In the sto­ry of mod­ern Trinidad and To­ba­go, few mo­ments car­ry as much po­lit­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal weight as the Black Pow­er Rev­o­lu­tion of 1970.

It was not on­ly a street up­ris­ing or a stu­dent protest move­ment, but it was al­so, as many par­tic­i­pants de­scribed it, a con­fronta­tion with the deep­est struc­tures of colo­nial so­ci­ety in­tact af­ter in­de­pen­dence.

For those un­fa­mil­iar, the Black Pow­er Rev­o­lu­tion took place be­tween Feb­ru­ary and April 1970. It be­gan with stu­dent-led protests in­flu­enced by the Black Pow­er move­ment in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, par­tic­u­lar­ly at the St Au­gus­tine cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, and quick­ly grew in­to a wider na­tion­al move­ment in­volv­ing labour unions, trade dis­putes, and calls for so­cial and eco­nom­ic re­form. Demon­stra­tions es­ca­lat­ed in March, with mass march­es in Port-of-Spain and in­creas­ing in­dus­tri­al ac­tion, in­clud­ing strikes in the oil and sug­ar sec­tors. Ten­sions peaked on April 21, 1970, when then prime min­is­ter Dr Er­ic Williams de­clared a state of emer­gency, or­der­ing the ar­rest of sev­er­al lead­ers of the Na­tion­al Joint Ac­tion Com­mit­tee (NJAC) and oth­er ac­tivists, while a mutiny al­so broke out with­in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Reg­i­ment at Teteron Bar­racks. The mil­i­tary quick­ly moved to re­gain con­trol, and the up­ris­ing was con­tained over the fol­low­ing days, mark­ing the end of the un­rest.