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The title of Chap. 5 comes from the 1963 appendix to The Black Jacobins, ‘From Toussaint Louverture to Fidel Castro’, where C. L. R. James recalled the importance of the growth of pan-Africanism for West Indians in the twentieth century, in the wider context of decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean. The chapter engages critically with the historiography relating to James and his early pan-Africanism, as well as with some of the contemporary scholarly literature relating to the IASB in order to try and assess why James felt the IASB should be remembered as such a ‘striking West Indian creation’.

Rufus E. Fennell (1887–1974) was a remarkable black intellectual and activist, born in America, but possibly of Caribbean descent. Now almost completely forgotten, he made an important contribution to Pan-Africanism and the struggle for racial justice in Britain, where he spent much of his life. He also worked in the theatre and appeared alongside Paul Robeson in the 1937 film Jericho. And, most interestingly, he wrote a hitherto completely unknown screenplay for Robeson on Haiti, The Black Prophet, on the themes of race, empire and revolution. This article attempts to explore Fennell’s life and work more fully, in particular The Black Prophet.

The author explores the political life in Britain of black Barbadian Chris Braithwaite (c.1885–1944), also known as ‘Chris Jones’, a hitherto overlooked, yet outstanding figure in the history of the twentieth-century Black and Red Atlantic. As leader of the Colonial Seamen’s Association and an important ‘class struggle Pan-Africanist’, he was the lynchpin of an anti-colonial maritime network in interwar London. Through his work in the Communist party in the early 1930s and then in the International African Friends of Ethiopia and the International African Service Bureau, led by George Padmore and C. L. R. James, Braithwaite’s talents as organiser, speaker and writer came to the fore.

This essay examines C. L. R. James’s relationship to the heroic and inspiring arc of labour rebellions that swept the colonial British Caribbean during the 1930s. The essay begins by discussing James’s 1932 work putting the case for West Indian self-government, The Life of Captain Cipriani , and its generally positive reception in the Caribbean. We then turn to the “outbreak of democracy” represented by the Trinidad general strike in 1937 and James’s attempt to rally solidarity with this and subsequent rebellions elsewhere while in the imperial metropole itself as a leading member of the International African Service Bureau. Finally, this essay stresses how the Caribbean labour rebellions themselves, with their demonstration of the “modernity” of the mass of working people in the West Indies and apparent vindication of the Marxist theory of permanent revolution, played their part in the shaping of James’s majestic The Black Jacobins .

This review-essay examines two recent works of scholarship on the life and work of the late Trinidadian intellectual and activist C.L.R. James (1901–89). While recognising the respective merits of Frank Rosengarten's Urbane Revolutionary; C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (2008) and Brett St Louis's Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C.L.R. James' Critique of Modernity (2007) the essay argues that a critical weakness of both works is their problematic discussion of James's Marxism. This review will aim not simply to defend the central importance of Marxism for James, but will also suggest that, as much as anything, it is precisely this that gives so much of his work a rare urgency and critical relevance in the twenty-first century.

George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary Edited by Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis Kingston, Ian Randle, 2009 xxvi+209 pp., ISBN: 978-976-637-350-4 (US$24.95 paperback) The appearance of an edit...

This chapter examines and explores the question of Marxism's possible contribution to such a 'rethinking of received wisdom' through the lens of the 'black international'. It evokes a sense of how James's creative fusion of Marxist scholarship and political activism ensured that A History of Negro Revolt represented, in the words of Rodney, 'a mine of ideas advancing far ahead of its time'. James concluded his discussion of revolutionary black internationalism in A History of Negro Revolt with a discussion of the spontaneous mass strike of copper-miners in Northern Rhodesia (what is now Zambia) in May 1935, which he considered to be of immense historical portent and significance. Keywords: A History of Negro Revolt ; black internationalism; class-struggle pan-Africanism; marxist theory; social movement

In April 1940, in a private letter written amid a fierce faction fight then engulfing US Trotskyism, Leon Trotsky would refer in passing to Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989), one of his leading comrades hailing originally from Trinidad, as a ‘Bohemian freelancer’.1 No doubt such an appellation would have caused distress to James had he heard of it at the time, for his political and intellectual evolution had owed much to Trotsky’s Marxism ever since his reading of the first volume of Histoiy of the Russian Revolution in 1932. Yet such an appellation would, for many, both within and outside orthodox Trotskyism, seem to be vindicated by James’s subsequent development as a political thinker, which would see him leave the official Trotskyist movement in 1951. Indeed, many commentators have gone much further than Trotsky, and associated James’s mature political thought as much with anarchist thinking as with revolutionary Marxism. In 1981, Paul Berman declared he thought James had ultimately come up with ‘a version of socialism that wittingly or unwittingly incorporates elements of anarchism within a larger Marxist framework’.2 In 1987, James D. Young, subsequently author of The World of C.L.R. James, asserted ‘James was always a dissi-dent with a touch of anarchist disaffection’.3 In 1989, after James’s passing, Robin Blackburn in an obituary declared him an ‘Anarcho-Bolshevik’, while E.P. Thompson apparently went as far as to speak of James’s writing not just being ‘infused with a libertarian tendency’ but of James’s ‘instinctive, unarticulated anarchism’.4

Summer 1958 saw mass racial violence perpetrated by whites against black people in two areas of Britain, the city of Nottingham and, more seriously, in the area of “Notting Hill” in west London. The underlying causes were many and complex, but critical in working‐class areas of London was a housing crisis due to “Rachmanism,” unaccountable racketeering slum landlords. Besides overcrowded, poor quality housing, black immigrants to Britain faced a “color bar”– racist discrimination in employment and public places. When the threat of unemployment raised its head in 1958, newly arrived migrant workers trying to make homes for themselves provided an easy scapegoat for racists.