Open letter to Itafariama

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Re: Proposal to rename Lady Musgrave Road to Amy Jacques Garvey Road

Thank you for your insightful article, which helps bring important materials to light. I fully support your idea that we should use precious resources to honourably memorialise real places and incidents and expose any well-loved myths for what they are.

The charter under which the UWI was established and the role of the Visitor have been crucial to its ongoing prominence and success. Naming the main road retains those facts at top level memory, unless that annoying historical marker is to be reinterpreted and removed.

The connection between 38 Lady Musgrave Road, Somali Court, and the Garveys is documented in Mrs Garvey’s memoir, “Garvey & Garveyism”, as one of the several places she lived with her husband. She mentions that she was educated at Wolmer’s Girls’ School. UWI Prof Emerita Carolyn Cooper’s research on Lady Musgrave Road, published in her article “Digging up dirt on Lady Musgrave Road” on April 28, 2024, further sheds light on this topic of the name of the road. Jacques Garvey’s family’s origins from Jacques Road off Mountain View Road, the place where she grew up, and the local efforts to honour her memory should be supported in many ways as they are authentically connected to her development as a woman of substance.

PRIORITISE CLEANING, MAINTAINING

In the Corporate Area, several places have been purposefully named to honour individuals to aspects of pre-independence. Denham Town, Nuttall Hospital and Nannyville come to mind. If given the chance, I would prioritise cleaning and maintaining the resting place of 501 victims of the 1907 earthquake at Bumper Hall, Kingston. There are many such places in the capital and throughout the country that need such attention, and an argument could be given that reinvigorating our capital is better done by maintaining these physical places. Would it be a straw man argument to have a discussion on how much more the refurbishing of Kingston 12 tenement yards and repurposing of the Tower Street and Fort Augusta correctional facilities can have instead of the expansion of the art scape dedicated to those who knew those places?

Could you also highlight the state of the Zong monument in Black River, the People’s Museum in Spanish Town, the White Marl Taino Midden, and the Jamaica Railway Corporation locomotive in Wilton Gardens in future communications?

ROSEMARY RUM

Fellow history enthusiast