Samuel A. Haynes was born in Belize in 1898. In 1916, as a member of the 2^nd contingent, he went to war at the tender age of 18. Of his own activities in Mesopotamia little has been unearthed but he obviously spent some time in detailing the catalogue of humiliations, discrimination and racial harassment the black Belizean Contingents were subjected to in the Middle East. For it was Haynes who, as a witness to the Riot Commission of 1919-set up to inquire into the Ex-Serviceman’s Riot of the year-, provided the Commission with the most comprehensive account of the years spent overseas. He noted that there was discrimination in rations, quarters, medical treatment and pay, such differences being exacerbated by the men’s continual humiliation at hands of white troops who regarded the Contingent members as “native” levies. He went on to cite other instances of the men transported in cattle trucks, abused by white officers, excluded from white mess huts, listed in the section sheets with Arab and Chinese laborers and relegated to receiving the Anglican communion last in mission tents.           

So, while it was Haynes with RSM MacDonald who restored order on the night of the Riot, he was in sympathy with the emotions, if not the actions, of the Contingent rioters. When Percy George in the Clarion was unwise enough to state that “The conduct of the looters and their supporters was not the conduct of British subjects” Haynes was stung into an angry repost. “So then we are British subjects” he wrote, “thank God for such a knowledge” and went on to acquaint George with the fact that British soldiers in Mesopotamia had not regarded “niggers” as fellow subjects of his Majesty.

            Indeed, it was Haynes who led a Contingent delegation to the Governor to lay before him the men’s grievances. Despite Hayne’s stalwart work on the night of the 22^nd, the Governor was under no illusion as to Hayne’s sympathies. Eyre Hutson believed Haynes to be “a troublesome agitator and very intimate with the editor of the Independent”. That belief was reinforced a year later when Haynes invited the Governor to the inauguration of the Belize branch of the UNIA and, when his Excellency

Demurred on the grounds that he was unaware of the UNIA’s aims and methods, he sent Hutson a copy of the Constitution and Books of Laws. This only served to entrench Hutson’s suspicion as he noted that this was ‘a very cleverly composed document and a dangerous one’, a view heightened by Hutson’s meeting with Garvey, Cain and Haynes in July, 1921.

            Garvey’s visit robbed the Governor of this agitator. Garvey, impressed by Hayne’s erudition, organizational ability and passionate UNIA loyalties, recruited Belize’s native son for his organizational in the U.S.A. Haynes left with Garvey for the U.S. declaring he would “fight for black advancement more energetically than he had for the Empire in the European War”. He attended the 1921 UNIA Convention, became a prolific contributor to the Negro World and for twelve years was the Convener of the Pittsburgh Branch of the UNIA.

            However the detail of ho service to the UNIA in the 1920s and 1930s remains undiscovered and readers in Belize or the U.S.A. may be able to assist Belizean history here. There is a twenty year gap to be investigated, for I next pick him up in the 1940s residing in Norfolk, Virginia and Philadelphia, mass. Editing a journal called the Afro-American. In 1951, he emerges as a volunteer worker for the Negro College Fund and by 1953 was resident in New Jersey. With the demise of Garveyism after Garvey’s death in 1940 he seems to have come to terms with the “integrationists’ so disliked by the UNIA founder, as by the mid-fifties we find him as the President of the Newark branch of NAACP and in 1858 he was appointed as the first ‘black” administrative assistant to the New Jersey Commissioner for Labour and Industry. In his office which he held until 1970, he was largely responsible for arranging the study programmes and itineriaries for foreign labor labor officials visiting New Jersey. By the early 1960s, he had become something of a V.I.P. in New Jersey for as well as his official post, he was president of his own public relations consultancy, was a ruling elder in the East Orange Presbyterian Church and in 1964 became one of the three Commissioners of the Newark Board of Alcoholic Beverages.

            Sammy Haynes died in East Orange New Jersey on July 1^st, 1971 at the age of 73. In the last quarter of his life, age, experience and the political realities had mellowed the old radical. By the 1950’s the passion of Garveyism was spent and the next twenty years were to see the triumph of the reformist integrationists’. In the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1950’s and 1960’s Sammy Haynes was to play his part, but the author of “Land of the Gods” never entirely lost his early faith in the charismatic leader of the UNIA. If, in his later years, he turned from Garvey to Martin Luther King he acknowledged his debt and that of other Civil Rights leaders to the Blackman’s first champion. He wrote:

            Lest we forget, Garvey has not failed. Slowly but surely the mists of prejudice, jealously, ignorance are being rolled away from the racial horizon. The American Negro’s bitter experiences with the purposes of rugged Americanism, plus the sufferings he has absorbed during the depressions, have served to convince him that Garvey was not indeed, a charlatan, a devil or a native but a FRIEND and COuNSELLOR who came to serve him and his generation.