“Do you know C. L. R. James?” So asked Carl Van Vechten of his friend the great poet, playwright and writer Langston Hughes in private correspondence in October 1941. Hughes responded that “C. L. R. James I met in Paris. Also I believe in Los Angeles. He was the leading colored Trotskyite of the English speaking world. Said to be very brilliant. But he did not seem to have much of a sense of humor.”Footnote 1 Hughes's brief passing reference to the Trinidadian Marxist historian and writer C. L. R. James (1901–89) is intriguing. The fact that a leading white cultural critic such as Van Vechten was asking Hughes about James tells us that by 1941 James – after leaving Britain, where he had resided for the previous six years, in 1938 – had in a sense “arrived” in the United States as a black public intellectual figure. The name of James was known in black progressive circles above all as the author of The Black Jacobins (1938), a magisterial account of the Haitian Revolution. The work had garnered positive reviews in African American periodicals and even Time magazine had hailed it as
an impassioned account of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Santo Domingo revolution, written from the Marxist point of view by a young British Negro. It bristles with harrowing atrocities, fiery denunciations of imperialism, but manages to give a vivid account of a revolution which greatly influenced U. S. history before the Civil War.Footnote 2
Hughes's response regarding James stands in its way as testimony to the power of what Brent Hayes Edwards has called “black internationalism,” not least the fact that the paths of these two great black political writers had first crossed on one of Hughes's extended visits to Paris, a veritable “Capital of the Black Atlantic,” in 1937 or (more likely) 1938. James would himself regularly visit Paris throughout the 1930s for historical research and meetings of the international Trotskyist movement, including the Fourth International's founding conference in September 1938, where James would be elected to its fifteen-strong international executive committee.Footnote 3 That Hughes could use the past tense to describe James (“he was the leading Trotskyite …”) is indicative of the fact that by 1941 “C. L. R. James” had disappeared from public view in America, having decided to overstay his short-stay visa and become an “underground” professional revolutionary in the American Trotskyist movement, and was now writing under various pseudonyms, most notably “J. R. Johnson.”Footnote 4 It is not surprising that the likes of Van Vechten were beginning to wonder what had happened to James, nor could Hughes really help him out, given his own considerable distance from Trotskyism. As Hughes's remark about James's apparently humourless nature reveals, the two writers, despite a number of mutual friends and their shared passion for matters such as theatre and the Haitian Revolution, were unlikely to become friends, let alone comrades.Footnote 5 Though after the 1939 Nazi–Soviet pact, Hughes would steadily become disillusioned with orthodox Communism and the Soviet Union, for most of the 1930s, as “J. R. Johnson” (James) had argued in January 1940, Hughes represented “one of the most pertinacious fellow-travellers of the Stalinists,” and so any encounter between the two in the late 1930s was inevitably likely to be a rather argumentative and terse affair.Footnote 6
On a deeper level, Hughes's brief comment, however, does at least generously acknowledge something of James's brilliance as a creative Marxist theorist, who as a leading anticolonialist theorist and pan-Africanist activist in Britain had been invited over to the United States by the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in late 1938 on the urging of Leon Trotsky himself. Trotsky was concerned that the American Trotskyist movement had not yet seriously come close to answering the critical challenge posed by what was then called “the negro question,” the massive systematic and deep institutional racism against black people ingrained in the American state and wider society. In April 1939, James would meet the exiled leader of the Russian Revolution himself in Coyoacán, Mexico, and their remarkable wide-ranging discussions on race, class and the appropriate revolutionary strategy and tactics for the black liberation struggle, although structured within the slightly abstract framework of “the right to self-determination,” always tried to relate Marxist theory to the concrete reality of antiracist organizing.Footnote 7 Some of the specific campaigning ideas suggested were indeed to be taken up in the civil rights movement of the 1950s. James, for example, suggested that
discrimination in restaurants should be fought by a campaign. A number of Negroes in any area go into a restaurant all together, ordering for instance some coffee, and refuse to come out until they are served. It would be possible to sit there for a whole day in a very orderly manner and throw upon the police the necessity of removing these Negroes.
