As we commence the celebration of We Gathering 2020 – a year to rediscover who we Barbadians really are as a people, to recommit to our core values and to meaningfully deepen the connection between our island nation and its Diaspora – it behoves us to reflect on some of the significant contributions made by heroic “Diaspora Bajans” to the countries that they migrated to and how those contributions ultimately redounded to the benefit of their Barbadian homeland.
And since We Gathering 2020 is commencing in the parish of St Lucy in the month of the centenary of the birth of the Rt Excellent Errol Walton Barrow – a native of the parish of St Lucy – what better historical personality could there be to start with than the father of Errol Walton Barrow – Bishop Reginald Grant Barrow!
Early years
Reginald Grant Barrow was born on the 24th of September 1889 in the island of St Vincent to Barbadian parents, Robert G Barrow and Frances Barrow (nee Adams).
It is reported that Robert G. Barrow had served in the British Army in Jamaica and parts of Africa before assuming duties as Warden of the prison in St Vincent.
However, soon after Reginald’s birth, Mr Barrow retired and took his family back home to Barbados, where they resided in the parish of St George in a sturdy home which Mr Barrow had specially built to withstand the destructive force of any hurricane – the building which today serves as Rectory of the St Augustine Anglican church in St George parish.
And so it was in Barbados that Reginald received an education of such quality that in 1909 – at the age of 20 years – he was able to gain admittance to Codrington College to study for the holy Ministry and entry into the ranks of the clergy of the Anglican church.
This was no mean achievement for a young black man in the oppressive, racist society of early 20th century Barbados – a British colony in which a white racist planter/merchant oligarchy still ruled the roost and maintained a semi-feudal society in which blacks were systematically denied opportunities for social advancement.
Upon successful completion of his studies and receipt of the Licentiate in Theology, young Rev. Reginald Grant Barrow was appointed assistant to the Rector of the St George parish church, at about the same time that he was making his way to the northernmost parish of St Lucy and taking as his bride Ruth Alberta O’Neal of Friendship Plantation – the little sister of Dr Charles Duncan O’Neal (subsequently Rt. Excellent Charles Duncan O’Neal national hero of Barbados).
However, it was not long before young Rev Barrow was appointed to his very own parish in the neighbouring island of St Vincent – the land of his birth and the territory that became the birthplace of the first of his and Ruth’s five children – Graham (born in 1915).
The St Lucy saga
After a short stint in St Vincent, Rev Barrow returned to Barbados, where he was appointed curate at the St Lucy Parish Church, leading him to take up residence with his small family at “Fairholm”, St Lucy, in one of the O’Neal family properties – a home that, in 1916, became the birthplace of Nita – the Barrow’s second child, and a future Governor General of Barbados.
And almost immediately, the young priest began to shake up the parish of St Lucy and the Anglican church of Barbados as well!
Indeed, it soon emerged that the new St Lucy parish priest was equipped with a deep social conscience, possessed an acute awareness of the race and class inequalities of Barbadian society and was quite willing to use the pulpit of the church to challenge the prevailing social order and demand a better deal for the impoverished black masses of the country.
The preaching of the “radical” young priest so disturbed the establishment of the Anglican church, that it was not long before the St Lucy pulpit was taken away from him by an appointment to the Alleyne School in the parish of St Andrew as Headmaster of the school.
St Andrew interlude
And so, off to St Andrew went the young priest, to take up not only the headmastership of Alleyne School but also a concomitant appointment as Secretary of the St Andrew Vestry – the parish Council that, among other things, administered the “Sir John Gay Alleyne legacy fund” that financed the Alleyne School. (It should be noted here that when Rev Barrow assumed the headmastership of Alleyne, the school was struggling – with a roll of only six “poor white” students.) And once again, the intrepid priest almost immediately made a mark on his new parish of St Andrew!
You see, the young Alleyne School headmaster – having discovered that the white planters who populated the St Andrew Vestry were in the habit of illegally dipping into the Alleyne legacy funds to carry out repairs to the roads to their plantations – felt sufficiently emboldened to scour the primary schools in St Andrew and to select some 40 of the brightest black senior primary school students and admit them to the Alleyne School!
