[3] The riots, which began on 16 October 1968, triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in Rodney's book The Groundings with my Brothers, published by Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications in 1969.

In this landmark work, Rodney denounced leaders who, like Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Idi Amin Dada and Joseph Mobutu, were turning to tribalism under the guise of "negritude."

[9] On 13 June 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, at the age of 38, by an explosive communication device in his car, a month after he returned from celebrations of independence in Zimbabwe at a time of intense political activism.

[11] "I found Rodney to be a deeply intelligent and compassionate man, with a hatred of bloodshed but a deep and growing fear that violence and civil war might be the inevitable consequence of Burnham's determination to hold on to power by all available means" (1979) Sam Silkin, former UK Attorney General.

It is widely believed, but not proven, that the assassination was set up by Guyana's president, (Guyanese Government was found liable for Rodney’s death in 2017 by Commission of Inquiry) Linden Forbes Burnham.

[12][13] Rodney believed that the various ethnic groups historically disenfranchised by the ruling colonial class should work together, a position that challenged Burnham's hold on power.

[14] In 2014,[15] a Commission of Inquiry (COI) was held during which a new witness, Holland Gregory Yearwood, came forward claiming to be a long-standing friend of Rodney and a former member of the WPA.

[16] Yet the same Commission of Inquiry (COI) concluded in their report that Rodney's death was a state-ordered killing, and that then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham must have had knowledge of the plot.

On 14 April 2021, the Guyana Court of Appeals overturned this judgment and Donald's sentence, exonerating him after forty years in which he contested his conviction.

23" to implement the 2016 findings of "The Commission of Inquiry Appointed to Enquire and Report on the Circumstances Surrounding the Death in An Explosion of the Late Dr. Walter Rodney on Thirteenth Day of June, One Thousand, Nine Hundred and Eighty at Georgetown".

In 1984, the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick established the Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture in recognition of the life and work of one of the most outstanding scholar-activists of the Black Diaspora in the post-World War II era.

In 2004, Rodney's widow Patricia and his children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center.

In 2005, the London Borough of Southwark erected a plaque in the Peckham Library Square in commemoration of Dr. Walter Rodney, the political activist, historian and global freedom fighter.

In 2022, at the 36th Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, 50th Anniversary of Dr. Walter Rodney's Book: "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", was presented by Horace G. Campbell at University of the West Indies.

In 2022 and 2023, SAVVY Contemporary, an independent art space in Berlin (Germany), dedicated a research, performance and exhibition project, titled to Walter Rodney, fifty years after the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.