Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989),Fraser, C. Gerald (2 June 1989), "C. L. R. James, Historian, Critic And Pan-Africanist, Is Dead at 88", The New York Times. . who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist, and Marxist writer. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature.Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993, p. 54. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.Segal, Ronald. The Black Diaspora, London: Faber, 1996, p. 275.
Characterised by Edward Said as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician",Said (1993), Culture and Imperialism, p. 253. James was known for his autodidactism, occasional playwriting and fiction writing, and as an avid sportsman. The 1936 performance of his play Toussaint Louverture was the first time black professional actors were featured in a production written by a black playwright in the UK. James' 1936 book Minty Alley was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in Britain.Bellot, Gabrielle (19 May 2016), "On the First Novel Published By a Black Caribbean Writer in England", The Huffington Post. . He is also famed as a writer on cricket and in 1963 he published his book Beyond a Boundary, which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography".James, Beyond a Boundary (1963), Preface.
Biography Early life in Trinidad Born in 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago, which was a British Crown colony then, C. L. R. James was the first child of schoolteacher Robert Alexander James"Timeline" , Every Cook Can Govern: Documenting the life, impact & works of CLR James. and Ida Elizabeth, née Rudder.
In 1910, James won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College (QRC), the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Port of Spain, where he became a club cricketer, distinguished himself as an athlete (he held the Trinidad high-jump record at from 1918 to 1922), and began to write fiction.Busby, Margaret, "C. L. R. James: A Biographical Introduction", in At the Rendezvous of Victory, Allison & Busby, 1984, p. vii. After graduating in 1918 from QRC, he worked there as a teacher of English and History in the 1920s; among those he taught was the young Eric Williams, who became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes, and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anticolonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine, in which he published a series of short stories. His short story "La Divina Pastora" was published in October 1927 in the Saturday Review of Literature and was widely reprinted.
British years In 1932, James left Trinidad for the small town of Nelson in Lancashire, England, at the invitation of his friend, West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine, who needed his help writing his autobiography Cricket and I (published in London in 1933, with a preface by critic Neville Cardus).Grimshaw, Anna, "Notes on the Life and Work of C. L. R. James", in Paul Buhle (ed.), C. L. R. James: His Life and Work, London: Allison & Busby, 1986, pp. 9–21."Cricket and I" at AbeBooks.co.uk. James had brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work, partly based on his interviews with the Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, which was published with financial assistance from Constantine in 1932."C.L.R. James" , Encyclopædia Britannica.Guha, Ramachandra (2004), "Black is Bountiful: C. L. R. James", in An Anthropologist Among the Marxists and Other Essays, Delhi: Permanent Black, p. 215.
During this time, James took a job as cricket correspondent with The Manchester Guardian, recruited by Neville Cardus, alongside whom he worked. In 1933, he moved to London. The following year, he joined a Trotskyist group that met to talk for hours in his rented room. Louise Cripps, one of its members, recalled: "We felt our work could contribute to the time when we would see Socialism spreading."
James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad. An abridged version of his Life of Captain Cipriani was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933 as the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government."The Case for West-Indian Self Government" was included in C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present (Selected Writings, vol. 1), London: Allison and Busby, 1977, pp. 25–40 ."The Life of Captain Cipriani", Every Cook Can Govern: Documenting the life, impact & works of CLR James.The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, with the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government at Duke University Press (2014). . James became a champion of Pan-Africanism and served as Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, later renamed the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE)Excerpts from pamphlet Celebrating C. L. R. James, produced by Hackney Library Service 2012. C. L. R. James Legacy Project.. — a group formed in 1935 in response to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia (the Second Italo-Ethiopian War). Leading members included Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, and Chris Braithwaite.
When the IAFE was transformed into the International African Service Bureau in 1937, James edited its newsletter, Africa and the World, and its journal, International African Opinion. The Bureau was led by his childhood friend George Padmore, who became a driving force for socialist Pan-Africanism for several decades. Both Padmore and James wrote for the New Leader, published by the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which James had joined in 1934 (when Fenner Brockway was its General Secretary).Polsgrove, Ending British Rule, pp. 27, 35.