In addition, Headmaster Barrow started a so-called “private division” of the Alleyne School for girls – some 20 in number – all of whom were taught by his wife, Mrs Ruth O’Neal Barrow, a graduate of Queen’s College.
Doing God’s work in St Croix
In the midst of these progressive developments, the Anglican church authorities in 1919 suddenly transferred Rev Barrow out of Barbados to the island of St Croix in the United States Virgin Islands! And according to Barbadian historian, Dr Pedro Welch, there was some suspicion that the transfer was engineered because the ecclesiastical authorities had become anxious about Rev Barrow’s militancy.
Rev Barrow therefore became a member of the “Bajan Diaspora” when, in 1919, he took up his post as Priest at the “Holy Cross Episcopal Church” at Estate Lower Love in St Croix. (At that time, the Rev and Mrs Barrow were the parents of three infant children, and Mrs Barrow, who was pregnant and carrying a fourth child, remained in Barbados long enough to give birth to “Errol” at the O’Neal family home in St Lucy on 21st January 1920, before joining her husband in St Croix).
Needless to say, it was the same socially conscious, “socialist” priest who had so disturbed the Barbadian powers that be that assumed pastoral duties over the predominantly black and impoverished working class congregation at the Holy Cross Episcopal Church in St Croix. And it really could not have been otherwise, for the then colony of St Croix – which the American government had purchased from Denmark in 1917 and placed under the administration of US naval officers – was a former slave plantation society that was very similar in racial and social structure to Barbados.
By the time Rev Barrow made his entrance onto the scene in St Croix, the local freedom-fighter and champion of the people – one David Hamilton Jackson – had already established the St Croix Labour Union (1913) and the crusading Herald Newspaper (1915), and was waging a fierce battle for civil rights and workers’ rights. It therefore did not take long for Rev Barrow to join forces with David Hamilton Jackson, and to support the latter’s righteous campaign from the pulpit of the Holy Cross church.
Indeed, Rev Barrow couldn’t help but be aware of the extremely poor working conditions of the majority of his flock, and he therefore not only spoke out from the pulpit, but he also began organizing the people to emancipate themselves through the formation of cooperatives and the undertaking of collective ventures to purchase land for themselves.
Inevitably, these activities brought the crusading Barbadian priest into confrontation with both the Episcopalian authorities in the US Virgin Islands and with certain elements within his own Holy Cross church, leading ultimately to a division in the church – a division that ended with the Barbadian Reverend being dismissed from his priestly post by the Virgin Islands church authorities in the year 1920.
But when Rev Barrow was forced to walk out of the Holy Cross Episcopal Church, many of the church members who respected and supported the progressive stance of their priest walked out with him! So, the Barbadian priest now had a devoted Anglican flock but no church building within which to worship. And, in his characteristically bold and creative manner, Rev Barrow responded by worshipping God with his congregation under a tamarind tree in an area known as “Estate Grove Place”!
This state of affairs continued for some time until, on the recommendation of David Hamilton Jackson, Rev Barrow and his members decided to establish a new church altogether, and they therefore applied to and were accepted into the “African Methodist Episcopal Church“ of the United States of America, before going on to establish the very first AME church of the US Virgin Islands – the still existing St Luke AME church.
Furthermore, the Barbadian priest also intensified his support for David Hamilton Jackson’s pro-worker campaign by assuming duties as Editor of the Herald Newspaper, and reinforcing the newspaper’s crusade against the deplorable and inhuman conditions associated with the plantation system in St Croix.
One can only imagine the consternation that this bold and righteous priest was causing among the ranks of both the new American colonial overlords of the Virgin Islands and the elite of the traditional Danish plantocracy of the islands!
Indeed, it was only a matter of time before they would act decisively to remove the danger that this “foreign” prophetic presence represented. And so, the hammer eventually came down in the year 1922 with the issuing of a “Deportation Order“ against the “foreign” Barbadian priest.
Deportation meant that Rev Barrow was separated from his wife and five infant children – one of whom had been born in St Croix – and unceremoniously shipped out of the US Virgin Islands. However, rather than return to Barbados and a racist Barbadian Anglican church that had already rejected him, the Barbadian priest, with the help of friends, made his way via Bermuda to New York City in the United States of America.
