Clotil Walcott and Black Power in Trinidad and Tobago

This post is part of our forum on “Black Women’s Activism in the African Diaspora.” 

In June 1984 Trinidadian labor organizer Clotil Walcott traveled to London to address an international gathering of feminist activists at the conference “Women Count—Count Women’s Work.” She told attendees, “Women everywhere pay a cruel price for unpaid servitude in the global kitchen. We pay with poverty, overwork, dependence on men and some of us pay with our lives.” Turning to the local context of her Caribbean birthplace, she added, “the working class women in Trinidad and Tobago are facing divisions of classism and careerism in the women’s movement, and on the other hand the sexual division of labor.”

Walcott’s activism represents an overlooked dimension of international struggles for Black Power—working-class Black women’s efforts to promote racial pride, autonomy, and women’s liberation. With some notable exceptions, narratives of Black Power—especially in the United States—often do not center labor activism. They also point to a decline in organizing by the 1980s, as many groups were riven by factional disputes, members’ incarcerations, and government repression. Exploring the career of Walcott into the 1990s offers an alternative perspective. She worked in a poultry factory in Arima, Trinidad, while balancing roles in the National Union of Government and Federated Workers and the Trinidadian Black Power movement, as well as founding her own labor union.

She was in her forties and a mother to five children when she began self-publishing pamphlets on women’s rights and labor issues in Trinidad in the late 1960s, challenging the view that Black Power involved a significant generational divide between younger and older activists. Her activism encompassed labor organizing, struggles for the rights of domestic workers, and fighting against sexual violence, all the while critiquing sexism and classism in activist movements and unions. “We need a new economic order which recognizes that the profits of the military-industrial complex are as high as they are because women are not paid for our work in the home, and are paid badly for our work outside . . . power to the sisters and therefore to the working class internationally,” she said in the same 1984 speech at the London conference. This broad, internationalist perspective is worth remembering today during a moment of revitalized independent labor organizing in the United States, especially among workers at fast food chains and corporations like Amazon.

Clotil Walcott was born in St. Joseph, Trinidad, in 1925, a decade prior to the wave of militant labor strikes that reverberated across the British Caribbean in 1937 and 1938. These strikes, which drew on the organizing of women members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, challenged the inequalities of British colonialism and planted the seeds of anticolonial nationalist movements that flourished in the 1940s. The achievement of formal “flag independence” in many Caribbean islands, including Trinidad and Jamaica in 1962, left intact many economic structures of British colonialism, such as the dominance of foreign business interests. These inequalities were particularly pronounced in Trinidad during the prime ministership of historian-turned-politician Eric Williams from 1962 until his death in office in 1981. As a scholar best known for the seminal Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and as a nationalist politician, Williams offered strident critiques of British colonialism and the influence of the United States since World War II through its control of a naval base in Chaguaramas, Trinidad. According to some accounts, Williams maintained a “commitment to gender equality” and support for women members of his People’s National Movement from its founding in 1956. However by the late 1960s, the PNM had imposed a series of repressive measures, including legislation to limit labor strikes and bans on leftist and labor-oriented literature deemed “subversive.” In 1965, the government placed the Trinidadian-born leftist CLR James under house arrest for six weeks. Two years later it banned Stokely Carmichael from re-entering his birth country in the wake of his call for “Black Power” and his international travels to London and Havana. Opposition to the PNM and Williams, despite his status as the first Trinidadian leader of African descent, culminated in a mass protest movement beginning in February 1970 that demanded “Black Power” in Trinidad.

In 1969 Clotil Walcott joined the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), which emerged as a key challenger to the Williams government during the 1970 uprising. NJAC began as a student activist group but quickly grew into a coalition uniting students, militant labor unions, community organizers, and radical academics from the University of the West Indies. In the first issue of its journal East Dry River Speaks in 1969, NJAC proclaimed itself part of a global movement of “our black oppressed brothers of the Third World” challenging systems of neocolonial governance. NJAC argued that its sense of “Black Power” applied to both Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians—descendants of Indians who emigrated to the island to work as indentured servants beginning in the mid-nineteenth century—as “oppressed and dispossessed people.”  While NJAC’s leadership was all-male until the early 1970s, some early essays, such as by member Deborah Allen, noted the burdens of “our black sisters who do the domestic duties of these white people . . . [who] are treated a little better than slaves.” Walcott’s commitment to the particular position of women workers deepened when she left NJAC in 1972 and founded her own independent labor union, the National Union of Domestic Employees (NUDE) two years later. NUDE grew out of Walcott’s frustrations with mainstream labor organizing and male-led activist groups such as NJAC. In a 1979 May Day speech, she reflected that “in time, the working class woman will, through experience rather than education, learn that she has been taken for a ride,” and will begin forming organizations that are “no longer waiting for leadership of the men.” Walcott noted that NUDE represented workers that were not represented by other unions, including fast food workers, cooks, chauffeurs, seamstresses, and babysitters.

Walcott’s commitment to challenging male chauvinism also extended to a focus on sexual and domestic violence facing women in the Caribbean and worldwide. This emphasis on raising awareness of sexual violence grew when she met London-based activists Selma James and Wilmette Brown—a former member of the US Black Panther Party—at a conference held at the Hague in 1980 and joined their International Wages for Housework Campaign. With their organization based in London’s King’s Cross neighborhood, James and Brown focused on fostering a feminist movement that would provide protections for sex workers, women with disabilities, lesbian women, and non-white women. “Rape does not only occur in the street, but in the home also . . . women have been emigrating, even committing suicide because of the violence of husbands and boyfriends,” Walcott told attendees at a 1982 conference organized by the Wages for Housework Campaign. The campaign’s proposals for wages for household work was controversial. The activist Angela Davis noted in a 1981 book that unlike demands for a guaranteed income or longstanding organizing by domestic workers in the United States, demanding wages for household work “does little in the way of providing a long-range solution to the problem of women’s oppression, neither does it substantively address the profound discontent of contemporary housewives.” For Walcott, however, an alliance with Wages for Housework aligned with her core goal of ensuring that women’s work in Trinidad—whether inside or outside the household—would be recognized legally and paid equally to that performed by men. Walcott also focused on legal campaigning for changes to Trinidadian laws governing women’s work. After years of organizing, the Trinidadian government adopted a minimum wage for “household assistants” in 1982 that included provisions for a forty four-hour work week, and maternity and vacation leave. In 1995 the government also adopted a law counting “unremunerated work” as part of its national statistics, fulfilling one of Walcott’s longtime goals. Historian Rhoda Reddock notes that this act became a model for language included in the Beijing Declaration adopted during the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.

Clotil Walcott’s activism illustrates the complexity of movements that took on the mantle of “Black Power” outside the United States. In her work as a labor organizer, a grassroots women’s rights activist, and part of NJAC in Trinidad, Walcott challenged male chauvinism and fought for a broader definition of what constituted “work” in a fraught social and political context. Remembering her work helps deepen our conception of Black Power as an international movement that intertwined struggles against racial oppression and neocolonialism with labor and feminist movements.