What major political work did C. L. R. James publish about the Haitian Revolution?

In 1938 he wrote The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution which became a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora.

Why did C. L. R. James leave the United States in 1953?

James stayed in the United States until he was deported in 1953 after years of political activity with groups like the Socialist Workers Party.

Which book by C. L. R. James is considered his most famous work on cricket?

He published Beyond a Boundary in 1963 which describes cricket in an historical and social context rather than as mere reminiscences or autobiography.

C. L. R. James: the story on HearLore

Q: Who were the key figures involved in forming the Johnson Forest Tendency with C. L. R. James?

Within the Workers Party James formed the Johnson Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs to spread their views within the new party.

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born on the 4th of January 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago. He grew up as the first child of schoolteacher Robert Alexander James and Ida Elizabeth Rudder. In 1910, he won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College, the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school located in Port of Spain. The young student distinguished himself as an athlete while also developing his writing skills. He held the Trinidad high-jump record from 1918 until 1922. After graduating in 1918, James worked there as a teacher of English and History during the 1920s. Among those he taught was the young Eric Williams who later became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes, and Alfred Mendes, James formed part of the anticolonialist Beacon Group. This circle of writers published short stories in The Beacon magazine. His story La Divina Pastora appeared 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. He arrived at the invitation of his friend West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine who needed help writing his autobiography Cricket and I. That book would be published in 1933. James brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work which was partly based on interviews with Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani. Financial assistance from Constantine allowed this work to be published in 1932. During this time James took a job as cricket correspondent with The Manchester Guardian. In 1933 he moved to London where he joined a Trotskyist group that met to talk for hours in his rented room. Louise Cripps one of its members recalled feeling their work could contribute to seeing Socialism spread. James had begun campaigning for independence of the West Indies while still 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. He became a champion of Pan-Africanism and was named Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia later renamed the International African Friends of Ethiopia. This group formed in 1935 in response to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia.

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. The play was staged in London's West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson Orlando Martins Robert Adams and Harry Andrews. It had been presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. 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. Amid his frenetic political activity James wrote what are perhaps his best known works of non-fiction. World Revolution published in 1937 was a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International. It received critical praise from Leon Trotsky George Orwell E. H. Carr and Fenner Brockway. In 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. This widely acclaimed history became 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 James recalled that Nemours used coffee cups and books in Paris cafés to bring to life the military skills of revolutionary Haitians.

At the urging of Trotsky and James P. Cannon James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party in October 1938. He kicked off his national speaking tour on the 6th of January 1939 in Philadelphia. Constance Webb who later became James' second wife attended one of his lectures in Los Angeles and reflected on it in her memoir. She noted hearing him speak alongside Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as three great orators. 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. Within the WP James formed the Johnson, Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya and 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 which was later renamed The Militant. 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. Unlike Tony Cliff the Johnson, Forest Tendency focused increasingly on liberation movements of oppressed minorities. 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. 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.

James is widely known as a writer on cricket especially for his autobiographical 1963 book Beyond a Boundary. He described this work himself as neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography. John Arlott called it so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it. The book's key question frequently quoted by modern journalists and essayists is inspired by a line in Rudyard Kipling's poem English Flag. James asks in the Preface What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? Acknowledging that answering involves ideas as well as facts James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context. While editor of The Nation he led the successful campaign in 1960 to have Frank Worrell appointed the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team. James believed that the relationship between players and the public was a prominent reason behind the West Indies achieving so much with so little. A conference to mark the 50th anniversary of its first publication was held 10, the 11th of May 2013. In August 1996 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-part abridgement of James's Beyond a Boundary read by Trevor McDonald and produced by Pam Fraser Solomon.

In 1937 James edited the newsletter Africa and the World and its journal International African Opinion for the International African Service Bureau. 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 which James had joined in 1934 when Fenner Brockway was its General Secretary. In 1957 James travelled to Ghana 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. 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. 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 party.

In the 1970s and 1980s a number of titles by James were published by Allison & Busby including four volumes of selected writings published during his lifetime. These looked to bring together the best of James' writing and introduce him to a new audience. They included The Future in the Present published in 1977 Spheres of Existence in 1980 At the Rendezvous of Victory in 1984 and Cricket in 1986. In his honour the Nello James Centre in Whalley Range Manchester was bought with funds donated by Vanessa Redgrave and bequeathed to the community in the 1970s. In 1976 Mike Dibb directed a film about James entitled Beyond a Boundary for the BBC Television series Omnibus. In 1983 a 60-minute film Talking History featuring James in dialogue with historian E. P. Thompson was made by Penumbra Productions. A public library in the London Borough of Hackney is named in his honour. There was a C. L. R. James Week of ceremonies in March 1985. His widow Selma James attended a reception there to mark its 20th anniversary. In 2004 English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque in Brixton London at 165 Railton Road inscribed C. L. R. JAMES 1901, 1989 West Indian Writer and Political Activist lived and died here. On the 17th of March 2023 a blue plaque was unveiled in Southwick West Sussex to mark the house where in 1937 James wrote The Black Jacobins. James appeared briefly in Steve McQueen's 2020 film Mangrove part of the Small Axe strand portrayed by Derek Griffiths.

C. L. R. James.

British Years And Political Awakening

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Common questions

The Black Jacobins And Haitian History

American Exile And The Johnson-Forest Tendency

Pan-African Activism And Postcolonial Struggles

Legacy And Cultural Recognition