Bernard Coard

Winston Bernard Coard (born 10 August 1944) is a Grenadian politician who was Deputy Prime Minister in the People's Revolutionary Government of the New Jewel Movement. Coard launched a coup within the revolutionary government and took power for three days until he was himself deposed by General Hudson Austin. Bernard Coard, the son of Frederick McDermott Coard (1893–1978) and Flora Fleming (1907–2004), was born in Victoria, Grenada, and is a first cousin of Hon. Mr Justice Dunbar Cenac, Registry of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court; Hon. Mr Justice Dunbar Cenac's late father, Francis (Kimby) Cenac and the late Flora Coard were biological children of the late Isabella Cenac (née Fletcher). Coard is also the nephew of the late Hon. Mr Justice Dennis Cenac, the last of Isabella Cenac's eight children. Coard was attending the Grenada Boys' Secondary School when he met Maurice Bishop, who was then attending Presentation Brothers' College. Coard and Bishop shared an interest in left-wing politics from an early age. They became friends and in 1962 they joined to found the Grenada Assembly of Youth After Truth. Twice per month, the two would lead political debates in St. George's Central Market Place. Coard moved to the United States, where he studied sociology and economics at Brandeis University and joined the Communist Party USA. In 1967, he moved to England and studied political economy at the University of Sussex. That year, he married his wife Phyllis while they were students in England, and Coard joined the Communist Party of Great Britain there. He worked for two years as a schoolteacher in London and ran several youth organisations in South London. In 1971 he published a 50-page book How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain. The book explained that British schools had a pervasive bias toward treating white children as normal, which led to black children being labelled as "educationally subnormal" (learning-disabled).