Elma François

Elma Constance François was born on 14 October 1897 in Overland, St. Vincent, to agricultural labourers Stanley and Estina François. After her family moved to Kingstown to escape volcanic eruptions when she was five, she worked as a cotton picker alongside her mother while attending school, and after leaving school found early work at a sugar factory — where she was promptly dismissed for attempting to organise fellow workers.

François migrated to Trinidad in 1919, working as a domestic servant while becoming active in the Trinidad Workingmen's Association during the 1920s. In 1934, she co-founded the National Unemployed Movement, organising 'hunger marches' to highlight joblessness, before going on to found the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association, which championed impoverished workers and domestic servants, launched a newsletter called The New Emancipator, and organised a dockworker boycott of Italian ships following Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia.

When labour riots broke out across Trinidad in June 1937, François travelled immediately to the epicentre in Fyzabad and helped instigate a sympathetic strike in Port of Spain days later. She was arrested and charged with sedition alongside labour leader Tubal Uriah 'Buzz' Butler, becoming the first woman in Trinidad and Tobago's history to face such a charge. Choosing to represent herself in court, she was acquitted by the jury. She died suddenly in 1944, and was posthumously declared a National Heroine of Trinidad and Tobago in 1987.