I’ll never forget the day Michael Manley died — March 6, 1997. A few hours later, my youngest daughter was born. As we celebrated her coming into the world, I paused to reflect on Manley’s leaving it and on the profound ways he helped define my life and that of a generation of young Jamaicans.

Manley was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1927. His entry into local politics did not, in itself, come as much of a surprise. The second son of renowned barrister and anticolonial politician Norman Manley, Michael returned home from his studies at the London School of Economics in the early fifties to wrest the trade-union movement from the left wing, which had recently been expelled from his father’s party, the People’s National Party (PNP).

Over the next two decades, he built the National Workers Union (NWU) into a formidable centrist force, sidelining the Left and effectively matching its rival, the Bustamante Industrial Trades Union (BITU), the labor arm of his father’s cousin and great adversary Alexander Bustamante’s right-leaning Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).