chief minister of Barbados (1948–1958); premier of Barbados (1954–1958); and prime minister of the West Indian Federation (1958–1962), was born on 28 April 1898 in Government Hill, Barbados. The third of seven children born to Fitz Herbert and Rosa Adams (née Turney), Adams attended St. Giles’ Primary and later Harrison College. In 1918 Adams was awarded the Barbados Scholarship, which enabled him to attend Oxford University to study law. At Oxford, he regularly participated in political debates and became a member of the Liberal Party there. He campaigned for the Liberal candidate Frank Gray in 1922–1923 and canvassed for C. B. Fry in 1924. He returned to Barbados in 1925. Adams met and eventually married Grace Thorne in 1929 One year later she gave birth to their only child John Michael Geoffrey Adams otherwise known as Tom Adams prime minister of ...
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Adams, Grantley Herbert
Shani Roper
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Anthony, Kenny Davis
A. L. Dawn French
was born on 8 January 1951 at Riviere Doree, a community in the southeast section of the island. He was one of nine boys of David William Barnard and Andrazine Anthony, better known as (and officially known as) Lucy Rosemond, who hailed from Saltibus. They also had two girls, both of whom died in infancy.
Anthony grew up in the south of the island, in the villages of Degatierre and River Dorée. His education started at the River Dorée Anglican Combined School, but was interrupted when he moved to the nearby island of St. Vincent. From 1959 to 1963 he attended the Kingstown Preparatory School in the capital, Kingstown. In 1963 he returned to Saint Lucia and attended the Laborie Boys School for one year; in 1964 he moved to the Vieux Fort Secondary School. Upon graduation in 1968 he worked at the business house of Minvielle and Chastanet ...
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Hunter, Billy
Jason Philip Miller
attorney and professional sports union representative, was born George William Hunter in Camden, New Jersey, but was forthwith sent away by his mother to be raised by her parents, John and Loretta Holmes, in what was then Delaware Township (later Cherry Hill). Hunter attended local schools, where he showed an athletic inclination and played football and baseball, among other sports (four letters in high school). In 1955 his little league baseball squad reached the Little League Baseball World Series with Hunter on the mound. He matriculated to Syracuse University, where he was an accomplished running back and captain of the football Orange, and helped lead the team to a 1964 Sugar Bowl appearance only to be defeated by Louisiana State University. He graduated in 1965, looking forward to a professional sports career.
Hunter anticipated being taken early in the 1965 National Football League NFL draft but an ...
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Johnson, Henry “Hank”
Charles Rosenberg
activist, founding member of the National Negro Congress and the International Workers Order, and organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), was best known as assistant national director of the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, centered in Chicago.
Accounts of Johnson's life prior to 1932 rely on the transcript of a 1937 Works Progress Administration interview. He was born and lived until the age of nine in a rural area of Texas between the Colorado and Brazos rivers. The WPA account records his birthplace as Siblo, which may be phonetic for Cibolo, at the time an isolated rural town outside of San Antonio. Johnson recalled being closer to the Gulf of Mexico and “seventy five miles from the Louisiana state line,” but both rivers reach the Gulf about 150 miles from Port Arthur. Even the year he was born is unknown.
He recalled being one of eight boys with ...
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Ramos Antonini, Ernesto
Carlos Dalmau
Ernesto Ramos Antonini was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. He started his public career as a labor lawyer defending the rights of Puerto Rican workers. In the early 1940s, he successfully represented the General Confederation of Workers of Puerto Rico (GCW), the union that represented the Sugar workers in important labor cases, and lobbied for the approval of labor-relations laws. He later became secretary of foreign relations for the GCW and established ties with other labor organizations in the United States and abroad. He was a relentless advocate of the unification of the Puerto Rican labor movement, which at the time was badly fragmented.
As a politician, Antonini stood out for his superb public speaking and principled public service. One of the founders and leaders of the Popular Democratic Party, he worked side by side with the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín in the ...
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Ramos-Antonini, Ernesto
Ernesto Morales-Ramos
was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, on 24 April 1898, just before the US invasion of the island at the outset of the Spanish-American War. Ramos was the youngest of six children of Federico Ramos-Escalera, a well-known musician and composer, and Rosa Antonini-Danseau. Shortly after he was born, his family moved to Ponce, Puerto Rico, a small city in the south with deeply entrenched racial and economic divisions. Ramos-Antonini’s father gave music lessons to the children of some of the city’s elite for only 25 cents an hour, and formed a musical ensemble with his children, in which the young Ernesto would play the violin, piano, and even the bass saxhorn to make ends meet.
Ramos-Antonini studied law at the University of Puerto Rico, graduating with honors in 1922 Having been born and raised in extreme poverty he managed to pay for his studies by selling charcoal door ...