Trotsky agreed, adding, “Yes, and give it an even more militant character. There could be a picket line outside to attract attention and explain something of what is going on.”Footnote 8 A few days after their meeting, James reflected in private correspondence that
I have been thinking over the Negro question … I have talked much with L. T. [Leon Trotsky], and have been thinking over all that he said. I am now certain that no one in America, none in the party, has ever seen the Negro question for the gigantic thing it is, and will increasingly be. L. T. sees it, I was groping towards it. I begin to see it now, every day more clearly …Footnote 9
That Trotsky and James recognized the validity of independent black self-activity and self-organization in the struggle for black liberation was to be of immense importance in enabling at least elements of the American Trotskyist movement after Trotsky's murder in 1940 to more effectively prepare for the civil rights movement when it exploded in the 1950s, and then to relate to leading black power figures such as Malcolm X. As James wrote in his famous “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States” (1948) – which was later read as an SWP pamphlet by Malcolm X – the black struggle had “a vitality and validity of its own,” but also had the potential “to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation,” and in particular “is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.”Footnote 10 However, by the time the civil rights movement erupted in the mid-1950s, James himself had been forced to return to Britain with the rise of McCarthyism, though he was able to meet with Martin Luther King for discussions in Ghana and London in 1957.Footnote 11 Nonetheless, in the United States, works like The Black Jacobins, and James's other writings on the black struggle, would come to influence a group which Manning Marable once argued represented “in many respects the most significant expression of black radical thought and activism in the 1960s,” the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.Footnote 12
In the current climate, questions of racism, resistance and revolt have come powerfully once again to the fore across the United States with the inspiring #BlackLivesMatter movement, which started as a hashtag after the shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2013 before going national. This movement of people taking to the streets in their thousands against murderous police brutality under the slogans “Hands Up, Don't Shoot” and “I Can't Breathe” (the last words of two young black men killed by police in the summer of 2014, respectively Michael Brown in Ferguson, St Louis and Eric Garner, killed as police put him in chokehold in New York), – together with the riots which saw Baltimore burn in April 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody – means it is surely timely to return to thinkers like James, author of the pathbreaking study A History of Negro Revolt (1938).Footnote 13 This article in particular will examine how James – whose experience of race and racism before 1938 had been first in colonial Trinidad and then in imperial Britain, and whose understanding was tied up with challenging a transnational “colour bar” across European empires – imagined and thought as an outsider about the peculiarly “national” question of racism in the United States before he actually confronted and experienced the levels of extreme discrimination directly himself. If James could later reflect that before arriving in Britain in 1932 from Trinidad, “about Britain, I was a strange compound of knowledge and ignorance,” then the same, it will be argued, was essentially true of James about America before his arrival in 1938.Footnote 14 To borrow from the title of a highly original but sadly unfinished (and posthumously published) manuscript that James embarked upon during the winter of 1949, this article will explore how one young black writer born in a small Caribbean outpost of the British Empire at the start of the twentieth century came to initially make sense of “American Civilization.”Footnote 15
IN TRINIDAD
“My mother's taste in novels was indiscriminate,” James tells us in his 1963 semi-autobiographical classic cultural history of cricket, Beyond a Boundary. “She was a reader, one of the most tireless I have ever known.” The novels that James describes picking up “as she put them down” as a boy included at least two towering American novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper. The young James particularly admired Cooper's vivid accounts of native American tribes fighting for survival against British and French colonialism, such as The Deerslayer, The Pathfinder, The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie.Footnote 16 In 1944, James described in a letter to Constance Webb how one day, when a small boy, “my mother put down The Last of the Mohicans”:
I picked it up and read it … when I finished the Last of the M [sic] I got a copy-book and began to write a story of my own. But after two chapters my mother read it and said it was exactly like the Last of the M and I stopped … she should have told me to go on and I would I have written it to the end I think.Footnote 17
