C. L. R. James

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born on the fourth of January 1901 at Caroni, in the Caroni Plain of the British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, the son of an Trinidadian-Anglican-schoolteacher father and a Trinidadian-Anglican-Bantu-descended mother. He was raised in the Trinidadian-Anglican working-class community of the closing decade of the British colonial period.

He was placed at six at the Caroni Anglican Primary School and at the Queen’s Royal College at Port of Spain — the principal Trinidadian male secondary school of the closing years of the British colonial period — where he was a contemporary of George Padmore (placed in this archive).

He took the closing portion of the Queen’s Royal College education through 1918 and was hired in 1919 as a teacher at the Queen’s Royal College itself — the first Black-Caribbean-born teacher at the Queen’s Royal College in the institution’s post-1860 history.

He was hired in 1920 by the Trinidad-Government Civil Service at the closing months of the British colonial period as the principal Trinidadian schoolteacher of the period. He taught at the principal Trinidadian secondary schools from 1920 to 1932 — and at the same period was the principal Trinidadian sports-journalist for the Trinidadian Daily Mirror.

He relocated to London in 1932 at thirty-one — and entered the closing-period London literary-political ferment of the inter-war period.

He joined the Independent Labour Party at London in 1934 — and shortly thereafter transferred to the principal Trotskyist Marxist Group at London under the principal British Trotskyist Murry Aubrey-and-Maurice Brinton circle of the closing years of the 1930s. He broke with the principal British Trotskyist circle in 1938 and remained a principal independent Trotskyist intellectual of the closing years of the period.

He wrote across 1933 to 1938 the principal historical monograph of his career — The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Saint-Domingue Revolution — published at London by the principal Marxist publisher Secker and Warburg in 1938. The James monograph was the principal historical-and-political reading of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 — and was at the time of publication and remains the principal historical-political reading of the Saint-Domingue Revolution in the English language.

He wrote in 1936 the play Toussaint Louverture — performed at the Westminster Theatre, London on the sixteenth of March 1936 with Paul Robeson (placed in this archive) in the title role — the first major London stage production of the Haitian Revolution.

He relocated to the United States in 1938 and operated across the closing years of the 1930s and the 1940s in the principal Manhattan-based Johnson-Forest Tendency of the principal American Trotskyist movement of the period — under the personal collaboration with the principal Trotskyist Raya Dunayevskaya and the principal American Trotskyist Grace Lee Boggs.

He was expelled from the United States in 1953 under the principal McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 — and returned to London at the closing months of 1953.

He published in 1963 the principal late monograph of his career — Beyond a Boundary, on the principal Trinidadian-cricket-and-imperial-cricket tradition — and operated across the closing years of his life as the principal Pan-African intellectual of the principal London circles of the closing years of the 1960s and the 1970s and the 1980s.

He died at Brixton, London on the thirty-first of May 1989 of complications of pneumonia, at eighty-eight.

He is honored here as the author of The Black Jacobins.