This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On April 4, 2017, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness stood before Parliament and apologised for the violence Jamaican security forces had carried out against Rastafari at Coral Gardens on April 11 and 12, 1963. The government's own published statement called the episode a grave injustice marked by brutality, injustice and repression.
The apology came with commitments attached rather than words alone. Holness's government pledged a Trust Fund of no less than ten million Jamaican dollars for survivors of the Coral Gardens violence and their families, and it committed the Public Defender's office to helping locate survivors who might still be owed some form of redress more than five decades after the events themselves.
The government also acted on the ground where the violence had happened. Six lots at Pinnacle in Saint Catherine parish, the site of Leonard Howell's own early Rastafari community and among the movement's most significant historical grounds, were designated a protected Rastafari Heritage and Cultural Centre as part of the same 2017 commitment.
What the 2017 apology changed for Rastafari in Jamaica was an official state acknowledgment, more than half a century after the fact, of a suppression the movement had endured largely without redress. A government that once sent security forces against Rastafari at Coral Gardens returned to name that violence an injustice, fund its survivors and protect the ground where the movement's own history had begun.