If it is indeed the case that when James won his place at the island's elite secondary school, Queen's Royal College (QRC), English literature came to dominate over, say, American literature, at least he had already got some sense of how European colonialism had shaped American history. Moreover, some of James's favourite English novelists wrote at length about American society, including William Thackeray, thirty-six volumes of whose writings were in the QRC library and were systematically devoured by James.Footnote 18 In the 1850s, Thackeray had twice visited America, and in The Virginians (1857–59), for example, wrote about a slaveholding family in colonial America in the second half of the eighteenth century, making what Deborah A. Thomas notes as his “most explicit fictional description of American slavery.”Footnote 19 During the 1920s, as a young modern intellectual James kept up to date with American literature, subscribing “for some time” to The Nation and the New Republic, and reading novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.Footnote 20 James – who would later write a pioneering work of Marxist literary criticism on Herman Melville – also tackled Melville's classic novel Moby-Dick for the first time in Trinidad.Footnote 21 He also became not simply a fan but an expert on jazz, and bought and played many records coming out of America during this period. “Particularly Louis Armstrong was one of my favourites.”Footnote 22 One of James's best friends during the 1920s and early 1930s, the Trinidadian writer Alfred Mendes, remembered that James had “an uncanny memory for music and literature,” even American literature:
I can remember one evening putting him to the test. I said “Look, Nello, we are going to put you to a test now. We have always heard of this memory that you have for reciting pieces of literature. You must let us choose the piece that we want you to recite, but you can choose the author.” So James chose O. Henry. James started off with the story, and I held it with the others overlooking the book. It was the typical O. Henry short story with the startling denouement. James missed up on a few words, but no sentences. He got the whole goddamn thing, and it was a story of about three or four thousand words!Footnote 23
It is impossible here to do justice to the way in which America, in particular the “Negro Metropolis” of New York, home of the Harlem Renaissance, appeared attractive to black West Indians.Footnote 24 As James wrote in 1938, the USA was “the Mecca of all West Indian Negroes before the slump.”Footnote 25 There was a huge wave of migration to the “black Mecca” of New York in particular, and even James might have considered joining his childhood friend Malcolm Nurse (George Padmore) when he made the move in 1924. As James remembered, “Padmore shook the dust of the cramping West Indies from his feet in the early 1920s and went to the United States.”Footnote 26 James instead stayed and gravitated around a group of young intellectuals, black and white, who formed independent literary journals, Trinidad and then, more substantially, The Beacon. The editor of The Beacon, Albert Gomes, had a conscious aim to help foster a national “West Indian literature” and he was inspired by American literature:
The day will come when we, like America, will produce our Walt Whitman; then, and only then will the movement towards an art and language indigenous to our spirit and environment commence. One has only to glance through the various periodicals published in this and the other islands to see what slaves we still are to English culture and tradition.Footnote 27
The Beacon had a number of Americans who would contribute to the journal, including two socialists based in America who were involved in editing and contributing to the journal from the outset, Sheldon Christian and Nathan Schneider.Footnote 28
James himself in the 1920s while in Trinidad was already also beginning to grapple for the first time with the systematic racism of American society. A reader of such towering figures of black American thought as the Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey – whom he first met and interviewed when Garvey visited Trinidad in the late 1920s – and the historian and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, in August 1931, in The Beacon, James was well prepared when he wrote his famous article on “The Intelligence of the Negro.” James here paid particular tribute to the black American artist and activist James Weldon Johnson, who had just retired from his position as NAACP secretary:
How many white people, particularly Colonials, hear of a man like Johnson? How many men today know what was the real quality of Booker T. Washington? To most he was a clever, even a distinguished negro, and nothing more. Time will right all these things. When names like Hoover, Coolidge, Mellon, Stimson and Walker, which fill the American news today, are dead as dust, there will yet be a place in history for Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Moton of Tuskegee, Burghardt du Bois, and others of their kind who, in the face of every imaginable difficulty, have fought and are still fighting the cause of negro emancipation.
