Domingo, Wilfred A.

DOMINGO, WILFRED A. (1889–1968). A Jamaican nationalist and journalist, Wilfred A. Domingo was associated with a series of West Indian-led movements as well as with the Socialist Party in Harlem, and participated in the publication of the Negro World, Emancipator, Messenger, and Crusader.

Domingo was born in Kingston, where as a teenager he became active in Sandy Cox’s National Party. His father Francisco Domingo was Hispanic, and his mother Alice was a Jamaican from the parish of St. Thomas. Domingo was instrumental in shaping the young Marcus Garvey’s ideas on race consciousness. He introduced Garvey to the writings of Edward Blyden, and later fostered Garvey’s fledgling political career in New York by introducing him to leading activists.

Domingo spent much of his life resident in the United States, where he first migrated as a young man to study medicine in Boston in 1912. By 1913 he had moved to New York and turned to speaking engagements advocating constitutional reforms for Jamaica, trade unionism, changes to the civil service system, expansion of voting rights, and greater independence. In 1917 he formed the British Jamaican Benevolent Association. He became the first associate editor of the Negro World, but his class-conscious editorials soon drew Garvey’s ire. Abandoning Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1919, Domingo continued as a member of the Socialist Party’s speakers’ bureau. taught at the party’s Rand School in New York, founded his own socialist publication, The Emancipator and worked for A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger.

Concerned with anti-West Indian bias, Domingo became active in fellow journalist Cyril Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood and Crusader magazine and was invited by Alain Locke to write about West Indians in New York for the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” The essay was reprinted as “Gift of the Black Tropics” in Locke’s The New Negro. In the thirties he returned to his earlier focus on Jamaican nationalism and in 1936 helped form the Jamaica Progressive League (JPL) with Walter Adolphe Roberts, Ethelred Brown, and other New York-based West Indian immigrants. He became vice president of the organization. The self-described “militant liberal” JPL platform supported self-government, universal suffrage, unionization, the organization of consumer cooperatives, promotion of inter-Caribbean trade, and an anti-imperialist platform.

Domingo continued using his influence as a powerful orator and wrote for Public Opinion, a weekly newspaper founded by O.T. Fairclough and other activists with the People’s National Party (PNP). Norman Manley encouraged him to return to Jamaica as political organizer for the PNP in 1941, but upon arrival in his homeland he was detained under authority of the governor, along with Richard Hart, Arthur Henry, Frank Hill, Ken Hill, and others. Their cause attracted international involvement of the American Civil Liberties Union and public calls for their release. Domingo remained in Jamaica and pursued his journalism and outspokenness with his “Sparks from my Anvil” column for Public Opinion, as vice-chair of the Trades Union Advisory Council and as contributor to the Labour Weekly. He returned to New York in 1947 and in the 1950s opposed the PNP and Caribbean Federation politics.

Domingo, W.A. British West Indian Federation: A Critique. New York, 1956.

Foner, Philip S. American Socialism and Black Americans. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Hill, Robert, and Carol Rudisell, eds. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Jones, Ken. “Remembering Wilfred Domingo: A Pioneer of Our Independence Movement.” The Gleaner, August 21, 2011.

Post, Ken. Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978.

Stevens, Margaret. “The Early Political History of Wilfred A. Domingo, 1919-1939” in Caribbean Political Activism, edited by Rupert Lewis. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2012.