Happy birthday to a boo-bear whom I love, love, LOVE!! She didn't have a Doodle request, so I selected the Jamaican flag since it represents some of her roots.
After dissolution of the West Indies Federation, a group formed in 1958 of British-ruled islands. Needing a new flag to fly, Jamaica held a national flag design competition (in 1961), which failed to yield a winning model, a bipartisan committee of the Jamaica House of Representatives in early 1962 moved quickly to establish their national flag in anticipation of its independence day, August 6, 1962.
The legislative committee responsible agreed that the flag should have the colors black, yellow, and green. These colors stood for the difficulties faced by the nation (black), its natural wealth and the beauty of its sunlight (yellow), and agriculture and hope (green). This was summed up in the phrase “The sun shineth, the land is green and the people are strong and creative”
The proposed flag had unequal horizontal stripes of green, yellow, black, yellow, and green. When it was discovered that this was similar to the new national flag of Tanganyika (now in Tanzania), the present design, incorporating a diagonal division of the black and green surmounted by a yellow saltire, was selected. This saltire was distinctive, but it did not have any official symbolic meaning.
The Jamaican flag was unfurled and hoisted for the first time at the dramatic hour of midnight on August 5, 1962 as the British flag was being lowered, signaling the dawn of Jamaica’s political independence from Britain, present day United Kingdom, after over 300 years under British rule.