Surely there is a case for saying that James's profound writings on “the negro question” in America date from this article written in Trinidad in 1931, rather than, say, 1939. However, James insisted on making a qualification:
I am not touchous on the race question. If at times I feel some bitterness at the disabilities to which my being a negro has subjected me it is soon washed away by remembering that the few things in my life of which I am proud, I owe, apart from my family, chiefly to white men, almost all Englishmen and Americans, men some of them of international reputation, who have shown me kindness, appreciation, and in more than one case, spontaneous and genuine friendship.Footnote 29
Indeed, even before James arrived in Britain and became a Marxist, he was fundamentally committed to the idea that class usually explained far more than race. On his way to Britain, James stopped off in Barbados and got talking to a small black boy, “a boy with a grievance”:
[The boy] told me that the white people took terrible advantage of the coloured. I asked for one instance. He said that years ago, fourteen men used to be employed lifting goods in a certain place. But the wicked white people had brought a crane which needed only one man to operate and so threw that thirteen out of work. I wanted to explain to him, but I didn't. I had had enough in my life of explaining things to people.Footnote 30
Yet James was, of course, not unaware of the way in which racial oppression was often intimately linked with, and reinforcing of, brutal class exploitation:
It must be a terrible thing to want work and not be able to get it. People say that the West Indian negro is lazy. They lie. I wish some of them would try going out to work in the sun at 40 cents a day. During the evidence given before the Sugar Commission in Barbados, Lord Olivier was astonished to learn that for years thousands of pounds, about a hundred thousand pounds, had come into Barbados every year from the Canal Zone and America, saved by Barbadian black people who had gone out there to work.Footnote 31
Yet while James was doubtless more than aware of the horrors of racism in American society, epitomized in this period by the Scottsboro case, there is a sense in which his early view of America was also shaped by a kind of dismissive, even snobbish, attitude derived from English writers. Matthew Arnold, for instance, so important an intellectual influence on the young James, was rather “anti-American” for reasons other than slavery and black oppression. As Stefan Collini notes of Arnold, “his assessment of American civilization had always been unflattering.”Footnote 32 James's descriptions of America in the early 1930s arguably need to be read with this in mind. In his first published work, a political biography of Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani, the charismatic nationalist leader of the Trinidad Workingmen's Association, The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932), James denounced American politics as poisoned by “corruption … naked and unashamed,” while American “men of business” were “given to fraud.”Footnote 33 As James put it in an article sent back from London to the Port of Spain Gazette in 1932, America was truly a “dreadful country.” Indeed, British and French official politics may be “bankrupt,” Italy may be languishing under Mussolini, Germany may be stuck between “a feudal baron like von Papen and a cinema gangster like Hitler,” but “Western Europe can say at least that she is better off than America – if that is any comfort.”Footnote 34
IN BRITAIN
Readers who know of James's later fascination with American popular culture, particularly Hollywood movies, might be surprised to know that his love of films was not so apparent while he was in Britain. Ross McKibbin has noted “the cultural hegemony of the American film in the interwar years” in England, yet in 1932 James had criticized “the English people” for being “still mentally adolescent” as “they live on cheap films.”Footnote 35 Critically, black people were barely shown in any films made in America at this time, and those that did, the “jungle pictures” of the 1920s, portrayed black people in a deeply racist fashion, either as servants or savages from “Darkest Africa.” As Paul Robeson – whose portrayal of The Emperor Jones in 1933 was a critical moment in breaking away from this tradition – was to note in Film Weekly in September 1933 that “Hollywood can only visualize the plantation type of Negro – the Negro of ‘Poor Old Joe’ and ‘Swanee Ribber’. It is absurd to use that type to express the modern Negro as it would be to express modern England in the terms of an Elizabethan ballad.”Footnote 36 As James himself would put it in 1938,
the millions who watch the films always see Negroes shining shoes or doing menial work, singing or dancing. Of the thousands of Negro professional men, of the nearly two hundred Negro universities and colleges in America which give degrees in every branch of learning, and are run predominantly by Negro professors, of this the American capitalist takes good care that nothing appears on the screen.Footnote 37
Indeed, Hollywood also eagerly embraced propaganda films about the British Empire, and as The Times noted in 1937, “the Union Jack has in the last few years been vigorously and with no little effect waved by Hollywood.” British film censors repaid this debt, and as John MacKenzie notes, “no film was banned for showing black people in an unpleasant or derogatory light.”Footnote 38 No wonder that James in 1932 was quick to blame racial prejudice he experienced at the hands of “an ordinary, middle-class, commonplace Englishman” on “his Daily Express, cinema-fed mind.”Footnote 39
