CYRIL LIONEL ROBERT JAMES
By Michael Alexander
Caricom Regional Youth Ambassador
Regional Youth Ambassador Program
cryap2002@hotmail.com
http://www.caricom.org
Newsday
July 15, 2002
Page 27
C.L.R. James was born on January 4, 1901 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. However, he spent most of his young life in the village of Tunapuna.
Although James could have very easily received a scholarship to an English university, he decided to stay in Trinidad after graduating from Queen's Royal College in 1918.
In 1932 he set off for Britain where he first became a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and later the Glasgow Herald.
He became involved in the social democratic Independent Labour Party and became the editor of International African Opinion, a journal published by the International African Service Bureau.
In 1938 James completed his most important work, The Black Jacobins. To a Euro-American audience still in serious denial about the reality of slavery, James graphically revealed the brutality inflicted by nascent capitalism. In anticipation of tactics used in the 1960s civil rights movement, James urged Blacks to enter segregated restaurants.
After having to return to England for a period of time he returned to Trinidad where he became a leading intellectual figure in the independence movement. He lectured at European and US colleges and continued to write until his death in London in 1989.