You wouldn’t have guessed he was in enemy territory. Addressing 2,500 people at New York’s Hunter College one June night in 1983, Maurice Bishop won the crowd over with ease, covering everything from the Palestinian struggle to Ronald Reagan’s Medicaid cuts. At one point, the 39-year-old prime minister of Grenada described a “secret report” from the US state department warning that the revolution he fronted was even worse for US interests than the Cuban and Nicaraguan ones.
Why? Because its leaders were young, black, socialist and, most crucially, English-speaking. The thousands of people who chanted: “Forward ever! Backward never!” with Bishop on that night showed the outsized importance that events on the tiny island of Grenada had taken on.