In Britain, James's knowledge about “American civilization” was no doubt expanded by conversations with friends and comrades who had been politically active in America. These ranged from the Canadian Trotskyist poet Earle Birney to other West Indians in the pan-Africanist movement in Britain who had spent time organizing in America, such as George Padmore, Ras T. Makonnen and Amy Ashwood Garvey, while James would also have occasional brushes with Marcus Garvey again himself at various meetings. James would also have some contact with Africans who had been students in America before coming to Britain to study.Footnote 40 But perhaps more significantly, in London James would also meet a number of black Americans, including Ralph Bunche and Paul Robeson (who would go on to star in the title role in James's 1934 play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, when it was performed on the London stage in 1936).Footnote 41 In March 1933, for example, at the first weekend conference of the British civil rights organization the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), James would have heard Harry Roberts, a black American visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics, give a presentation on “The American Negro.” Roberts “drew a picture of the slave trade, proving it to be Capitalism at its worst” before dealing with the Scottsboro case, and then “the contributions of the Negro to American civilization – music, poetry, literature, politics and fine arts.”Footnote 42
Such internationalist and critically minded contacts perhaps presented James with a rather misleading and idiosyncratic view of American civilization – one that ignored what Kent Worcester has called the “sheer insularity of life as lived by ordinary people outside the micro-landscapes of Los Angeles, Cambridge, San Francisco and Manhattan.”Footnote 43 Nonetheless, James's knowledge about race in America inevitably expanded from such contacts, together with his wider reading. In March 1934 James discussed “the American situation” at some length in a lecture on “The Negro” he gave to the Nelson Sunday Lecture Society in Lancashire. After noting there had been 7,300 lynchings over the past thirty years, James commented that “the position of the masses of negroes in the Southern States was just as precarious as it was in the days of slavery.”Footnote 44
THE REBELLION OF AMERICAN LABOUR
When James joined the Trotskyist movement in Britain in 1934, he joined a tiny group inside the socialist Independent Labour Party (ILP) that did not have the resources for a paper of their own and so his group initially had to make do selling the American Trotskyist paper Militant.Footnote 45 From July 1934, the American Trotskyist movement also began publishing the New International, a theoretical journal edited by James Burnham and Max Shachtman. Through reading the Militant and the New International, James would have been able to follow quite closely political events in Roosevelt's New Deal America, above all the explosion of American trade unionism during the 1930s.Footnote 46 For example, in the first issue of New International Alfred Weaver described how he had rightly predicted in December 1933 that
considering the present historic period, and the deep-going wage cutting, speed-up, and general suffering (unemployment, etc.) which the present crisis has brought to the American proletariat, any appreciable revival of industry carries with it the perspective of a strike movement of hitherto unseen proportions.Footnote 47
In September 1934, the editors of New International, noting that “rarely do strikes anywhere in the world last as long as in the United States; rarely are they fought with such spontaneous vigor and even violence,” described how the peculiarities of the American working class gave it its spirit of militancy:
We have before us a proletariat unique in world labour history. Peculiar historical circumstances have combined to keep the political development of the workers as a class at an inordinate distance from the economic development of the country … once started on the road of radicalization, the American workers will move with seven league boots and more likely than not, tend to skip over stages in which the workers in other countries lingered for longer periods. As soon as the retarding burden of its petty bourgeois past is shaken off, it will shoot to the top with phenomenal speed, just as a deep sea diver, divesting himself of artificial lead weights, would surge to the surface with all the greater speed the deeper and denser the level at which he was working.Footnote 48
Such information and reports meant that James was confident enough not just to expose some of the failures of the Communist International under the leadership of Stalin and Zinoviev with respect to America in his pioneering 1937 anti-Stalinist history of the Comintern, World Revolution, but also to pass comment on the rising wave of industrial struggle there for the British Trotskyist journal he edited, Fight.Footnote 49 The year 1937 saw what James noted was “a welcome revival in Britain of working class militancy” since the Lancashire cotton workers' strike he had witnessed in Nelson in 1932. This was “an extension of the widespread international strike wave” that had begun in Spain in 1935 and since spread to France, Belgium and the USA. In America, “amid all the social and political corruption of a highly developed Imperialism, with different races and stratas among the proletariat, the workers are noted for their extreme economic militancy and political backwardness.” “The struggle has taken the form of a fight for industrial unionism,” James noted, and he wrote about the rise of the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its “partial victories” despite “the sabotage of the A. F. of L. [American Federation of Labour], use of State troops, tear gas, company thugs and all the other methods of ‘restoring industrial peace,’ so expressive of American Imperialism”:
The issue has been in general for recognition of the Committee and its affiliated unions to represent the workers. Its importance is that it organises the workers in units, based on the factory. The form of struggle has been mass “sit-down” strikes; thousands of workers have occupied the factories, and the usual brutal methods of repression have failed to break their spirit … the situation presents great opportunities for the militants to play the leading role in the struggle for Industrial Unionism. In this way they can strengthen the workers' fighting power for the future revolutionary struggles of the factory committee, council or Soviet. The importance of American Imperialism in world politics renders the raising of the struggle in that country of vital importance to the international proletariat.Footnote 50
