Leonard Howell

Leonard Percival Howell, an early preacher of Rastafari in 1930s Jamaica and founder of the Pinnacle commune near Sligoville, whose repeated arrests and the community's suppression shaped the colonial-era hostility that later fell on Rasta music and imagery. In 1934 Howell and his second-in-command Robert Hinds were tried for sedition after Howell sold roughly 3,000 postcard photographs of Haile Selassie at a shilling each while declaring the Ethiopian emperor the only sovereign owed allegiance, implying no further taxes were due the British Crown; the trial, before Jamaica's Lord Chief Justice, drew heavy press coverage, and Howell was declared insane and confined before his release by 1940, when he founded Pinnacle.