Regrettably, this separation turned out to be a devastating blow from which the Barrow family never fully recovered. Mrs Barrow and the children remained in St Croix for a few years (with young Errol – a future Prime Minister of Barbados – receiving his early childhood education at the Danish Preparatory School in St Croix) before finally deciding that it would be better to return to Barbados so that the children could receive a higher quality education and have the support of the financially secure O’Neal extended family. And sadly, Reginald and Ruth’s marriage ultimately ended some years later in divorce.
The New York years
Rev Barrow, for his part, found himself – an ordained Anglican priest – in the racially segregated United States of America of 1922, and discovered to his dismay that the US Episcopal church was riddled with anti-black racial discrimination.
It was this discovery that led the Barbadian priest to finally and totally abandon the Anglican or Episcopal Church, and to instead, join the newly established, black conscious “African Orthodox Church“ (AOC) – a religious organization that had been founded by Bishop George A Mc Guire, the Antigua-born former Chaplain General of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
By the year 1925, the then 36-year-old New York-based Reginald Grant Barrow was consecrated a Bishop – the fourth Bishop – of the African Orthodox Church, and he ultimately rose to the lofty position of Archbishop of the African Orthodox Church of North America.
Reginald Grant Barrow resided in the USA for over 40 years, and during that extensive period he continued to take an avid interest in Barbadian and wider West Indian affairs, and supported the Caribbean freedom struggle in many important ways. He was a friend and confidant of such pivotal New York-based Barbadian/Caribbean activists as Richard B. Moore and Reginald Pierrepoint, and supported the efforts of these revolutionary “away-men” to use their base in New York City to facilitate the Caribbean struggle for popular enfranchisement, decolonization, federation and independence.
Two specific contributions that he made to the struggle of the masses of black people of the Caribbean – and indeed of the USA – was his undertaking of a written analysis of the social, political and economic conditions of the West Indian people for US President Franklin Roosevelt (all in an effort to promote a progressive US policy towards the Caribbean), and his support of Richard B. Moore in the latter’s historic (and largely successful) campaign against use of the demeaning term “negro” as a designation for black or African people.
During his years of stewardship in the USA, Bishop Barrow entered into a second marriage in 1933 with a Muriel Ives – a devout member of the Baha’i Faith. This union produced a son who was also named “Reginald Grant Barrow”, but sadly, this marriage also eventually ended in divorce.
Retirement in Barbados
In the mid 1960s, Archbishop Barrow’s life underwent a fundamental change. Not only did he retire from service as a cleric in the African Orthodox Church, but he also made a permanent return to his native land and married for a third time — this time to Elizabeth Elise Ifill (also known as Madam Ifill), a legendary Barbadian social worker, educator and pioneer of the Arts in Barbados.
Needless to say, the Barbados that he returned to in the mid 1960s was a very different country from the one he had left in 1919 – not least because of the tremendous work that had been performed by his son, the Rt Excellent Errol Walton Barrow, the “father” of Barbados’ Independence.
Though officially retired, the former Archbishop wished to remain actively involved in holy Ministry and since there was no African Orthodox Church in Barbados, he turned to the local Roman Catholic Church and offered his services to that church. As a result, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church as a Priest in 1970 and was assigned to a parish.
And, not merely content to serve his beloved Barbados as a Priest, the former Alleyne School headmaster also returned to his vocation as an educator, and even though he was in his 80s, served as a teacher at Louis Lynch’s Modern High School before that school’s closure in 1978.
Reginald Grant Barrow died in his native Barbados on the 9th of June 1980 at the age of 90 years. His name is still remembered and revered in progressive circles in both St Croix and New York City, and should be in his native Barbados as well!
One of the principal objectives of We Gathering 2020 is to rediscover who we Barbadians really are as a people and to recommit to our core values. And if we are to do so with any measure of integrity and success, it will be essential that we examine very carefully and take to heart the many lessons and insights wrapped up in the life story of one of the greatest sons of this nation — Reginald Grant Barrow.
