ABSTRACT
When Jamaica held its first election as an independent nation, the Jamaica Labour Party had a reputation for representing the poor or the "small man", but it also traditionally had received the support, electoral and financial, of the wealthiest section of the society. The Rastafarians were clearly in the vanguard of racial consciousness in the early to mid-1960s. Some informants perceived that Black power philosophy was imported from the United States and "legitimated" Rastafari in Jamaica, yet the "Twenty-one Points" and the campaign of Ras Sam Brown predated the heightened activity of the American Black power movement. The period between the 1967 and 1972 elections saw a spread of the Black power movement throughout the Caribbean, influenced in large part by writers and activists in the United States. Given Jamaica's history of protest, it is hardly surprising that protest in modern Jamaica is expressed through the forms of religion and music.
