Today we reprint part one of a two-part interview with Delano Franklyn, attorney-at-law, which was published in September 2004. Franklyn, a former minister of state and political activist, died of cancer of the blood on Friday, February 10, 2023 at age 63.

Let’s accept that some people are born to the very purpose they come to be known for; that the cosmic hand of fate will unilaterally reach across oceans of time to tap someone on the shoulder and henceforth determine his or her path in life. Delano Franklyn is so destined to lead. How else can one explain his unquenchable, often self-sacrificial but relentless drive to be in the service of his fellow man, against the anguish of parents, humiliating detention in the nation’s jails, educational sacrifices and the best judgement of friends and well-wishers?

Study Delano Franklyn. He is the face of future Jamaican politics. And he does it not for the spoils of office but out of a deep and abiding conviction that if one should be great, let him first serve the weak and oppressed. Franklyn’s story thus far is about a life in preparation for a goal not yet firmly defined. But the dots connect in an unmistakeable direction.

From a student leader through Kingston College, Mico Teachers’ College and The University of the West Indies (UWI), he was made a senator in 2002 and, inevitably, a minister of Government, all in the space of only 42 years. In that relatively short span of time, Franklyn has had his share of hard knocks and a divorce to show for it. And he has been forced to confront the ferocious demons of Jamaican political culture.

He still beats upon himself for the fact that he was absent and away from the job when his boss, Prime Minister PJ Patterson, suffered a dramatic fainting spell. And he is haunted by the time when fate dealt him a cruel hand: the stabbing death of an inner-city youth by another on the first night of camp in a resuscitated National Youth Service (NYS) under his watch.

It is to the small farming district of Alleppo in the eastern parish of St Mary that we head to begin to trace the remarkable story of a man who would be leader.

My mother never slept, it seemed

On an 11-acre farm in Alleppo, situated within the Highgate-Clonmell-Richmond triangle in St Mary, Cotelia Monica Franklin nee Smallhorn, gave birth to her fourth child and third son on November 23, 1959. Her husband, Reginald George Franklin, an avid reader and current affairs enthusiast, named him Delano Roosevelt Franklin by juggling the name of the former United States president (FDR). By an accident of spelling, much like the finance minister Dr Omar Davies (as against Davis), Delano’s name was rendered ‘Franklyn’ with a ‘y’ instead of the ‘i’ in his late father’s name.

Delano’s siblings are John Franklin, late father of young Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) politician, Andre Franklin; Maxine Franklin who currently teaches at St Andrew High School; Robert Franklin, a businessman; and Marcia Franklin, a businesswoman living in the US. Their mother and father, a typical peasant couple, worked the land hard. In time, they established a shop fed largely by produce — banana, yam, cocoa, poultry, pigs and goats — from the farm.

Franklyn recalls seeing his father reading a lot and listening to the radio, after which he would inform the community about the news of the day. People gravitated to their home and his mother often fed the community. He can’t remember ever seeing his mother sleeping, as she went to bed after him and got up before him; dressmaking, baking, grating coconuts, boiling oil, catching the market truck to sell produce and later running the shop.

Alleppo was one of those communities where everybody was responsible for everyone else. Franklyn, like many of his generation and before, received several spankings from community residents but could not report them to his parents, lest they put another on top of that. Even at that, he remembers that his parents were informed about the punishment before he reached home!

The children were home-schooled, though they might not have used the fancy term back in the days. Their mother taught them to spell, to read using the newspapers and other publications, mostly The Gleaner but also the Public Opinion, which were piled high in the home, and to do math by counting stones and playing card games. By the time they entered Elliott Primary School where the principal was Vivian Rochester, later the prominent insurance leader, they were well ahead.

Franklyn remembers the strong focus on agriculture because every Friday he had to go to the school farm. So taken was he with it that he asked his father for a plot of land on which he planted peas, pumpkins, banana, plantain, and yam. He boasts that his ‘farm’ flourished until “one day when the old man’s cows went through and wreaked havoc. I cried, man”.

Home Sweet Home lamp

The home had no electricity and it was the legendary ‘Home Sweet Home’ lamps that he studied by, saying how he was always fascinated by the extent to which “the lamp could pierce the darkness”. He walked four miles to and from school. “But it was a joy. We had no piped water so we caught water from the little river that ran through the property. Telephone, of course, came long after. But it was a home that shared with the community,” Franklyn recounts. These were the circumstances in which he grew up and the lessons learnt would not be forgotten.

Right after the 1967 General Election — he was about eight going on nine — his mother moved with him and his sister Marcia to live in Kingston, leaving his father to tend the farm. His older siblings were already at school in Kingston (they were actually born in the capital). They first lived at 15 Jacques Road in east Kingston in a tenement yard with many houses owned by one Mrs Bygrave, an influential lady. Not unexpectedly, the transition for Delano was dramatic.

