C. L. R. James on the Negro Question

Best known for The Black Jacobins (1938), C. L. R. James was a pan-African historian and thinker who, upon arriving in the United States for a lecture tour in 1938, was warmly received by audiences, Black and white, throughout the country. Expelled under McCarthyism in the early fifties, he was branded an undesirable alien and thus was prevented from taking a more active role in the civil rights movement. In the intervening years, James wrote numerous studies of African American history and politics, works that remain of great interest but which have gone almost completely unnoticed.

This volume collects James’s major essays, theoretical writings, and analyses on African American topics from 1939 to1950, a period James called his most creative. Articles on Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright, and Eric Williams (whose Capitalism and Slavery James deeply influenced) are included with documents from James’s 1939 meetings with Leon Trotsky in Mexico―as well as the major writings in which James developed his own distinctive Marxist theory of Black liberation.

Included too is a selection of short essays on Black history―published pseudonymously in American newspapers and journals. These trace James’s vision of the development of African American resistance from the beginnings of slavery through the twentieth century. Also, reprinted her for the first time are his reports on white racism and his work among American sharecroppers in the South.