What happened? Over the next dozen years or so, James quit writing
under his own name, and he stopped lecturing in public. He stayed on
in the United States until 1953, when, at the height of McCarthyism,
he was thrown out of the country. In the meantime, he lived
"underground." He published countless articles and pamphlets under a
variety of pseudonyms. He became, in short, a professional
revolutionary.
Early during his visit, James had traveled to Mexico to talk with Leon
Trotsky. In the course of their discussions, he began to apply some of
the insights from The Black Jacobins to the situation of
African-Americans. Contrary to what many white radicals thought, James
believed that "the Negro represents potentially the most revolutionary
section of the population," and he argued that black struggles did not
require the leadership of the white labor movement.
Over the following decade, while active in various leftist
organizations, James worked out the implications of this idea. For
several months in 1941 and '42, he helped organize a mostly black
group of sharecroppers in Missouri as they prepared to go on strike.
He spent hours listening to industrial workers throughout the country.
He studied American history and culture. And he wrote scores of
articles for Marxist journals.
Along the way, James became friends with Richard Wright. He also began
to write a play about Harriet Tubman, which he hoped might interest
Ethel Waters.
But for the most part, James moved in the world of radical politics,
developing his own interpretation of Marxism. Gradually breaking with
Trotskyism, he began a close study of philosophy -- especially Hegel's
vast and complex Science of Logic. A small circle of activists and
intellectuals formed around him, called the Johnson-Forest Tendency.
("Johnson" was James' most frequent pseudonym).
Only during the past decade have scholars begun to appreciate the
brilliance of James' theoretical work from this period. His Notes on
Dialectics (1948) and American Civilization (1950) circulated in
typewritten copies, while State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950)
and his study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
(1953), appeared in small editions that few readers ever saw. (In
recent years, they have all been published and are available from
bookstores.) These works project a bold vision of the drive of
ordinary people to abolish exploitation-and to create a world where,
in a phrase from Lenin that James liked, "every cook can govern."
In time James` activities won the attentions of the FBI. Declared a
subversive and undesirable alien, James was arrested in 1952 and
jailed for several weeks on Ellis Island. After being released, he
delivered a well-received series of lectures at Columbia University in
the spring of 1953. But that summer, his appeal for U.S. citizenship
turned down, James returned to London.
****
James' forced departure from the United States was a turning point in
his career. He had always been a cosmopolitan thinker, yet throughout
the second half of his life, James became an ever more profoundly
international figure. He moved among Europe, Africa and the Caribbean,
writing, speaking and organizing like a revolutionary elder
statesman-without-a-state.
In 1957, he met with Martin Luther King in London to discuss the
Montgomery bus boycott. When his former student Eric Williams became
the prime minister of Trinidad, James returned there to edit a
newspaper and lecture. Younger African and West Indian intellectuals
rediscovered his work. And during the late 1960s, when university
students began demanding courses in black studies, U.S. authorities
allowed him back into the country to teach. Throughout the 1970s, he
lectured on numerous campuses, and for several years he was a
professor at the University of the District of Columbia (then called
Federal City College).
James remained a prolific writer well into his 80s, but the last
book-length manuscript that he completed was Beyond a Boundary (1963).
Considered one of the best books on the game of cricket ever
publishedand so gracefully written that even baseball-centric
Americans can read it with pleasure -- it limned a picture of life in
Trinidad during the early years of the 20th century. Perhaps
remembering his friend Richard Wright's harrowing childhood in Black
Boy, James creates an almost idyllic image of the world in which he
grew up. Boundary's treatment of the island's black middle class is at
once critical and affectionate. "My grandfather went to church every
Sunday morning at eleven o'clock," James writes, "wearing in the
broiling sun a frock-coat, striped trousers and top hat, with his
walking stick in hand, surrounded by his family, the underwear of the
women crackling with starch. Respectability was not an ideal, it was
an armour."
****
Revolutionary though he might be, James always remained something of a
Victorian gentleman. Yet, eminently respectable as he was in his
personal manners, his work as historian and thinker focused on the
creative and disruptive forces at the bottom of society. "Ordinary
working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices," he once
wrote, "are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention ...
Always the aim is to regain control over their own conditions of life
and their relations with one another. Their strivings have few
chroniclers."
James returned to this theme in countless articles and lectures, and
many of the books published over the last two decades of his life were
collections of such work. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977) and
At the Rendezvous of Victory (1984) give perhaps the best overview of
his thinking on PanAfricanist concerns. Spheres of Existence (1980)
gathers James' cultural essays -- especially his work on literary and
philosophical questions. Whether analyzing Shakespeare or Marcus
Garvey, Hegel's philosophy or Toni Morrison's fiction, James kept his
attention fixed on how social movements "from below" expressed
themselves throughout history.
Settling down in London during the final decade of his life, James
became a kind of sage: the ancient teacher, upon whom countless
visitors called to pay their respects. In 1984, an interviewer from
the Third World Book Review asked what he thought of a certain
nickname admirers had given him. "When people call me the `Black
Plato,"' James answered, "they mean to say that I have touched various
subjects with a certain effect. But I am very much aware of the vast
distance that lies between the original, seminal work of Plato and
Aristotle and what I have been able to do at the present time. I don't
like it, I don't dislike it. I just pay no attention to it."
That reply was unusually modest. But then, James could be confident
that his work would survive. When he died in 1989, his body was
returned for burial to Trinidad, the island of his birth. His
tombstone is designed as a book, opened to a page inscribed with one
of the most memorable passages from Beyond a Boundary:
"Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their
place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to
change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and
utility which matters, but movement; not where you are or what you
have, but where you have come from, where you are going, and the rate
at which you are getting there."
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