THIS IS AN OPEN LETTER
4th April, 2013
CLIFTON HERITAGE AUTHORITY,
Western Bay Road,
Clifton Point, New Providence Island,
The Bahamas
Attention: ALL BOARD MEMBERS
Clifton Heritage Authority
Dear Sirs / Madames,
Re: Resignation of Entire Board of Clifton Heritage Authority
I write as a BENEFICIARY of The Clifton Heritage which was declared by The Parliament of The Bahamas to be an inalienable part of the national patrimony of The Bahamas, a fact evidenced in Section 3(2) the Clifton Heritage Authority Act, 2004 (“CHAA”) which was assented to on 24th June, 2004 and commenced on 25th April, 2005 (Chapter 51B – Statue Law of The Bahamas, 2000). With the promulgation of the CHAA, The Clifton Heritage was vested in the Clifton Heritage Authority (“CHA”) and thereupon settled on a statutory trust for the use and benefit of the people of The Bahamas.
In addition to being a Beneficiary under the CHAA, I had the distinct privilege of serving as a Member of Parliament when the Bill for the CHAA was laid, debated and passed. On 29th January, 2004, I contributed to the debate with a two-hour historical account of the struggle as well as to defining parliament’s ultimate intention behind the CHAA.
As a Beneficiary, therefore, and direct participant in the creation of the CHAA and ultimately the CHA, I hereby call upon you ALL to forthwith resign your respective posts on the CHA in accordance with Section 7 of the Second Schedule – CHA. Failure to do this will result in steps being taken to have your appointment revoked pursuant to Section 8 of the Second Schedule – CHAA. This might include the commencement of an action before the Supreme of Court The Bahamas for judicial review of the decision taken by the Board of the CHA to openly align itself and thereby compromise the integrity of the CHA by supporting, or being reckless as to whether it gives the impression that it supports the private cause of a LOUIS BACON, descendant from North Carolina, USA but now of the State of New York, USA and whose alter ego is the local so-called non-profit organization carrying the name of “The Coalition to Protect Clifton Bay” (“Bacon’s Coalition”).
This alliance has been widely publicized and touted by Bacon’s Coalition with no demand of a retraction from the CHA Board or any of its members.
I believe that this failure amounts to a breach of your individual and collective duties ostensibly as trustees of the CHA. This is especially the case when, unashamedly, you openly displayed your lack of loyalty, commitment and respect to beneficiaries of the CHA by publishing the image of Dr. Keith Wisdom, Chairman – CHA and that of member, Mr. Bennet Atkinson in public ads by Bacon’s Coalition as being members of the Board of Bacon’s Coalition. Their involvement was in their respective capacities as Board Members of the CHA.
I am, therefore, of the view that the level of objectivity and proper judgment necessarily required of persons serving on the CHA, is not met by any of the Members currently serving or the CHA, as currently constituted. These characteristics are an absolute requirements which must be inculcated in the demeanor of, if not simply demonstrative by the public stance taken by those who are asked to serve on the Board of the CHA as the guardians of this sacred place where rests the souls of our Lucayan, African and Loyalist ancestors; the preservation of which stands as a testament of the rarest of occasions when a grassroot movement of The Bahamas achieved unity over a short 6-year campaign beginning in 1998 and ending in 2004 with the promulgation of the CHAA.
That grassroot movement led by a harmonious quartet of Bahamians, Ms. Sam Duncombe,
Rev. Dr. C. B. Moss, Mr. Vivian Whylly and me, was endorsed on 30th March, 2000 by the current
Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, The Right Honourable Perry Christie who was then Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, when he spoke from the shores of Clifton and committed himself and his Progressive Liberal Party to stopping the development of a luxurious gated community that the then Governing Party of the Free National Movement led by The Right Honourable Hubert Ingraham, had intended to approve at that time. Some of us believed that the public dialogue was the Government simply going through the motion to give effect to a fait accompli.
In spite of this achievement of unity, Bacon’s Coalition has been formed for the purpose of being divisive, regressive and an endorsement of Bacon’s overt racist cause aimed at Bahamians and our way of life.
According to a Press Statement of Bacon’s Coalition dated 21st March, 2013, Bacon bases the coming into existence of his Coalition, on an unsupported scientific premises pronounced by one of its members, Associate Professor at the Department of Biology of University of Miami, Ms. Kathleen Sullivan-Sealey. She says that Clifton Bay is under massive threat because its conch population risks dying out because of the lack of proper oversight by the Government and little or non-existence of regulation of fishing, tourism, transport, coastal development and other human activities occurring in Clifton Bay. She makes an astounding conclusion which attacks Prime Minister Perry Christie and his current PLP Government and questions the ethics of those who have or are likely to make the decisions in respect of which she and Bacon’s Coalition complains: that the conservation and protection of the Clifton Bay is being sacrificed by the Government for short-term interests.
