Community activist and former parliamentarian Hamilton Lashley has unveiled a comprehensive plan to combat the escalating violence in The Pine community by looking to its past glories.
Lashley is spearheading the establishment of a community sports museum and Hall of Fame, an initiative he believes will restore identity and offer a sustainable path away from the gun violence that has plagued the area.
“The Pine has a very terrible reputation as being the murder capital of our area. We’ve got to change that,” he told the Sunday Sun in a recent interview.
He noted that between 2004 and 2026, 22 people in The Pine lost their lives to gun violence adding: “There is a cell block up at Dodds Prison called ‘The Pine Block’ and I am still counting because some of The Pine fellas get killed in other people’s territories.”
The initiative, driven by the Hamilton Lashley Human Development Foundation, aims to transform the narrative of The Pine.
Lashley, who served in the House of Assembly for 19 consecutive years from 1994 to 2013, representing the St Michael South East constituency, announced plans to convert the Delisle Bradshaw National Resource Centre in The Pine into the Barbados’s first community sports museum.
The facility will house a Hall of Fame to honour the area’s sporting heroes, ranging from football and cricket to netball and squash.
“All of those outstanding persons in The Pine community that represented Barbados internationally and regionally and their community locally will be inducted in large numbers in the Hall of Fame,” he said.
“Identity precedes participation,” Lashley asserted, quoting historian Walter Rodney.
“A community must know its history because as Marcus Garvey once said, a people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
The museum will feature mass inductions of athletes who represented Barbados and the region, including footballers, netballers like Marian Johnson and Sandra Fergusson, cricketers such as the Brooks brothers. He also mentioned names such as former Olympian Rawle Clarke. Special tributes will also be paid posthumously to persons such as Ralph Walker, who made outstanding contributions to the community Lashley highlighted the community’s rich history, noting its dominance in sports during the 1990s.
“In 1992, The Pine was in its glory days. They won all of the major trophies in football in Barbados – the Under-12s, Under-14s, Under 16s, Under-18s, the middle league football tournament, the knockout, everything,” Lashley recalled. The netballers won the league and also won the knockout championship.
However, he sadly revealed that the negativity started to creep back in during the years 2000 to 2006, describing it as a “horrific period in The Pine in terms of the murders with the gun being the preferred weapon of choice.”
He mentioned Princess Royal Avenue, Regent Hill and Golden Rock as notorious troubled spots.
However, Lashley argued that nostalgia alone would not solve the current crisis. He criticised the “get rich and switch” mentality of successful professionals who originated from housing areas but fail to give back. He said the new initiative required a holistic approach, including direct intervention from the private sector.
“The private sector has a critical role to play,” Lashley stated.
“We are putting a proposal to them to intervene in a practical way by offering not assistance in terms of money, but offering some jobs.”
With more than 75 firms located in and around The Pine, including the Barbados Olympic Association and various statutory corporations, Lashley believes these entities have an obligation to help stabilise the social environment.
“We can’t plan a programme and not want to involve them,” he added.
“That would be madness.” The project also includes collaboration with the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment, as well as the local secondary school. Lashley is targeting an August launch for the museum and is seeking to produce a 12-page pull-out publication to document the community’s achievements and honour its fallen heroes. He said businessman Henderson Williams would also partner with the Foundation “It is a holistic social intervention programme,” Lashley said. “We want to put the people on track in a prepared mood. We can’t continue with this killing no more in Barbados.” (MB)