This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Violence at a gas station in Coral Gardens, near Montego Bay, on 11 April 1963 escalated within hours into a state crackdown on Rastafari across the island. Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante ordered police to "bring in all Rastas, dead or alive," turning a local incident into an order aimed at an entire religious community rather than at the individuals involved in the original violence.
Over the two days that followed, at least eight Rastafari were killed and up to 150 detained, many of them with their dreadlocks forcibly cut and some subjected to torture. What had actually set off the violence is not agreed even now: a police account blames the confrontation on the Rastafari present, while another traces the trigger to a longstanding land dispute at the nearby Rose Hall estate, a genuine disagreement between the two versions that this article states rather than resolves.
What Coral Gardens changed for Rastafari in Jamaica was the length of the reckoning that followed the crackdown itself. Jamaica's government did not formally apologise for what had happened until April 2017, more than fifty years after the events at Coral Gardens, leaving the movement to carry the memory of a state ordered roundup for two full generations before the state that had ordered it acknowledged it at all.