He became convinced that “they are no better than we” - that is, white over black. Even though he was an outstanding student, he spent his time on the cricket field. He began writing some cricket reportage - his very first writing. He became interested in teaching Trinidadian history to students and then was drawn into journalism. At the same time, he graduated and began teaching. According to the most famous stories, he rebelled against his schooling. He grew up with his father very much wanting this very bright son to be a successful lawyer, or a minor political official in the colony, or a doctor, or something else that would be as far as a jet-black, talented young fellow could go. His mother was a woman who had been to a Catholic school and was a great reader of novels of various kinds.
There had been faint stirrings about nationalism in Trinidad, but not so much - more cultural than political, you might say, more through the carnival than political challenges. It was 1901 when he was born, and therefore a very colonial setting. This is an edited transcript from an episode of Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, published shortly before James died in 1988. Paul Buhle was the founding editor of Radical America and the author of a pioneering biographical study, C. But he’s still best remembered for his classic history of the slave revolt in Haiti, The Black Jacobins, which opened up an entirely new field of study, showing the vital role that slaves had played in their own emancipation. James wrote several books, including his study of cricket, Beyond a Boundary, a pioneering exercise in the social history of sport. His long career as a writer and activist brought him into contact with everyone from Paul Robeson and Richard Wright to Eric Williams and Kwame Nkrumah. Born in Trinidad, James spent much of his life in Britain and the United States. James was one of the great political and intellectual figures of the twentieth century.
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