Bernard Coard

Winston Bernard Coard (born 10 August 1945) is a Grenadian politician who was Deputy Prime Minister in the People's Revolutionary Government of the New Jewel Movement. Coard launched a coup within the revolutionary government and took power for three days until he was himself deposed by General Hudson Austin.

Coard, the son of Frederick McDermott Coard (1893–1978) and Flora Fleming (1907-2004), was born in Victoria, Grenada and is a first cousin of Hon Mr Justice Dunbar Cenac, Registry of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court; Hon Mr Justice Dunbar Cenac's late father, Francis (Kimby) Cenac and the late Flora Coard were biological children of the late Isabella Cenac (née Fletcher). It is also known that Coard is the nephew of the late Hon Mr Justice Dennis Cenac, the last of Isabella Cenac's eight children.

Coard was attending the Grenada Boys' Secondary School, when he met Maurice Bishop, who was then attending Presentation College Grenada. Coard and Bishop shared an interest in left-wing politics from an early age. They became friends and in 1962 they joined together to found the Grenada Assembly of Youth After Truth. Twice per month the two would lead political debates in St. George's Central Market Place.

Coard moved to the United States, where he studied sociology and economics at Brandeis University and joined the Communist Party USA. In 1967 he moved to England and studied political economy at the University of Sussex. While in England Coard joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

He worked for two years as a school teacher in London and ran several youth organisations in South London. In 1971 he published a pamphlet How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain. The pamphlet explained that British schools had a pervasive bias toward treating white children as normal, which led to black children being labelled as "educationally subnormal" (learning-disabled). Coard wrote:

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