“When I got up in the night, it was a different sight. The first thing that struck me was this large and intriguing television set, something I had never seen before. I would always remember the programme Daisy on the then JBC-TV. I was just so astounded to see people speaking from a box! The light at night was coming from the ceiling and not from a lamp and nobody had to light a wicker. I was so fascinated that I kept flicking the light switch over and over,” Franklyn smiles at himself.

One morning he woke up to the ringing of a telephone in Mrs Bygrave’s house. What was even more startling was that she seemed to be talking to someone but he saw no one. He asked and she told him what the instrument was all about.

It was a lively tenement yard but the community setting was very different from Alleppo where the crowds in his home were created by his mother’s cooking. Here, now, everyone lived in this big yard and many people came and went visiting relatives and friends. He heard the many stories that people were always telling and listened as they discussed the news of the day. Some were boisterous, often cantankerous, but he was always learning from their words and actions. He found that he wanted to continue his father’s legacy of keeping newspapers and did so whenever he could. In fact, to this day.

Kingsley Cooper’s music

His mother sent him to Norman Gardens All-Age School which was an easy walk from home. He recalls that the school was next door to the home of Kingsley Cooper, the fashion bigwig of today. Cooper, he says, was heavily involved in music — sound system — then. He yearned to be exposed to the music himself but his disciplinarian mother forbade it. Phillip Paulwell, the now government minister, attended that school but Franklyn never met him then. The principal was a Mr Pape and he was placed in 2a. There was no school garden, he noted. From the 200 students at Elliott Primary, there were now some 800 students here. He especially remembers Mrs Morgan, his form teacher and Common Entrance tutor in 5a.

Mrs Franklyn recognised immediately that her son, Delano, was attracted to the music coming from the Cooper’s residence near the school. She thought to herself that this was not the time. He must concentrate on school. There would be time for that later. She insisted he come home from school by a certain time every day — rain or shine. From time to time she would drop by the school to ensure that he was in class. She kept the strap nearby, not being afraid to use it when necessary to bring home a point. For her, education and appearance were important indicators of a good upbringing. Whether Delano liked it or not, and the other children for that matter, they would have to accept it.

Every holiday since moving to Kingston, everybody went back to St Mary to be with their father, who, of course, had been visiting them from the country.

Dreaming of Kingston College

They moved to 2nd Avenue in adjoining Vineyard Town from Jacques Road where Delano noticed that there were many youths his age or just older. Most were in high school and even more importantly, they were attending Kingston College (KC). Day in and day out he would hear them speak of KC and its exploits. He liked what he heard. More than that, he decided there would be no other school for him.

“I read the sports section of the newspaper and related it to KC. The purple and white became the dominant colours for me,” he relates. “This was reinforced when I travelled with my mother on the no 26 JOS bus along North Street. KC was all I saw on those occasions.”

He sat the Common Entrance Exam, the highly selective test which served as a ticket to a secondary education and a better life, especially for the children of the poor. While he awaited the results, he went to St Mary for the summer. But now he no longer enjoyed the activities he had once loved as a country boy and he was not enticed by his father’s stories which used to hold him spellbound. All he could think of was KC and hoped desperately that he had got a place there.

When the results came out in The Gleaner, his father ran down the road and got a copy. Under Kingston College was the name Delano Roosevelt Franklyn. His dream had come true. “I knew that the entire uniform was important but there was nothing to me like the purple and white tie,” says Franklyn.

He attended ‘College’ with big name guys like Barrington “Barry G” Gordon; Mikey Bennett; Stephen Vasciannie; Bradley Smith, who heads up Food For the Poor; Charlton Collie, the man who contested the Kingston Central seat against the People’s National Party’s (PNP) Victor Cummings; Richard Dyche, a manager at Capital and Credit; Rainford Wilks and several others. When he entered KC, Bishop Percival Gibson had already handed over as principal to Douglas Forrest who was preparing to pass it on to Rev Don Taylor.

KC was everything he had heard the boys say about its achievements in academics and sports. At orientation when the school paraded outstanding old boy after old boy, the goose pimples told him he had chosen the right place. The new boys were addressed by people such as Michael Holding; Trevor “TC” Campbell; Clive Barriffe; Noel Headlam; Howard Bell; Mario McClennan, Derrick Denniser and the like. It was here at KC now that Delano Franklyn would begin to develop his instincts to lead.

First stirrings of social conscience

Without thinking about it, Franklyn found himself sharing his lunch with boys who did not have. So often he had seen his mother and father share with people in their community. He grappled with the idea that some boys had lunch while others did not. At KC, boys from different social backgrounds had been thrown together. And he didn’t see the same kind of communal sharing as he had seen among the humble country folk back in St Mary.

