Labour Day being just around the proverbial corner, we feel it is most timely to reveal that wheels are in motion for yet another edition of my book FREEDOM FIGHTERS, subtitled From Monk to Mazumbo.

This will be the fourth edition since the first was published in Britain in 1987 by Akira Press, Ltd.

It was a beautifully bound hard cover that received some scholarly reviews, resulting in it being snapped up by individuals, church librarians, scholars and historians universally.

Notably, the Rev John Brandon, who became an icon in the AME Church and President of Payne Theological Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio, and who was a former pastor of Allen Temple AME Church, Somerset hailed my effort. He called it a “spellbinding account of the universal drama of entrenched power versus the irresistible urge for freedom, profiling two individuals unable to ignore their passion for freedom, responding to intimidating injustice and bringing about a new day for generations unborn”.

His review chronicled also how the tradition of the oligarchy in Bermuda, though diminished, endured.

He wrote: “FREEDOM FIGHTERS is a history that goes beyond Bermuda with its universal story of how the black man has to fight against oppression. It is an exciting narrative on the struggle around two black expatriates, West Indian-born Dr Edgar Fitzgerald Gordon (Mazumbo) and American Charles Vinton Monk.

“Those two men led the masses of Bermuda against a racist oligarchy known as ‘The Forty Thieves’, bent on controlling all facets of Bermuda’s Twentieth Century economic, political and ecclesiastical affairs. Bermuda, a mere dot on the world map as FREEDOM FIGHTERS noted, assumed an international significance out of proportion to its size.

“Being Britain’s oldest self-governing colony, a strategic military base back in the day, 600 miles off the coast of North Carolina and approximately 1,000 miles north of the nearest Caribbean Island, its population dynamics always distinguished it from all other colonial territories except South Africa, with its predominately black majority and significantly large white minority.

“The first families, as ‘The Forty Thieves’, were powerful and feared. They held the black masses and poor whites in virtual economic thraldom until Dr Gordon succeeded in organising labour. First was the Bermuda Workers Association, the precursor of the Bermuda Industrial Union.”

It was such reviews that helped make my book a best seller. The first edition was snapped up, as I stated earlier, and the demand for second and third editions similarly followed.

There were other reviews I could quote from. The one I thought was most impactful was by Mr Calvin Smith, who was then the Government’s chief statistician. He later resigned that office to become a Member of Parliament for the Opposition Progressive Labour Party.

Mr Smith noted how the black church and black press from the earliest days of chattel slavery were the foremost channels in combating racism and economic exploitation, and how the oligarchs resorted to various subterfuges to evade their just responsibility.

Dr Gordon, in turn, was branded a racist troublemaker and one Governor, supposedly intending to be complimentary, described Dr Gorson as “an immigrant from Trinidad with a dynamic personality combined with skilful eloquence”.

That Governor contended Dr Gordon would help Bermuda more if he could be persuaded to direct his energies and cleverness towards teaching his followers good citizenship for greater responsibilities instead of instilling into them the wrong belief that the demands he (Mazubo) was making were to be had for the asking.

Responding, Dr Gordon noted he was only demanding justice, equal opportunity and fair play for all regardless of race, creed and colour.

Yours truly, this columnist and author thanked Mr Calvin Smith for his review back in the day, and has taken note of the current accentuated interest in FREEDOM FIGHTERS.

Consequently, as I stated in my opening sentence, the wheels are in motion for a fourth edition.