Maurice Bishop
Maurice Bishop took Grenada in a morning with forty-six men, governed it for four and a half years, and was shot by his own party in the fort where the revolution had begun. He was born in Aruba in 1944 to Grenadian parents, trained as a lawyer in London, and came home in 1970 to organise against Eric Gairy, the eccentric and increasingly violent prime minister whose thugs, the Mongoose Gang, beat Bishop's father to death in 1974. His New Jewel Movement seized the barracks and the radio station on 13 March 1979 while Gairy was in New York. The People's Revolutionary Government that followed built clinics, a literacy campaign, cooperatives and, with Cuban labour, an international airport at Point Salines that Washington chose to read as a military runway. Bishop was popular, a large man with a large voice, and less doctrinaire than the party around him; the government held no election, and the argument over that and over joint leadership with the deputy prime minister, Bernard Coard, split the central committee in 1983. Coard's faction put Bishop under house arrest on 13 October; a crowd freed him six days later and carried him to Fort Rupert, and soldiers of the People's Revolutionary Army retook the fort, killed dozens in the crowd, and executed Bishop and seven others against a wall. The United States invaded six days after that, on 25 October, with the killings as its justification, and the revolution was over in a week. His body was never found. Coard and the others were sentenced to death in 1986 and released between 2007 and 2009. The airport he built is named after him.
- Lived: 1944 CE – 1983 CE
- Nationality: Grenadian
- Roles: head_of_government, revolutionary