In 1934, James wrote a three-act play about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture (entitled Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History), which was staged in London's West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson, Orlando Martins, Robert Adams, and Harry Andrews.James, C. L. R., Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History – A Play in Three Acts (edited and with an introduction by Christian Høgsbjerg), Duke University Press, 2013. .Bennett, Gaverne (May 2013), – review – toussaint – louverture – by – clr.html "Book Review: Toussaint Louverture by CLR James", LSHG Newsletter # 49. . The play had been presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. The play was adapted into a 2023 graphic novel by Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee (published by Verso Books). (James went on to write in 1967 a second play about the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, which would become the first production from Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, coinciding with the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had held the presidency of Haiti since 1971.)"The Black Jacobins | Talawa Theatre Company – 21st February 2019" .
Also in 1936, Secker & Warburg in London published James's novel, Minty Alley, which he had brought with him in manuscript form from Trinidad. (Fenner Brockway had introduced him to Fredric Warburg, co-owner of the press.)Matera, Marc, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, University of California Press, 2015, p. 276. It was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK.Paris, D. Elliott, "Minty Alley", in Paul Buhle (ed.), C. L. R. James: His Life and Work, London: Allison & Busby, 1986, p. 200. In 1937, James wrote the foreword to Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of revolution and the civil war, by Juan Ramón Breá and Mary Stanley Low.
Amid his frenetic political activity, James wrote what are perhaps his best known works of non-fiction: World Revolution (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International, which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, George Orwell, E. H. Carr, and Fenner Brockway;Brockway, Fenner, The New Leader, 16 April 1937. and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian Revolution, which was later seen as a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora. James went to Paris to research this work, where he met Haitian military historian Alfred Auguste Nemours. In a new foreword to the 1980 Allison & Busby edition of The Black Jacobins, James recalled that "Nemours used coffee cups and books in Paris cafés to bring to life the military skills of revolutionary Haitians."
In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the ILP to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation.
Speaking tour in the United States At the urging of Trotsky and James P. Cannon, in October 1938, James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), then the US section of the Fourth International, to facilitate its work among black workers. Following several meetings in New York, where he garnered "enthusiastic praise for his oratorical ability and capacity for analysis of world events", James kicked off his national speaking tour on 6 January 1939 in Philadelphia. He gave lectures in cities including New Haven, Youngstown, Rochester, and Boston, before finishing the tour with two lectures in Los Angeles and another in Pasadena in March 1939. He spoke on topics such as "Twilight of the British Empire" and "The Negro and World Imperialism".
Constance Webb, who later became James's second wife, attended one of his 1939 lectures in Los Angeles and reflected on it in her memoir, writing: "I had already heard speeches by two great orators, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now I was hearing a third. The three men were masters of the English language, a skill that gave them extraordinary power."
James's relationship with Louise Cripps Samoiloff had broken up after her second abortion, so that intimate tie no longer bound him to England.Polsgrove, Ending British Rule, p. 34.
Meeting Trotsky
In April 1939, James visited Trotsky in Coyoacán, Mexico. James stayed there for about a month and also met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, before returning to the United States in May 1939. A key topic that James and Trotsky discussed was the "Negro Question". Parts of their conversation were transcribed, with James sometimes referred to by his pen-name, J. R. Johnson. Whereas Trotsky saw the Trotskyist Party as providing leadership to the black community, in the general manner that the Bolsheviks provided guidance to ethnic minorities in Russia, James suggested that the self-organised struggle of African Americans would precipitate a much broader radical social movement.
U.S. and the Johnson–Forest Tendency James stayed in the United States until he was deported in 1953. By 1940, he had begun to doubt Trotsky's view of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state. He left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers' Party (WP). Within the WP, James formed the Johnson–Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya (his pseudonym was Johnson and Dunayevskaya's was Forest) and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs) to spread their views within the new party.
As "J. R. Johnson", James wrote the column "The Negro Question" for Socialist Appeal (later renamed The Militant), and was also a columnist for the WP newspaper Labor Action.