Beyond the Postcard: Rastafari, the 1963 Coral Gardens Massacre, and Jamaica's Unfinished Debt

Walk through any airport gift shop in Montego Bay and Rastafari is everywhere: red, gold and green scarves, dreadlocked figurines, Bob Marley on every wall. Jamaica's tourism industry has turned the faith into a brand. Yet, as The Economist reported on October 22, 2026, the people who live that faith still face stigma, police suspicion and exclusion from the money their culture earns. One campaigner put it simply: the country uses Rastafari to "attract visitors" while Rastafarians remain on the margins.

That contradiction has a history, and the Jamaican state is now, slowly, being made to answer for it.

A Faith Born Under the Crown

Rastafari grew out of Kingston's poorest neighborhoods in the early 1930s. Inspired by Marcus Garvey's call to look to Africa, and by the 1930 coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen as Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, preachers such as Leonard Howell taught that Black people owed loyalty not to the British king but to an African sovereign. Colonial authorities treated that message as sedition. Howell was jailed for it.

In 1940 Howell founded Pinnacle, a self-sufficient Rastafari community in the hills of St. Catherine. Members farmed, governed themselves and lived outside the plantation economy. Police raided Pinnacle repeatedly and destroyed it in 1954, scattering its people into the yards and shantytowns of west Kingston. From the start, the faith's crime was independence.

"Bad Friday" at Coral Gardens

Jamaica became independent on August 6, 1962. Eight months later, on Holy Thursday, April 11, 1963, a dispute over land near a gas station at Coral Gardens, outside Montego Bay, ended in violence that left several people dead, including police officers. The response of the new national government, led by Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante, was collective punishment. Police and soldiers swept the island. Rastafarians were rounded up, beaten, tortured, jailed and forcibly shorn of their locks. Survivors remember the order as "bring in all Rastas, dead or alive." Rastafari call it "Bad Friday."

Coral Gardens matters because it was not a colonial crime. It was carried out by a Black-led, newly sovereign state against Black citizens whose faith rejected the old order. It showed that independence did not end the colonial habits of policing.

From Apology to Land

For more than fifty years the survivors waited. In 2015 Jamaica's Public Defender issued a report on the events and recommended an apology and compensation. On April 4, 2017, Prime Minister Andrew Holness apologized in Parliament on behalf of the state and announced a trust fund for survivors. The State Department's religious-freedom reports have since recorded payments from that fund.

Then, on Good Friday, April 3, 2026, Deputy Prime Minister Horace Chang handed land titles in Albion, St. James, to the Rastafari Coral Gardens Benevolent Society as restitution, according to the Jamaica Information Service. The land is meant for elder care and community development. It is one of the clearest examples anywhere in the Americas of a government returning land to a community it once brutalized.

The New Front: Who Owns the Culture?

Apology and land are not the end of the claim. Rastafari campaigners now press three demands:

• Cultural property. Activists want legal protection for Rastafari symbols, music and language, and a share of the profits when companies sell them.
• Cannabis equity. Jamaica decriminalized small amounts of ganja in 2015 and allowed sacramental use, but licensed growers are often well-funded firms, not the Rastafari farmers who were jailed for decades for the same plant.
• Legal recognition. The Rastafari Mansions and Organisations have argued that Jamaican law still does not name Rastafari in a way that addresses its specific history of discrimination.

The movement's own diversity, many "mansions" with no single leader, makes negotiating harder. But the direction is clear.

Two Kinds of Repair

Caribbean reparations are usually discussed as a claim against Europe: CARICOM's Ten-Point Plan, and the protests that met King Charles in the Bahamas this month. Coral Gardens shows a second claim, made against post-colonial states that kept colonial methods. Both demand the same thing: that those who profited from harm, or carried it out, pay for it. Jamaica has shown that repair is possible. It has not yet shown it is complete.

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