Phyllis Coard

Phyllis Coard (, 2 November 1943 – 6 September 2020) was a Jamaican-born Grenadian social worker, women's rights activist, communist, revolutionary, educator, writer and politician. She was founder member and president of the National Women's Organisation (NWO), was a minister in the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG), was a central committee member of Grenada's New JEWEL Movement (NJM) party, and was the only woman member of the "Grenada 17" group who were controversially convicted for ordering the murder of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop in 1983.

Early life and education Coard was born on 2 November 1943 in Jamaica. Her father Frederick Evans was an accountant, her mother Sybil Wilson Evans was a bookkeeper, and her uncle Ken Evans was a businessman who founded the Tia Maria coffee liqueur company. She had an older sister.

Coard studied undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications at the University of Reading and the London School of Economics in England. After graduating, she worked as a qualified social worker in London.

After returning to the Caribbean, Coard taught sociology at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad and Tobago. The Coards moved to Grenada in 1974.

Political career Coard and her husband joined the New Jewel Movement NJM in 1976. In December 1977, Coard was one of the founder members of the National Women's Committee (NWO) of the NJM. with Rita Joseph as her vice-president.

Following the revolutionary coup against Eric Gairy’s rule by the NJM, known as the Revolution of 1979, the socialist People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) was installed. Coard was a central committee member of the NJM and was appointed as the country’s first deputy minister of women’s affairs in the Ministry of Education and Social Affairs. She secured equal pay legislation for women, codified maternity leave in law, mobilised women’s involvement in non-traditional occupations and established the River Road Day Care nursery under the NJM’s "Economic Enterprises of the People" programme. tried to requested that the more moderate Bishop to either step down or agree to a power-sharing arrangement after political disagreements. After rejecting the proposal as he felt that joint leadership was untenable, Bishop was placed under house arrest on 13 October 1983 by the Grenadian Army. Bishop allegedly confided to a journalist: "I am a dead man." Bishop was released from his house arrest by a crowd on 19 October 1983. After walking to Fort Rupert (now Fort George), a four-man firing squad executed Bishop, along with cabinet members and aides, including Unison Whiteman, Norris Bain and Jacqueline Creft. The remains of Bishop and those who died with him have never been found.

After the death of Bishop, Coard's husband named himself prime minister. Coard and her husband were arrested by the occupying forces. Coard was initially held as a "prisoner of war" on a United States warship, before being transferred to prison to await trial. During the trial she shouted at presiding judge Sir Dennis Byron: "the world will condemn you!" but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1991. During the trial Coard was injured due to an attack on her bus. She was lifted into the courtroom on a stretcher.

Coard was imprisoned in Richmond Hill Prison in Saint George's, Grenada, where she was the only female prisoner in Grenada during some of the years of her incarceration. She went on hunger strike to protest against the conditions in prison. Coard published the books US War on One Woman: My Conditions of imprisonment in Grenada (1988) and Unchained – A Caribbean Woman’s Journey Through Invasion, Incarceration and Liberation (2019) about her experiences in prison.

The controversial trial of the Grenada 17 has been criticised by Amnesty International in an October 2003 report, by the United Kingdom's High Court of Justice in 2014, and by former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark in 1997.

On 7 February 2007, the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ordered a re-sentencing of Coard's husband and others convicted for the 1983 killing of Bishop. Her husband was freed from prison in September 2009 and he joined her in Jamaica where she remained for medical treatment.