BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY Jeremiah Gumbs, 91; Led Anguilla Protest

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Jeremiah Gumbs, a hotel keeper who became a hero in Anguilla when that sliver of sand upended Britain's postcolonial design for the Caribbean islands known as the Lesser Antilles, died there on Thursday, his family announced. He was 91.

Mr. Gumbs, an institution on an island that today has a population of about 12,000 people, reached a world audience in 1967 when he went before the United Nations with the islanders' objections to a British plan that lumped Anguilla's 35 square miles into a self-governing state, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, associated with Britain.

Considering the 70 miles of blue waters between Anguilla, the northernmost of the Leeward Islands, and the new authorities in St. Kitts, not to mention the many different flags that flew on the islands in between, like St. Martin and St. Barthélemy, the Anguillians balked.

''After 300 years of neglect as a British colony,'' Mr. Gumbs told the United Nations, ''the people feel they are able to take care of their own affairs.'' Indeed, he said, Anguillians wanted independence.

The people of Anguilla voted for it, 1,813 to 5, but Britain did not recognize either the referendum or Mr. Gumbs as a leader of the secessionist movement. But a special United Nations subcommittee on colonialism listened to his formal arguments for Anguilla.

It was a ''natural paradise,'' Mr. Gumbs said of the island, but had been left undeveloped under British rule, without running water, electricity, phones or a decent road. (A new highway, built with European aid, has recently been named for Mr. Gumbs.)

The British protested United Nations involvement, while other Caribbean commonwealth islands sought to mediate.

Britain asserted that the island was ''completely dominated by a gangster-type element,'' referring to Mr. Gumbs and the chosen leader of the rebellion, James Ronald Webster. It sent a troop of London's Metropolitan Police force to keep order and stop the secession movement.

But efforts to patch the link to St. Kitts failed. In the end, Anguilla got part of what it wanted, becoming a self-governing British dependent territory with its own elected officials, an arrangement codified in 1971 and brought up to date with Anguilla's new Constitution in 1982.

Jeremiah Gumbs was born in Anguilla, the youngest of nine children; his mother was a baker and his father a fisherman. He started school in Anguilla, but economic hardship drove him as a boy to work the cane fields in the Dominican Republic. Starting at age 15, he worked for two years in oil refineries in Aruba and Curaçao before returning to Anguilla to teach himself tailoring.

At 25, he went to live with a sister in Brooklyn and took night classes at City College on a scholarship. He hoped to become a dentist, but was drafted into the Army in 1941 and was given American citizenship at the time.

After the war, he married Lydia Gibbs of Perth Amboy, N.J., and, using his G.I. Bill money, trained as a furnace installer. He started his own company in Perth Amboy, Gumbs Fuelers, and made a success of it.

When he took Lydia to show her Anguilla, it was she who planted the idea for another venture -- tourism on the island's untouched beaches. They bought 14 acres, later doubling the amount, and in 1959 started building Anguilla's first beach resort with their own hands.

They rented the first rooms in 1962, opening what has become the Rendezvous Bay Hotel and Villas, a cornerstone of the island's growing tourism industry.

As a businessman with local roots and a civic leader acquainted with the ways of the world, Jeremiah Gumbs became a natural choice to serve as the island's roving ambassador during the Anguillan revolution of 1967-69.

He managed the hotel until about five years ago and remained a jovial host after that.

Lydia Gumbs died about three years ago. Jeremiah Gumbs is survived by three sons, J. Alan, the managing director and owner of the Rendezvous Bay, Clyde, of Atlanta, and Duane, of Edison, N.J.; a daughter, Una, of Edison and Anguilla; and seven grandchildren.