No doubt it was the rise of such inspiring industrial action on such a large scale, increasingly around the CIO, which pulled into the struggle black workers for the first time in mass numbers, and James's Marxist understanding of the significance of such struggle, that led him to quickly rethink his opinion of American society and culture while still in Britain. In 1938, Bob Edwards, chair of the ILP Industrial Committee, visited Detroit and in glowing terms reported back for the New Leader about the class struggle in America. In an article on “Sit Down Strikes,” Edwards described the growth of the auto workers' union from 30,000 in 1936 to 400,000 by 1938. “Nowhere in the world has the Trade Union movement advanced so rapidly. Nowhere in the world of labour have the masses developed such a militant programme of struggle.”Footnote 51 In September 1938, Edwards, now back in Britain, reported on the growth of the CIO from one million members to four million members over the last three years through struggle, in an article titled “America Now Leads.” “I left the American scene full of hope and enthusiasm for the CIO, and full of an eagerness to share my impressions, experiences and estimations … a new spirit is abroad in America. A new workers' army is on the march.”Footnote 52
A REVOLUTIONARY ANSWER TO THE “NEGRO QUESTION”
As editorial director of the publications of the militant pan-Africanist International African Service Bureau (IASB), formed in 1937 out of the earlier network of solidarity that had come together in London in the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA) in 1935 at the time of Mussolini's barbaric war on the people of Ethiopia, James would deepen his already quite advanced understanding of the systematic racism in America.Footnote 53 The IASB newsletter Africa and the World carried reports on “West Indians in America” on 14 August 1937; its successor, African Sentinel, reprinted an article from the Afro-American on 25 September 1937 while the journal International African Opinion carried a regular section, entitled first “American Notes” and then “The American Scene.” One issue of International African Opinion in August 1938, for example, among other things, carried an obituary of James Weldon Johnson, discussed Joe Louis's triumph over white German boxer Max Schmeling (seen by many as a symbolic blow to fascist ideology) and the proposed establishment of a “Negro Division for the U. S. Army,” discussed the novelist Richard Wright (with whom James would become good friends after his move to the United States), and published a poem by Langston Hughes on the Scottsboro Boys (the permission for which may have been secured by James when he met Hughes in Paris). Accompanying Hughes's poem on Scottsboro, International African Opinion carried a “Brief History of the Case” which ended as follows:
Lynch terror is the weapon in the hands of the white ruling class in order to keep the Negro workers in subjection and misery, so that the boss class can wring their super profits out of them. The subjection of the Negro workers is also used as a club to beat down the standards of the white workers. Thus by breeding this racial discrimination, white and black workers are pitted against each other.Footnote 54
As Matthew Quest notes, in various news items International African Opinion sought to “foster autonomy from the Democratic Party at their best” during the era of the New Deal and to challenge “the increasing loyalty of African-Americans to Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party machine” through exposing “the American ruling elite regardless of party affiliation” on the question of black liberation.Footnote 55 Yet James's greatest elucidation on “the Negro Question” in America, before he left for America itself, came in his short work A History of Negro Revolt, where James discussed “The Old United States,” “The [American] Civil War” and “Marcus Garvey.” In his discussion of the antebellum South, James briefly discussed a huge variety and number of slave revolts which had taken place, some with the Haitian Revolution in the background, from the Stono rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 to Turner's revolt in 1831, making good use in particular of “an admirable and well-documented” article by the American communist historian Herbert Aptheker on “American Negro Slave Revolts” which had recently appeared in the summer 1937 edition of the American journal Science and Society.Footnote 56 Nat Turner's revolt, James noted, “had an effect out of all proportion to its size”:
Though there are reports of slave conspiracies and of plots all over the Southern states for the next thirty years, nothing on a large scale seems to have been attempted. On the other hand at the time of the Turner revolt the Southern slave owners realised that the unrest “was not confined to the slaves.” Henceforth the fear of unity between the blacks and the poor whites drove the South to treat with great severity any opposition to slavery in the South from whatever source it came. A rigid censorship was instituted. In the years before the American Civil War the turmoil among the slaves was widespread all over the South. Their chance came, however, not from the poor whites of the South but from the economic and political necessities of the Northern whites.Footnote 57
James noted that if the American Civil War “resulted in the abolition of slavery it was not fought for the benefit of the slaves”:
Negro slavery seemed the very basis of American capitalism. Slavery made cotton king; cotton became the very life food of British industries, it built up the New England factories. This accounts for not merely the support given to the South by Conservatives but even by certain British Liberals … The South had dominated the Federal Legislation for more than half a century, but with the increasing industrial expansion of the North, that domination was now in danger. Both North and South were expanding westward. Should the new states be based on slavery as the South wanted or on free capitalism as the North wanted?