As you ought to know, the Minister of The Bahamas Government with portfolio responsibility for the seabed of The Bahamas (inclusive of Clifton Bay), is Prime Minister Perry Christie.
He is also the Minister with portfolio responsibility to have relations with the CHA on whose consultation the Governor General would have made the appointment of each and every member currently on the CHA. Mr. Christie is also the Leader of the Progressive Liberal Party which, since the late 1950’s, became the primary political organization that championed the cause of the Black majority of The Bahamas toward political and economic equality.
I was appalled and grossly offended by the full color double trunk advertisement that appeared in all of the dailies last week that was sponsored by Bacon’s Coalition when it stated that Bacon’s Coalition was to “…shortly be announcing a series of financials grants to existing Bahamian organizations with whom [they] will be partnering and the uses of such grants.”. I believe that Bacon’s Coalition is fully funded by Bacon himself, Not only is the CHA listed as a member of Bacon’s Coalition, it is listed as one such entity that is partnering with Bacon’s Coalition.
A closer inspection of the advertisement and website of Bacon’s Coalition reveals that
Bacon’s real target is the premises of his neighbor, Peter Nygard. That hidden agenda is found under the heading “Reversing harmful development impacts on Simms Point/Nygard Cay”.
With this in mind, the CHA’s receipt of (or any of its members), or agreement to receive money from Bacon and his Coalition on the conditions that he specified in the advertisement, compromises any position now taken by the CHA in relation to the Clifton Bay area or Clifton itself. At best, such positions are subject to a high degree of suspicion that necessarily requires the greatest amount of scrutiny. Could it be that the CHA is signing off on Bacon’s agenda in return for the grants of money to it or any of its Members. Matters are made worse by the fact that this hidden agenda neglects to mention or otherwise hides the fact that in 2005-2006, Bacon unlawfully constructed a boat basin on the Lyford Cay property known as The Point House where he is said to live when in The Bahamas. That boat basin was suspiciously constructed underneath the house so that one could not be seen boarding, loading or off-loading vessels that dock there.
You are to note that when the boat basin was being built, I was serving as the Bahamas
Ambassador for The Environment and Chairman of the Bahamas Environment Science &
Technology Commission. In those capacities and according to the policy of the Government at that time, such activity would have required my direct involvement and approval, prior to any permits being issued under the Conservation and Protection of the Physical Landscape of The Bahamas Act, 1997 (Chapter 260 – Statue Law of The Bahamas, 2000) for its construction. Not only can I definitively state that I did not issue any such approval, in December 2010, documents were tabled in The Bahamas Senate by current Attorney General, Senator The Honourable Mrs. Allyson Gibson that confirmed that no approval was given by any Government agency for Bacon’s construction of the boat basin and the secretive under-house dock.
Additionally, your attack on Peter Nygård and the Prime Minister in relation to the sanded area to the south of Nygård’s premises falls foul of the rule against public discourse on issues that are sub-judice. The primary issue of the ongoing proceedings before the Supreme Court of The
Bahamas in Action No. 1447 of 2011 (intitutled Peter Nygård v Attorney General of The Bahamas) is whether, as a matter of law, the said sanded area accumulated there was by way of accretion, as opposed to what amounts to reclamation of land from the sea bed. This Supreme Court Action which remains extant before the Supreme Court of The Bahamas, is known by Bacon or ought reasonably to have been known by him and Chief spokesperson of Bacon’s Coalition, Fred Smith.
I believe the actions of Bacon’s Coalition to be contemptuous and maybe even be criminal in that it is clearly attempting to excite a popular prejudice against Mr. Peter Nygård in the said proceedings of Supreme Court Action No. 1447 of 2011.
The reality is that Bacon’s Coalition was only formed by Bacon after he had been turned back and rebuked for his OUTRAGEOUS LIE at the Audubon Society in New York in February, 2013 on the occasion of him being awarded with a prestigious award for Environmental Leadership.
