marriage but identified as black in his home country.  He was from the wrong side of the tracks.

Lynden Pindling was 36 years old.  He was short, dark and had a bad eye. He had to train himself out of stuttering.  He was the son of an immigrant, Jamaican policeman.  Indeed almost half the Cabinet of the 1967 government had at least one parent from somewhere else in the Caribbean.  Even in today’s society these things are used against you, in this comparatively enlightened age.

I still hear people talking about good hair.  We still have people trying to bleach their natural skin colour.

You can imagine then what was being said about him.  How no good black people were and nothing good could come out of a government headed by black people.  They were all proven wrong.

Martin Luther King said it best with his injunction it is not the colour of the skin but the content of your character than counts.

Michael Stevenson, who is the son of Cyril Stevenson, one of the founders of the PLP, delivered an essay yesterday at the Majority Rule Day Service.  In it, he said that  the question of whether or not the people of the country  trusted black governance was actually settled in the 1962 general election.  The PLP got the majority of the votes in that election by some 10,000 but lost the general election because there were more seats in the Family Islands than there were in New Providence where the bulk of the population lived.

In 1965 when Sir Lynden Pindling threw the Speaker’s mace out of the window, he did it as part of a demonstration by the PLP  to cause there to be a fairer distribution of the boundaries.  Once that issue was resolved so that New Providence got the majority of seats in the Assembly,  the election on 10th January 1967  went in favour of the PLP.

But the victory of 1967 was not just a victory for the PLP, it was the first time in the history of our country that  there was universal adult suffrage, meaning that there was one person, one vote.  Women got to vote for the first time in 1962.   Before 1967 only men and women with property up to certain value could vote.  You could vote as many times as you had property.  You could also vote as many times as you owned companies.  All of that disappeared in 1967.

Two years later in 1969, the PLP introduced an act to lower the voting age to 18.  Some are arguing today that the voting age needs to be lowered again to 16.

I was 13 years old in 1967 and I listened to the returns lying on the carpet in my parent’s home in Collins Ave.   It was a momentous occasion.  The crowds gathered on the streets and there was a massive celebration. I wish you could have been there. It was a feeling of enormous pride.  I did not get to feel that same way again until I stood outside the White House in Washington D.C. on the night Barrack Obama was  elected President of the United States.

10th January 1967 was an important day.  It is a day that made all of what you have today possible.  I ask you therefore not to lose this opportunity that you have.  You have a great mission to fulfill.  You must learn the history of our country and carry on its traditions.  You must go on to college and train yourselves to develop this country.

We are suffering today because not enough of you are  embracing the opportunity for a first class education.  It is never too early or too late to start to embrace education.  It will carry you everywhere and  enhance and enrich your life.

This school was put here by a great man Canon John Pugh because he saw the deficiencies in our educational system, a system that at one time had only one public high school the Government High School that admitted only 25 students per year and  that was that.  The first thing the majority rule government did was to start to give assistance to private highs school so that your grandparents could go to high school where they had been denied before.

History is not there for you to dwell on it.  It is  a teaching and learning tool.  What happened in the past may never happen again but one thing I know is that I have responsibility to teach you about the past so that when you see it again, you will know exactly what it means and who to deal with the challenges that face you.

I hope that you will find what I have said this morning interesting enough to ask your parents and grandparents more about the history of our country and what happened 43 years ago when  majority rule came to  our country.

Thank you once again for your kind invitation and I hope at some future point to be able to speak to you more directly about your concerns.

God bless you all!