PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness ISSN: 1543-0855 Issue 6 (2007)

Acklyn Lynch

Any conversation with C.L.R. James—elder . . . mentor . . . friend—was an inspiring moment, whether he was teaching, storytelling or challenging you on serious intellectual issues. The learning curve was steep because his wisdom and commitment to truth always prevailed. Often, students and activists gathered around him to “reason” about their responsibilities to the future.

C.L.R. never tried to indoctrinate us with his ideological formation, but shared generously his accumulated knowledge. I had been familiar with his work, before I met him in the late Sixties. His reputation as a Marxist-Leninist scholar and a Trotskyist preceded him.

C.L.R. was born on January 4, 1901—in Tunapuna, a small town in the North-Eastern corridor of Trinidad and Tobago. He was an outstanding student athlete. He wrote in literary circles before leaving for London in 1932. He left England in 1938 for the United States and remained here until 1953. He returned to the Caribbean in 1958 at the request of Dr. Eric Williams to edit the Peoples National Movement’s (PNM) newspaper, The Nation. After a falling out with the PNM party leadership on the Chaguaramas base issue, he resigned from the newspaper. He left Trinidad and Tobago a few days before the independence celebrations in 1962; and he returned in 1965 only to be put under house arrest by the PNM government under the leadership of Dr. Williams. He left for London in 1965. He returned to the United States in 1968. From 1968 to 1980, he lived in Washington, D.C., where he taught at Federal City College and Howard University. It was during this period that I got to know C.L.R. fairly well.

During the 1968-1980 period, C.L.R. traveled extensively across the country on the lecture circuit. However, he was able to spend quality time with those of us who were part of the Civil Rights Movement. This experience challenged his imagination as he became attached to our ongoing work. He connected our struggle with world history and showed us its relationship to the Haitian Revolution, maroonage, slave revolts in the Americas and the outstanding intellectual contributions of DuBois, Douglass, Robeson, Garvey, Césaire, Padmore, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Fanon, Rodney, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Jackson, Angela Davis, etc. He validated our work in the Sixties and encouraged us to organize study groups. He affirmed our progress and applauded the fact that ordinary people were an essential part of the struggle. He also insisted that we pay particular attention to the literary work of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, etc., arguing that they were among the best writers of the Sixties and the Seventies.

These conversations with C.L.R. were events extended by the angularity and depth of the moment. His sense of humor often buttressed the seriousness. He demanded from us incisive and critical analysis and recommended a broadening of our cultural base. He was undoubtedly preparing us for the battlefield of ideas. C.L.R. was a gentle, kind, generous and dignified man, urbane and wise.

C.L.R. introduced us to literature, music, art, sculpture and architecture. He was a sports fanatic with an incredible reservoir of knowledge about cricket. He was a highly respected sports journalist and his book Beyond a Boundary became a classic. He wrote for the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph from 1933 to 1938.

The remarkable thing about C.L.R., as an intellectual, is that he never attended a university. Armed with the equivalent of a high school diploma, C.L.R.—like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Duke Ellington, etc.—challenged the world with his creative ingenuity. He earned tremendous prestige for his acuity, vision and craftsmanship.

While living in England, he published: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1935); Minty Alley (1936); A History of Negro Revolt (1938); and, his classic work, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). He also wrote and directed the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (1936) in London, in which Paul Robeson played the leading role.

When C.L.R. left England for the United States in 1938, he unexpectedly remained here for nearly fifteen years. During this time, while working among sharecroppers in Missouri and trade unionists in Detroit, Michigan, he wrote Notes on Dialectics (1948); Education, Propaganda, Agitation: Post-War America and Bolshevism (1948); and State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950). In 1952, he was arrested and sent to Ellis Island, New York, as an undesirable immigrant. While waiting for the court hearings and possible deportation, he wrote Mariners, Castaways and Renegades (1953), a study of the work of Herman Melville. This occurred during the McCarthy era.

From 1958 to 1980, C.L.R. published his work from the Johnson-Forest Tendency, which led to Facing Reality (1958); Modern Politics (1960); Beyond a Boundary (1963); Party Politics in the West Indies (1962); A History of Pan-African Revolt (1968); A Case for West Indian Self-Government (1967); and Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). He was a prolific writer and became an erudite speaker.

James returned to England in 1980 and he died in Brixton, London, in May 1989. He lived a full life with many challenging experiences. He has remained an icon in radical, progressive circles since his death. In the Eighties, Margaret Busby published three more C.L.R. James books: Spheres of Existence (1980); The Future in the Present (1982); and At the Rendez-Vous of Victory (1984), all of which contain some of his finest essays.

C.L.R. developed a unique style. He wrote with elegance and simplicity as he mastered the English language. He believed in the virtues of Western civilization from fifth century Greece to Shakespeare, Hegel, Lincoln, Marx Engels, Lenin, Picasso, Heidegger, Stravinsky, etc., but he remained critical of colonial Europe and imperial America, as he argued that there has been a descent into barbarism in the twentieth century. He saw our ongoing struggle in the New World as one for the reconfiguration of MIND and MEMORY. Furthermore, he believed strongly that the Maroons, who fought fiercely in the mountains, swamps, palenques and quilombos, were an essential and sustaining part of legacy and identity.

There is a particular relationship between C.L.R. and myself, which I treasure. As an elder, who visited my home frequently, he asked me to take him to see my nine year old son perform at a gymnastics exhibition. C.L.R. had taken a keen interest in his development as an athlete. At the end of the event, C.L.R., who had been quietly observing all of the gymnasts, called Jair and examined carefully his entire body structure. He looked at him fixedly and said, “Acklyn, I don’t know much about gymnastics, but this boy is a gifted athlete. Please keep him in this sport. I don’t know whether he will beat the Russians or the Chinese, but he will be one of America’s greatest gymnasts and he will represent the United States at the Olympic Games.” Jair and myself never forgot those words and when Jair was selected to the U.S. Olympic Teams for Barcelona (1992) and Atlanta (1996), we recalled C.L.R.’s prediction. Jair went on to be a silver medalist at Atlanta’s Bicentennial Games. He was later inducted into the United States Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2002, and the Stanford University Athletic Hall of Fame in 2004.

C.L.R. James’s emphasis on organized resistance and proletarian revolution was always political. H saw culture as an essential part of the political process, but he was fundamentally concerned with the motion of history, the interventions of mass movements and dialectical materialism. He was critical of Caribbean and African leadership during the Sixties and Seventies. He argued strongly that the leaders had betrayed the people’s trust and that governments had become bankrupt, autocratic and elitist. He felt that the struggle for independence had been betrayed except perhaps by Julius Nyerere in Africa and Fidel Castro in the Caribbean. He maintained that this corrupt leadership had no vision, nothing to say and no place to go. He refused to attend the Sixth Pan-African Congress (1974) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, because of a decision to exclude certain dissident Caribbean groups, although he had been one of the earliest organizers.

Even though C.L.R. was a Marxist-Leninist, he believed strongly that any revolution must have a spiritual foundation anchored in the reality, courage and wisdom of ordinary people. He had faith in the proletarian and peasant classes, who anchored the sustainability of any national undertaking. He searched for a democratic society where “every cook can govern.” He challenged bourgeois capitalism as harshly as he attacked fascism and state capitalism.

C.L.R. James has etched his name on twentieth century thought, especially among radical progressives, who have been inspired by his vision, clarity and courage during this sterile period of post-modern scholarship.

Axé . . . Unity . . . One Love.

Citation Format:

Acklyn Lynch. “Remembering C.L.R. James,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 6, 2007

Copyright © 2007 Africa Resource Center, Inc.