“This was not a moral question,” yet “Karl Marx hailed the Civil War as the greatest event of the age … What he could see so early was the grandeur of the civilisation which lay before the States with the victory of the North”:
What we are really witnessing here is not that sudden change in the conscience of mankind so beloved of romantic and reactionary historians, but the climax of a gradual transformation of world economy. Where formerly landed property had dominated, the French Revolution marks the beginning of the social and political domination of the industrial bourgeoisie. It began in the French Revolution, in Britain its outstanding dates are the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and it reached its culmination with the Civil War in America. The process worked itself out blindly and irrationally.Footnote 58
Abraham Lincoln originally “said openly that to save the Union he would free all the slaves, or free some, or free none,” and “long maintained his attitude. It was the pressure of war which forced him to accept emancipation.” Lincoln now “saw the necessity of at least using slaves for labour purposes. Refugees poured over to the Northern forces” and soon “were establishing themselves in the army as capable teamsters, mechanics, and general workers.”
They were industrious and loyal. The South was proving more difficult to conquer than had first been thought, and the Negroes would have to be used as soldiers … thus Lincoln's objections were finally overcome by the necessity of events.Footnote 59
By the end of the war, 178,875 blacks had been enrolled in the Union army and while “unfair treatment affected the morale of the blacks … of their military quality there was never any question.” They were “fighting for freedom” and “defeated some of the crack Southern troops, men who had formerly owned them … Lincoln himself admitted that but for the assistance given by the Negroes, the North might have lost. He spoke more wisely than he knew.”Footnote 60 Among the slaves still in the South,
after the proclamation of emancipation, the news spread and it is claimed that there took place a sort of general strike, an immense sabotage, which helped to bring the South to its knees. Slavery degrades, but under the shock of great events like a revolution, slaves of centuries seem able to conduct themselves with the bravery and discipline of men who have been free a thousand years.
After victory in the Civil War,
the Negroes themselves knew what they wanted – the land – and had they been strong enough to take it, or had the Northern capitalists the wisdom to give it to them, the possibilities opened up for the Negro and American capitalism would have been immense … Only a revolution in which the poor were the driving force would have held out its hand to the blacks and made common cause of its own objectives and land for the blacks. There was no such revolution in America … monopoly capitalism was on its way … in another generation, Northern monopoly capitalism had America in its grasp. It left the Negro to his fate, and the South turned on him. Landless, his Northern collaborators gone, he was whipped back to an existence bordering on servitude.Footnote 61
Robin D. G. Kelley once claimed of “James's analysis of the slaves' actions during the conflict,” from his “invocation of the ‘general strike’ to his description of the slaves' hesitant responses toward the Union soldiers,” that they are “taken straight” from Du Bois's monumental 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880.Footnote 62 It is testament to James's historical skill that his writing evokes Du Bois, and James did indeed take note of “Negro scholarship in America” as well as the claim of a “general strike.” However, if this confirms James that was aware of some of the recent historical debates around the Civil War, it does not necessarily confirm his having read Black Reconstruction itself.Footnote 63
James finally turned his attention to “the Garvey Movement” from 1919 to 1926. In modern America, James wrote, “the prevailing attitude to the Negro is one of strong and sometimes ferocious prejudice,” usually related to notions of black sexual promiscuity, but “the Negro question” ultimately is not one of race but is “a social and political question.” “The Negro must be kept in his place.” “All Negroes are aware of the mass of lies on which the prejudice is built, of the propaganda which is designed to cover the naked economic exploitation,” a propaganda particularly apparent with respect to Hollywood. But despite barbarous racism, there was no “clash of civilisations” in America:
The American Negro, in language, tradition and culture is an American. He was in America almost from the beginning and he has helped to make the country what it is … literate, Westernized, an American almost from the foundation of America, [he] suffers from his humiliations and discriminations to a degree that few whites and even many non-American Negroes can ever understand. The jazz gaiety of the American Negro is a semi-conscious reaction to the fundamental sorrow of the race.Footnote 64
