Sidney Young, the Panama Tribune, and the Expanding Geography of Black Belonging

Often marginal in the historiography of international black radicalism, Panama in the interwar era was more nearly at its core.  As British Caribbean migrants moved outward from their home islands at the start of the twentieth century, they created a vibrant transnational culture.  Central to it was a flourishing circum-Caribbean press, comprised of papers owned, edited, and read by men and women of color in Grenada, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Costa Rica—and Panama. Quotations and subscriptions linked readers at all these sites to the U.S. "Negro Press" of Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York.  The peripheral black press offered colonials of color a panoramic view of the evolving geopolitics of white supremacy and a place to debate what could be done in response.

One tireless campaigner in the circum-Caribbean press was Sidney Adolphus Young (b. Jamaica, 1898, d. Panama, 1959).  Young nurtured an unprecedented flowering of black journalism in Panama as the editor of the Panama Times's "West Indian Page" from 1926 to 1928.  When the Page's outspoken defense of British Caribbeans against rising Panamanian nativism got Young fired in 1928, he founded the Panama Tribune. For the next four decades, the Tribune would function both as a staging ground for local activism and as a window onto the wider "Coloured World."  Young defined himself as both a "loyal Britisher" and a West Indian nationalist, as an anti-Communist and an anti-racist, as a man dedicated to his own "Negro Race" and as a champion of all "coloured peoples" from Japan to India to Cape Town.

The Panama Tribune's global vision meant that even when readers found themselves at the margins of Panamanian national belonging, they could understand themselves to be at the center of a community of struggle that was far, far bigger.