Mentally he wrestled with the idea. Of course, it was not an issue. He was just happy to be at school. But this concern was only the first stirrings of social conscience, even if Franklyn made nothing of it at the time.

Like regular boys, he played football, cricket, athletics and though he did not make any of the school teams, he followed them religiously. He was struck by the competitiveness of Jamaican secondary school sports, noting that no other country in the western hemisphere had anything close to it. He has always asked how was it that Jamaica was able to compete in sports with the best in the world and remain a success story, despite the paucity of resources.

“I believe it has to do with the structure of organised competition at the primary and secondary levels of school here. The teachers must be given all the appreciation for turning all the rough diamonds into such winners.”

Manley’s democratisation of education

In February 1972, the Government changed hands with the Michael Manley-led PNP whipping Hugh Shearer’s JLP. Manley’s basket of social reforms, outlined in 1974, found resonance with the teenaged Franklyn. He had taken special notice of the establishment of a National Youth Service (NYS), not having the slightest idea that one day, many years hence, he would be called on to head up the NYS.

He was especially turned on by the notion of the democratisation of education which proposed that all stakeholders in the school system should take decisions jointly. This meant the school’s administration, teachers, students, ancillary staff and community members would be represented on the school board. Importantly, student councils were established with individual classes electing form representatives and the entire student body electing a president. Franklyn was in 5a when the concept was introduced. He was immediately elected class representative, marking the beginning of what was to come.

Franklyn’s excellent rapport with his classmates and his willingness to empathise with them had not gone unnoticed. He was usually the first to speak up when he felt something was going wrong in the school and was not afraid to speak for other boys.

On one occasion, some boys were upset over how the Manning Cup team was chosen, feeling that some deserving boys were left off in favour of less skilful ones. When the principal’s office ignored their protestations, the boys, led by Franklyn, proceeded to form their own football team and entered it in a corner league under the name “Yadma Football Club”, for which they got sponsors. The principal came down hard on them. In preparation for their defence, Franklyn read up all he could about the democratisation process. The boys were impressed.

A few months later, he was elected president of the KC Students’ Council; followed soon after by his election to the executive of region 10 of the students councils representing schools in Kingston and St Andrew, before going on to win as president of the National Secondary Schools Council (NSSC).

He recalls that many principals had a warm time accepting the Students’ Council idea. In particular, they could not see why it was the Students’ Council president and not the head boy nominated by the principal who should sit on the school board. And as the struggle raged, he was caught in the middle.

The NSSC was established as a unit in the Ministry of Education under Minister Dr Phyllis McPherson-Russell. Senator Dawn Lindo, now Williams was appointed parliamentary secretary and given responsibility for the NSSC. The unit was also staffed by Yvonne Kong, now principal of GC Foster College of Physical Education & Sport; and Sidney Murray.

Franklyn’s election to the presidency of the NSSC came in 1977, right after Manley had again led the PNP to a crushing victory (December 15, 1976) over the JLP, he recalls. He threw himself into the job, visiting every secondary school in the island to either establish or strengthen the Students’ Council and to ensure that every school board had a Students’ Council rep. And he travelled by bus! Imagine his joy therefore when some 6,000 students attended the student rally held in 1978 at Mico College grounds in Kingston.

The student rally had drawn heavily on the resources of the Jamaica Union of Tertiary Students (JUTS), which had been formed earlier, largely as a result of the involvement of students from the UWI Guild of Undergraduates; the College of Arts, Science, and Technology (CAST), now UTech, Jamaica; the Jamaica School of Agriculture (JSA); Moneague Teachers’ College; and Mico Teachers’ College. JUTS dealt extensively with the power of principals and the position of the minister of education as it related to education at the secondary and tertiary levels, as well as student rights.

Appalling social conditions

While Franklyn travelled to the various schools, he saw the appalling conditions in which some schools existed and the equally appalling social conditions in which some communities lived all over the country. The disparity in the social relations also struck him forcefully.

He increasingly engaged himself in hot debate about national issues. Instead of studying and playing sports like other boys, his every waking moment was taken up with the NSSC. He grew confident in his ability to articulate the issues, growing well beyond what mere academic activity would allow him. And he became better and better at organising, learning, he says, to listen, learn and compromise. “For me, the social intercourse was awesome,” he recollects.

But it all came at a great price. With little time to pay attention to his books, Franklyn fell behind in his grades. Predictably, his end-of-fifth form report indicated he did not do enough to be promoted to sixth from and would have to repeat. His parents were distraught. They had warned him over and over that they had sent him to school to study and pass his exams, not to be traipsing all over the country, talking about democratisation of education. Franklyn was in a quandary. He loved what he was doing, but his parents were right. What was he to do? And would all of this one day make sense?

Next: Thrown behind bars for the people’s cause