Clennell Wilsden Wickham (21 September 1895 – 6 October 1938) was a radical West Indian journalist, editor of Barbadian newspaper The Herald and champion of black, working-class causes against the white planter oligarchy in colonial Barbados during the inter-war period, leading to the social unrest that triggered the Riots of 26 July 1937.
[1][2] After his return to Barbados, he joined The Herald newspaper, edited by Clement A. Inniss, in 1919 and wrote for universal adult suffrage in a column under the title "Audax" (the listener).
Clennell described the attitudes of the white assembly in the early 20eth century as follows: Wickham shaped a lot of Atholl Edwin Seymour "TT" Lewis's (1905–1959) political thought, and he had a high regard for the man.
By the time Lewis got to know Wickham, the latter had already lost a libel case in 1930 that separated him from the Herald newspaper and effectively exiled him to neighbouring island Grenada and suffered several years of frustration and great hardship.
A Barbados special jury upheld the libel suit brought by the Bridgetown merchant W. D. Bayley against Clennell, who was represented by a young Grantley Adams and which resulted in the termination of his editorship of the newspaper and a change of its ownership.
[9] Wickham founded and edited The Outlook: A Monthly Magazine and Review, known for his radical political views expressed primarily in his previous weekly Herald.
Its reviews of texts such as George S. Schuyler's Black No More (1931) were evidence of the linkages between the Harlem Renaissance and the West Indian awakening that would become even more pronounced in The Forum Quarterly.
In a manner that was revolutionary and unprecedented for the times, another short-lived journal published between 1931 and 1934, The Forum Quarterly envisaged its role as supplementing the work of other publications, such as the Herald newspaper edited by Wickham and Clement Inniss.
Former Principal of UWI, Keith Hunte wrote: "The Herald provided a medium through which its editor, Clennell Wickham, poured trenchant criticism on the political behaviour of the local oligarchy and called attention to social ills that needed to be remedied."
The journal's further definition of its mission in The Literary Outlook, in the March 1932, recognized the potential of the synergies between literature and other publications of social discourse exploited chiefly by Clennell and Inniss, and O'Neale, with whom they had established the Democratic League in 1924: Barbados in the 1920s and 1930s was that liberalism was not rooted there.
Barbara Wickham, his surviving younger sister (1999), related how on his return to Barbados he had been asked to vacate a church pew reserved for whites.