Times have changed quite a lot.
When Ronaldo Holder left Barbados for British Guiana’s (BG) greener pastures early in the 1900s he never dreamed that someday a great grandson’s exploits and his death in the US would attract national and international attention at the highest levels in the US and BG.
Back then, BG and Barbados were British colonies. Just as interesting, New York City’s Police Department had few, if any, Blacks patrolling its streets.
Fast forward to October 2015. Guyana and Barbados are planning next year’s celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of independence from England; a black man, Barack Obama is the US president, and the Bajan’s 33-year-old great grandson, Randolph Holder Jr, a much admired New York City police officer was murdered while chasing an alleged violent criminal, Tyrone Howard.
The cop who was born and raised in Guyana had migrated to New York as a young adult, dreaming of joining the NYPD and was killed with a single bullet to the head. The tragedy plunged the city into a deep state of mourning. Flags were lowered to half-mast; President Obama, the City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Guyana’s new President David Granger all expressed their condolences; and two NYC television stations broadcast Holder’s funeral service live from Queens for the benefit of millions of mourners in New York and Guyana.
Randolph Jr meant different things to different people.
To his father, Randolph Holder Sr, a former cop in Guyana whose father before him was also an officer there, his son “was a very proud young man who liked to work and tried to set an example for others to follow.”
To President Obama, the cop had died, not because he “ran towards danger because he thought himself as a hero. He ran towards danger because he was a cop. It was part of his job description,” the president told thousands of members of the International Association of Police Chiefs meeting in Chicago.
Mayor de Blasio saw him as a “remarkable man, a man who made us better by his presence”.
“We are humbled by Officer Randolph Holder’s example of service and courage and sacrifice,” added the Mayor.
Next was the eulogy of William Bratton, New York’s Police Commissioner.
“His friends said ‘Randy’ had the calm smooth demeanour of a 15-year vet,” asserted Bratton during Holder’s funeral service in the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in Queens where hundreds of police officers from across the US had gathered to pay their last respects to a fallen comrade.
Put the tributes together and we get a portrait of a brave man whose dream was nourished in Guyana as he watched his father and grandfather serve as excellent cops there. It was as if public safety was the family business.
“He always wanted to be a police officer,” his father told the Sunday Sun. He was “well liked” and “principled.”
It said a lot about the esteem in which the West Indian with Bajan roots was held that about 100 NYPD cops travelled to Guyana to salute Holder during a crowded funeral service in the Brickdam Roman Catholic Cathedral. The presence of Guyana’s new leader, President David Granger, added solemnity to the celebration of Holder’s life. Granger had met him when he was a youth, long before he set out for New York to become a cop.
“Growing up, all I wanted to do was to make a difference in my community and become a role model” by being a cop, Holder wrote five years ago at the City’s Police Academy.
Hamilton Greene, Georgetown’s Mayor who spoke at the funeral, praised him and so did Holder’s sister-in-law Arika Noel who said he “listened and was never judgmental”.
As a measure of gratitude from a grateful New York, Holder was promoted posthumously to detective in the NYPD. He was buried in a well known cemetery in Georgetown.
“As soon as I heard his name was Holder from Guyana, I knew he had Barbadian connections,” asserted Malcolm Best of the Barbados Ex-Police Association of New York, a fraternal body.
Tony Best is the Nation’s North America correspondent. Email Bestra@aol.com.