C. L. R. James

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. Characterised by Edward Said as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician", James was known for his autodidactism, occasional playwriting and fiction writing, and as an avid sportsman. The performance of his 1934 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. 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 studied at Queen's Royal College. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is politics, journalism and translation. Employment is recorded with University of the District of Columbia and The Guardian. Works named in the authority record are The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary, Minty Alley and World Revolution.

• Name — C. L. R. James • Birth Name — Cyril Lionel Robert James • Born — 4 January 1901 • Birthplace — Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago • Died — 31 May 1989 • Place of death — Brixton, London, England • Other Names — J. R. Johnson; Nello James • Occupation — Historian, writer • Movement — Johnson–Forest Tendency Caribbean Artists Movement • Notable Works — The Black Jacobins Beyond a Boundary Minty Alley

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 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 5 ft from 1918 to 1922), and began to write fiction. 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.

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). 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. 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. 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) — 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). • Illustration — James in 1938 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. 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.) 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.) It was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK. 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; 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.

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.

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.

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. While within the WP, the views of the Johnson–Forest Tendency underwent considerable development. By the end of the Second World War, they had definitively rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state. Instead, they classified it as state capitalist, a political evolution shared by other Trotskyists of their generation, most notably Tony Cliff. Unlike Cliff, the Johnson–Forest Tendency was focusing increasingly on the liberation movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James's thought in his 1939 discussions with Trotsky. Such liberation struggles came to take centre stage for the Johnson–Forest Tendency. After the Second World War, the WP witnessed a downturn in revolutionary sentiment. The Tendency, on the other hand, was encouraged by the prospects for revolutionary change for oppressed peoples. After a few short months as an independent group, during which they published a great deal of material, in 1947, the Johnson–Forest Tendency joined the SWP, which it regarded as more proletarian than the WP. James still described himself as a Leninist despite his rejection of Vladimir Lenin's conception of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party. He argued for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements. By 1949, James rejected the idea of a vanguard party. This led the Johnson–Forest Tendency to leave the Trotskyist movement and rename itself the Correspondence Publishing Committee. In 1955, after James had left for Britain, about half the membership of the Committee withdrew, under the leadership of Raya Dunayevskaya, to form a separate tendency of Marxist humanism and found the organisation News and Letters Committees. Whether Dunayevskaya's faction had constituted a majority or a minority in the Correspondence Publishing Committee remains a matter of dispute. Historian Kent Worcester says that Dunayevskaya's supporters formed a majority, but Martin Glaberman says in New Politics that the faction loyal to James had a majority. The Committee split again in 1962, as Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, two key activists, left to pursue a more Third Worldist approach. The remaining Johnsonites, including leading member Martin Glaberman, reconstituted themselves as Facing Reality. James advised the group from Great Britain until it dissolved in 1970, against his urging. James's writings were also influential in the development of Autonomist Marxism as a current within Marxist thought. He himself saw his life's work as developing the theory and practice of Leninism.

In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his visa. In his attempt to remain in America, he wrote a study of Herman Melville, titled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate. He wrote the book while being detained at the immigration station on Ellis Island. In an impassioned letter to his old friend George Padmore, James said that in Mariners he was using Moby-Dick as a parable for the anti-communism sweeping the United States, a consequence, he thought, of Americans' uncritical faith in capitalism. Returning to Britain, James appeared to Padmore and his partner Dorothy Pizer to be a man adrift. After James started reporting on cricket for the Manchester Guardian, Padmore wrote to American novelist Richard Wright: "That will take him out of his ivory tower and making his paper revolution...." Grace Lee Boggs, a colleague from the Detroit group, came to London in 1954 to work with James, but she too, saw him "at loose ends, trying to find his way after fifteen years out of the country." In 1957, James travelled to Ghana – formerly the Gold Coast – for the celebration of its independence from British rule in March that year. He had met Ghana's new head of state, Kwame Nkrumah, in the United States when Nkrumah was studying there and had sent him on to work with George Padmore in London after the Second World War; Padmore was by this point a close Nkrumah advisor and had written The Gold Coast Revolution (1953). In correspondence sent from Ghana in 1957, James told American friends that Nkrumah thought he, too, ought to write a book on the Convention People's Party, which under Nkrumah's leadership had brought the country to independence. The book shows how the party's strategies could be used to build a new African future. James invited Grace Lee Boggs, his colleague from Detroit, to join in the work, though in the end, James wrote Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution on his own. The book was not published until 1977 (by Allison & Busby in London), years after Nkrumah's overthrow, exile and subsequent death.

In 1958, James went back to Trinidad at the request of Eric Williams, who was then the island's premier, and edited The Nation newspaper, publication of Williams's pro-independence People's National Movement (PNM) party. James also became active again in the Pan-African movement. He believed that the Ghana revolution greatly encouraged the anticolonialist revolutionary struggle. James also advocated the West Indies Federation. It was over this issue that he fell out with the PNM leadership. He resigned as editor of The Nation in 1960, and returned to Great Britain, where he joined Calvin C. Hernton, Obi Egbuna and others on the faculty of the Antiuniversity of London, which had been set up in early 1968 by a group of left-wing thinkers led by American academic Joseph Berke. In 1968, James was invited to the US, where he taught from 1970 at the University of the District of Columbia (formerly Federal City College), leaving for Trinidad in 1980. Ultimately returning in 1981 to Britain, where Allison & Busby had in the mid-1970s begun a programme of reissuing his work, starting with a volume of selected writings, James spent his last years in Brixton, London. In the 1980s, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from South Bank Polytechnic (later to become London South Bank University) for his body of socio-political work, including that relating to race and sport. James died in London from a chest infection on 19 May 1989, aged 88. His funeral took place on Monday, 12 June in Trinidad, where he was buried at Tunapuna Cemetery. A state memorial service was held for him at the National Stadium, Port of Spain, on 28 June 1989.

James married his first wife, Juanita Young, in Trinidad in 1929, but his move three years later to Britain led to their estrangement. He met his second wife, Constance Webb (1918–2005), an American model, actress and author, after he moved to the US in 1938; she wrote of having first heard him speak in the spring of 1939 at a meeting in California. James and Webb married in 1946 and their son, C. L. R. James Jr, familiarly known as Nobbie, was born in 1949. Separated forcibly in 1952, by James's arrest and detention on Ellis Island, the couple divorced in 1953, when James was deported to Britain, while Webb remained in New York with Nobbie. A collection of James's letters to Webb was posthumously published as Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939–1948, edited and introduced by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Stories written by James for his son were published in 2006 as The Nobbie Stories for Children and Adults, edited and introduced by Constance Webb (with a foreword by Anna Grimshaw). In 1956, James married Selma Weinstein (née Deitch), who had been a young member of the Johnson–Forest Tendency; they remained close political colleagues for more than 25 years, but divorced in 1980. She is best known as one of the founders of the International Wages for Housework Campaign.

Collections of C. L. R. James papers are held at the University of the West Indies Alma Jordan Library, St Augustine, Trinidad, and at Columbia University Libraries. Duke University Press publish the series "The C. L. R. James Archives", edited by Robert A. Hill, literary executor of the estate of C. L. R. James, producing new editions of books by James, as well as scholarly explorations of his oeuvre.