Joseph Robert Love

Joseph Robert Love, known as Dr. Robert Love (2 October 1839 – 21 November 1914), was a 19th-century Bahamian-born medical doctor, clergyman, teacher, journalist, politician and pan-Africanist. He lived, studied, and worked successively in the Bahamas, the United States of America, Haiti, and Jamaica. Love spent the last decades of his life in Jamaica, where he held political office, published a newspaper, and advocated for the island's black majority.

Early life Love was born in the Bahamas on 2 October 1839. Love was educated at St. Agnes Parish School and Christ Church Grammar School in Nassau. He was influenced by the Anglican Church during this period. Later he became a teacher in Bahamas.

In the 1866, he went to Florida, United States. In 1871, Bishop John F. Young of the Diocese of Florida ordained him a deacon. In June 1871, he became clergy in Trinity Church, Florida and transferred to the Church of St. Stephen, Savannah, Georgia in December. In 1877, Bishop Arthur Cleveland Coxe of the Diocese of Western New York ordained him to the priesthood.

Haiti In 1881, Love moved to Haiti, where he served as the rector of an Anglican church in Port-au-Prince. He was forced to end his career in church due to a quarrel, and he became a doctor in the Haitian army that engaged with the revolt in Haiti. During his time in Haiti he experienced grave difficulty in politics. In 1889, he was eventually expelled. He went to Kingston, Jamaica and failed in his attempts to return to Haiti.

Love piloted a voter registration drive, as a means of empowering the black majority, and challenging white minority rule. The white elite in the Colony of Jamaica worried that Love was filling the heads of black people with dangerous ideas of racial equality. John Vassall Calder claimed that black people lacked the mental capacities to thrive, and stated: “Dr. Love must remember that his ancestors were my ancestors’ slaves....He could never be my equal. He is aggrieved because my forefathers rescued him from the bonds of thraldom and deprived him the privilege of being King of the Congo, enjoying the epicurean and conjugal orgies and the sacrificial pleasures of his ancestral home in Africa.”

The white establishment viewed Love with as much suspicion as they did the pan-African Native Baptist preacher, Alexander Bedward. However, Love always thought Bedward to be nothing more than a skilled showman whom a hysterical establishment had managed to turn into a martyr.

Death and legacy Love's health began to deteriorate, and by 1910 he had been forced to end his political career. He died on 21 November 1914, and was buried in the parish church yard at Half Way Tree, near the city of Kingston. Love's activism in favour of Jamaica's economically depressed black majority influenced later Jamaican and Caribbean activists, including Marcus Garvey.