He lied when he said that he was the “Leader” of that said “grassroot movement” 14 years ago, which led to the saving of the Clifton Heritage. I see the formation of Bacon’s Coalition as his desperate attempt to coopt the CHA to serve his hidden racist agenda along with leading environmental organizations and persons by flaunting huge CASH GRANTS to the CHA and those persons and other organizations. It is no mistake that he has use a name that is very close to the original body (The Coalition to Save Clifton) that championed the cause 14 years ago, which has now risen again in the form of “Saving Clifton Again” to push back on his attempt to revise and rewrite our history. In fact, this offer of money to the CHA (and maybe its members), as set out in the Petition of Bacon’s Coalition (see https://www.change.org/petitions/prime-minister-perry-christie-help-save-the-bays-before-paradise-is-lost), amounts to bribery and contrary to the provisions of the Prevention of Bribery Act, 1976 (Chapter 88 of the Statutory Law of The Bahamas, 2000).
Although Bacon would have you believe that the purpose of Bacon’s Coalition is to SAVE
THE CONCH in Clifton Bay, what he has posted on the website, clearly shows that they wish to bar ALL BAHAMIANS from using any of the coastline of Clifton to fish off of the rocks or by boat, or to otherwise use the Clifton Bay for recreation.
From what I can see, particularly with the installation of fencing and gates that have kept continually locked to cordon off certain parts of the CHA to keep our people from utilizing the facilities, I have every reason to believe that the CHA has agreed with Bacon on some, if not all of what his Coalition has set out in their various publications. Further, the callous bulldozing of the wetlands at the northern side of the CHA evidences ignorance in environment terms or simply disregard for the environment, both of which feeds the rumor that certain parts of Clifton is being offered to Bacon for purchase so that he can give effect to keeping Bahamians off of the CHA.
This state of affairs cannot be allowed to stand.
The fact that Bacon claims to be the owner of a $50 Million sprawling palatial fortress called
“The Point House” aka, “The Rocks” on the northern side of Clifton Bay (in Lyford Cay) taking up more than 1,000 feet of the northern side of the Clifton Bay Coast, should not have missed your collective knowledge.
During his acceptance speech at the Audubon Society (can be seen at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl8Yl46ELVo), Bacon said the most reprehensible thing one can say in Christendom when he said that:
“in…times of questioning of self-doubt, I reach for the HOLY BOOK for answers. Now, as a SOUTHERNER, you have to realize that when I say THE HOLY BOOK, of course, I mean GONE WITH THE WIND”
He went on to draw attention to a passage found in Chapter 2 of that book when the father of the main character, Scarlett, admonishes her for her disregard of her plantation home.
Bacon read that passage aloud. It states:
“Land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth
dying for, because its the only thing that lasts”.
Amazingly, Bacon concluded that portion of his speech by figuratively draping himself in this racist past by saying that that extract, “…kinda sums up [his] philosophy…”.
We have now traced Bacon’s maternal heritage to his great-grandfather, the late Lieutenant Colonel Roger Moore, the last Commander of the 3rd North Carolina Calvary of the 41st Regiment of the Confederate States Army. Lt. Col. Moore is infamously heralded as being the Chief of the Division of the Ku Klux Klan, in Wilmington, North Carolina where he then resided. In fact, it is recorded in Electronic version of the New York Public Library, that after taking the secret oath at Raleigh, North Carolina in 1868, Lt. Col. Moore organized and commanded the Ku Klux Klan at Wilmington which was a black-majority City.
Believed to be the Commander of the General Organization of the secret Committee of Nine, a white supremacists group led by Alfred Moore Waddell, Bacon’s great-grandfather, Lt. Col. Moore, was integrally involved in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 when more than 100 Black people were killed simply because a Wilmington-based organization called The Committee of Colored Citizens refused to commit to shut down a black-owned newspaper.
With the recent purchase of the Orton Plantation in North Carolina which used to be owed by his family in the early 1700’s, we believe that Bacon is attempting to resurrect his racist heritage in hopes to continue the same wherever he goes, including in The Bahamas.
With this in mind, I would say that the chickens of Bacon’s heritage, through his action of trying to rewrite the history of Clifton and extinguish its heritage by writing black people right out of it, are simply coming home to roost. With a heritage such as his, I can see why Bacon would demonstrate so comfortably through his utterance at the Audubon Society why he would, in this 2013, openly show his disdain and dislike of black people or anything that seek to revere us. A man’s past is as much a part of whom and what he is unless he publicly condemns the acts of his forbearers. Bacon has not simply neglected to condemn his great-grandfather for what he represented or stood to support, he has overtly praised those unacceptable attitudes in his acceptance speech at the said Audubon Society Award Ceremony.
