Historian Duncan McDowall yesterday branded the clearance of poor black families from Tucker's Town as a "great miscarriage of justice" and attacked lawyer Peter Smith for only concentrating on the price paid to them for their land.

Mr. Smith sparked controversy on Tuesday when he told Hamilton Rotary Club that popular stories that the families were cheated and paid a pittance when they were forced out in the 1920's for tourist developments were wrong.

His father, A.C. Smith, was secretary of the Bermuda Development Company, which bought the land, and he said all the families were paid a fair price for their land.

Prof. McDowall, a Canadian who has written a book on Bermuda tourism which deals with the Tucker's Town clearances, said the families may well have received a fair price.

But he said the real scandal about the Tucker's Town development, which Mr. Smith did not touch on, was the way wealthy whites in 1920's Bermuda could ruthlessly boss about blacks when they wanted.

The black community was forced off the land to make way for the Mid-Ocean Club and Marriott Hotel, which helped kickstart Bermuda's tourist industry.

Prof. McDowall told The Royal Gazette yesterday: "This is still a very sensitive issue in Bermuda and what Mr. Smith misses, in what was a very transparent and self-serving apologia for a number of people, and what made it a sore point, was the way it showed the racial and political arrangements of old Bermuda.

"He skates over that. His main line is that people were not cheated or swindled and the people involved had integrity. By and large that is true, the relative prices paid for the land were fair. That's not really the contention.

"The contention is the much broader issue of a mercantile element which saw an opportunity for tourism, and they are not to be faulted for this, and they were determined to have that at all costs.

"And the people living in Tucker's Town, who were largely black and in every way on the margin of society - illiterate and politically impotent - were not clued into the modern arrangements of political society."

Prof. McDowall, of Carleton University, Ottawa, added: "It was a great miscarriage of justice because you had people who had power, and the authority of the state on their side.

"The people who moved were paid fair compensation but what it comes down to was they were powerless to stop the removal of their way of life.

"It may have been backward and illiterate, but it was their way of life. In the new Bermuda, that is not going to happen again.

"No one has much debated whether they were cheated or swindled or whether the commissioners were crooks.

"And some of the people taken out have said it was probably good for them, but the point of upset was that it revealed the racial and commercial power structure in Bermuda, and it was a very unfair contest in that sense.

"In terms of real estate, they probably got a good price, and the men were not on the take, but what is historically important is that the expropriation revealed the structure of Bermuda society.

"The outcomes were good for tourism, but it revealed a way of life in society and a black and white division, and that is why it is still remembered in Bermuda today. In the end, it was a racial expropriation of land."

Prof. McDowall said that what made it different from the forced removal of other parts of Bermuda for projects such as the US Baselands, was that at Tucker's Town, all those moved were black and powerless.

As a measure of how sensitive the issue still is today, he said when he lectured on the subject in Bermuda in 1996, there were at least 400 people there and the "atmosphere was electric".

In yesterday's Royal Gazette, Bermuda Industrial Union President Derrick Burgess, whose family were forced out of Tucker's Town, also attacked Mr. Smith, saying no price was fair compensation for the way the families were treated.