5 Trinidadian Global Icons Whose Impact is Still Being Felt Around the World

Kwame Ture Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian activist active in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement and later the global Pan-African Movement. Ture rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later as the honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party and finally as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party. C. L. R. James Cyril Lionel Robert James, best known as C. L. R. James, was an Afro-Trinidadian historian, journalist and political activist. His works are known as pioneering and being an influential voice in postcolonial literature. James' writing on the Communist International stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and his history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, is a seminal text in the literature of the African Diaspora. Billy Ocean Billy Ocean is a Trinidadian recording artist who had a string of R&B, international and pop hits in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the most popular British R&B singer-songwriter of the early to mid-1980s. After scoring his first four U.K. top 20 successes, seven years passed before he accumulated a series of transatlantic successes, including three U.S. No. 1 hits. In 1985, Ocean won the Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for his worldwide hit, Caribbean Queen. Tony Martin Anthony Martin was a Trinidadian professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He was a lecturer and prolific author of scholarly articles about Black history and was considered the world’s foremost authority on the most-followed Black nationalist leader of all time, Marcus Garvey. Martin authored, compiled or edited 14 books, his earliest work being Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1976). Ato Boldon Ato Boldon is a former track athlete from Trinidad and Tobago and four-time Olympic medal winner who inspired many runners from his country and throughout the world. Only three other men in history — Usain Bolt, Frankie Fredericks and Carl Lewis — have won as many Olympic individual event sprint medals. He is the current Trinidad and Tobago national record holder in the 50-, 60- and 200-meter events. He also held the 100-meter national record and the NCAA record until they were broken recently. He also holds the world Commonwealth Games record in the 100-meter event.

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