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The Classics

PHOTO FLASHBACK: West Kingston mass evictions – July 1966

Published:Friday | July 16, 2021 | 12:50 AMA Digital Integration & Marketing production
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DOWN IN THE SWAMP sinks one of the two bulldozer that has been demolishing Shanty Towns at Industrial terrace and Foreshore Road.
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WHERE NOW: An infant girl stares blankly atop her mother’s suitcase in the May Pen Cemetery, two days after their Industrial Terrace shack had been razed. She was one of several children who slept unsheltered in the cemetery. In the background are tombstones.
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WESTWARD: A shack is moved from the Foreshore Road shanty town to an alternative location further west, as bulldozers flattened others for burning.
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Still Burning: Huge black mushrooms of smoke cover blazing squatter shacks in a swampy area of the Foreshore Road shanty town, where demolition operations were completed on July 13, 1966.
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The scenes of persons looking on as the only homes they knew burned to the ground is chilling, even if the reason for the government’s decision to flatten the Shanty Towns of West Kingston was understood. A particularly harrowing depiction can be seen in an image where a child sits on a suitcase. The image smacks of hopelessness and brings home the desperation the homeless families must have felt. 

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