It was a combination of disillusion among black Americans who had returned home having fought for nothing during the Great War, coupled with the tireless dedication, exceptional oratorical talents and militant vision of Marcus Garvey, that gave birth to what, by 1920, was “proportionately the most powerful mass movement in America.” “That nine-tenths of the Negroes in America were listening to him is probable … his name rolled through Africa.” James himself, as we have already noted elsewhere, used to read Garvey's paper the Negro World in Trinidad and briefly met Garvey himself in 1927, just as the movement was in decline. However, in London James had become closely acquainted with Garvey's first wife, Amy Ashwood, who had been there from the start. “The King of Swaziland told a friend [Amy Ashwood] some years after that he knew the names of only two black men in the Western world: [the boxer] Jack Johnson and Marcus Garvey.”Footnote 65 James later recalled that Kenyatta once told him that illiterate Kenyan nationalists in 1921 would gather around and listen to one person read aloud an article from the Negro World two or three times. “Then they would run various ways through the forest, carefully to repeat the whole, which they had memorized, to Africans hungry for some doctrine which lifted them from the servile consciousness in which Africans lived.”Footnote 66
As a Marxist, James was naturally highly critical of the apparent glaring contradictions of Garvey's politics. Garvey “attacked lynching, he formulated militant demands, equal rights for Negroes, democratic liberties, etc.,” but also “negotiated with the Ku Klux Klan for the repatriation of Negroes to Liberia.” He “attacked imperialism” but “appointed himself President, Emperor, King and what not, of Africa,” and ultimately “made his peace with British imperialism.” Garvey “viciously attacked Communism and advised the Negro workers against linking up with white workers in industrial struggles” at a time when “revolution was in the air, and the Negroes were ready for revolution.” Garvey's alternative to revolutionary politics was not only “confused” but “pitiable rubbish.” He spoke of “Africa for the Africans,” but, as James pointed out, when it came to an actual programme “for the Afro-Americans he had none, not even a bad one.”Footnote 67
Yet James knew that an understanding of Garveyism, less of Garvey himself but of what his movement represented and signified, was absolutely critical as it showed “the fires that smoulder in the Negro world, in America as in Africa.” “Negroes wanted a leader and they took the first that was offered them … desperate men often hear, not the actual words of an orator but their own thoughts.” But there was “one thing Garvey did do”: “He made the American Negro conscious of his African origin and created for the first time a feeling of international solidarity among Africans and people of African descent. In so far as this is directed against oppression it is a progressive step.”Footnote 68 The “revolutionary answer to the Negro Question,” therefore, for James in 1938, lay in building on the strong foundation laid by Garvey in providing a militant lead for black Americans, and igniting “the fires that smoulder” among them in a revolutionary conflagration directed against the racism of the American state and the capitalist system in general. No wonder Trotsky was so keen that the newly formed American SWP should invite him over for a lecture tour.Footnote 69 Aware that “a new workers' army” was now also “on the march” in America in the form of the CIO, it seems doubtful James took much persuading.
Overall, C. L. R. James's understanding of “American civilization” and its potentialities underwent an important transformation in Britain after leaving colonial Trinidad, the result of his development into a Marxist and his subsequent reading of the rise of the CIO together with his own activism and education by figures like George Padmore and Amy Ashwood Garvey in the tiny militant pan-Africanist movement. It would clearly be deepened and transformed once again when James crossed back over the Atlantic to experience America for himself, in ways which this article can only point towards. When Marcus Garvey died, for example, James wrote in his obituary for Labor Action in June 1940 – perhaps implicitly half-critiquing some of his own comments about Garveyism just two years before in A History of Negro Revolt – that “every two-cent revolutionary who has talked to Negroes in cafeterias and therefore knows the Negro question, points out Garvey's errors and absurdities and thinks that thereby a contribution has been made to knowledge.” Now after a year and a half in America James showed a new level of respect for Garvey's achievement: “more than in all the theses of the Comintern, a basis for the building of a real mass movement among the Negroes lies in a thorough study of this first great eruption of the Negro people.”Footnote 70 It is perhaps most appropriate given the heroic recent struggles against police violence in the United States to conclude with the stirring words with which James himself concluded his 1948 “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States,” which also stand as testimony to the distance that James had travelled over the preceding twenty years:
Let us not forget that in the Negro people, there sleep and are now awakening passions of a violence exceeding, perhaps, as far as these things can be compared, anything among the tremendous forces that capitalism has created. Anyone who knows them, who knows their history, is able to talk to them intimately, watches them at their own theatres, watches them at their dances, watches them in their churches, reads their press with a discerning eye, must recognize that although their social force may not be able to compare with the social force of a corresponding number of organized workers, the hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among them to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.Footnote 71
