Trevor Munroe

Who is Trevor Munroe?

Trevor St George Munroe is a Jamaican political scientist, labour activist, and politician.

Munroe went to high school at St. George's College and later studied political science at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University where he obtained the D.Phil in political science for a landmark study of the process of decolonization in Jamaica between the 1930s and 1960s, published as The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization in 1972.

On his return to Jamaica in the late 1960s, he became involved in the political ferment which followed on the Rodney Riots of 1968. He founded a trade union, the University and Allied Workers' Union, initially to represent janitorial and service staff at the UWI. In 1974 he founded the Workers' Liberation League, an explicitly pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist organization. In 1978, working with Elean Thomas and others, Munroe transformed the WLL into the Workers Party of Jamaica, and Munroe served as its general secretary.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the WPJ dissolved in 1992. Following the elections of 1997 he was appointed an independent senator by Prime Minister Percival Patterson. In 2002, he was reappointed to the Senate as a member of the People's National Party.