I conclude that Bacon is not only a reprehensible revisionist who has been found out, he is an unashamed and bold racist with his eyes on owning and controlling our Clifton Heritage.
Afterall, it is widely known in the literary world that “Gone with The Wind” is considered a book which glorifies the right of the American South to keep their Plantation system and their Slaves.
An excerpt from a critique by Inverarity Live Journal found on the world-wide web at
http://inverarity.livejournal.com/126023.html supports this conclusion: “Gone With the Wind is a racist, revisionist Southern apologetic. Not just racist in a “Well, it was written in 1936 so what do you expect?” kind of way, but offensively, horribly racist even by the standards of the time in which it was written. Margaret Mitchell [the author] was a wealthy debutante in the post-war South, raised with the bitter taste of defeat still in the mouths of her Confederate grandparents, and her novel was, as novelist Pat Conroy (who wrote the preface to the 75th Anniversary Edition) says, “a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.”
– “Gawdlmighty, Miss Scarlett! Ah’s sceered ter go runnin’ roun’ in de dahk by mahseff! Spose de Yankees gits me?”
Of course a writer can write from the viewpoint of Southern slave owners who of course would be racist and view black people with, at best, benevolent paternalism, without her characters’ attitudes necessarily being her own. But it’s very apparent that Mitchell was wholly and uncritically sympathetic to her antebellum ancestors. The Old South was a graceful, chivalrous land where slavery was not a horrible and oppressive institution creating generations of misery and oppression, but a divinely-ordained means of preserving racial harmony. And for all that
Mitchell, like her characters, probably considered herself to be kind and affectionate to all the African-Americans she knew personally, there isn’t a single black character in the book who isn’t an ignorant, semi-human ape — which is literally how they are described. Even beloved Mammy is repeatedly compared to a monkey. From Margaret Mitchell’s version of history, one would get the impression that the only negative thing about slavery was that some slaves were unlucky enough to have mean owners – who were almost always of Yankee descent, since the only really evil people in the book, and the only white people who actually mistreat blacks, are Yankees.”
Interestingly, during the 1998-2004 Save Clifton campaign, I was approached by persons saying that they represented The Moore Charitable Foundation, who attempted to get my support and approval, as one of the key leaders in that campaign, to have a portion of the coast of the Clifton Heritage in exchange for contributing the $25 Million plus that was needed to pay the original owners of the land who was entitled to be paid as a result of the acquisition of it in 1989 by the Bahamas Government, then led by the Father of Our Nation, Sir Lynden Pindling. Of course, that overture was flatly refused by me. I have only learnt in recent years that The Moore Charitable Foundation is Bacon’s foundation which carries the maiden name of his mother and that of his great-grandfather.
Bacon will soon learn that the words of my HOLY BOOK always comes to past for the words of therein is truly, the only thing in this world that will LAST. In fact, he will soon learn the power of Exodus 34:6-7 which states:
6. Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The LORD the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth;
7. Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and fourth generation.”
In this regard, I can announce that I have commenced discussions with local bodies, those in the United Kingdom and in the USA to explore and implement legal action and lobby effort to the Parliaments and Congress of those countries and all others where he does business and own homes either in his personal and business capacities either as Moore Capital Fund or Moore Charitable Foundation for reparations against any family business associated with the wealth he boasts either from the days of the African Slave trade to the days of Jim Crow in the USA to the recent meltdown of the mortgage markets in the USA in which Black people there had an unusual share of the losses experienced.
The manner in which the CHA have recently been governing its operations clearly appears to be with a view to keeping the public off of the Park, or certainly restricted in terms of parts that they are allowed to have access to. This seems to be your carrying out Bacon’s racist design.
It is for these reasons (although not exhaustive), that we require this existing Board (statutory trustees) to resign. It’s the only honourable thing for you to do in the kind system of governance which we laud; Westminster. Should the Board not immediately resign, steps will be taken to compel you to so resign.
Yours truly,
BENEFICIARY
THE CLIFTON HERITAGE
KEOD SMITH
cc. His Excellency The Honourable Sir Arthur Foulkes
Governor General of The Commonwealth of The Bahamsa
Rt. Honourable Perry Christie, MP
Prime Minister of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas &
Minister of Finance
The Honourable Kendall Major, MP
Speaker of the House of Assembly of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas
Senator The Honourable Ms. Sharon Wilson
President of The Senate of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas
Permanent Secretary to the Cabinent
Permanent Secretary to The Governor General
Permanent Secretary to The Office of the Prime Minister
