By the time it was reprinted in 1963 the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was at its height and there were growing independence struggles across the Caribbean and Africa.
As a committed revolutionary, he was not afraid to revise it as the world around him changed. James’s book was first published in 1938 when he was seeking to influence the inter-war anti-colonial and Pan-African struggles. It is not simply a celebration, however, but rather a serious attempt to examine how its contents and influence have evolved over time. This collection of essays emerged out of a conference held to mark the 70th anniversary of The Black Jacobins’s publication. James therefore set about the task of righting this historical wrong and his account of the Haitian Revolution was his brilliant riposte to those “professional whitewashers” who had sought to “wipe out all trace of what had been written in blood and fire by the black rebel slave army under Toussaint Louverture”. As James wryly observed, “The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians.”įar from meekly accepting their enslavement, slaves frequently fought back ferociously. He played a critical role in persuading socialists including the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky to take seriously the so-called “negro question”.įorsdick and Høgsbjerg note that Trotsky himself wrote that “what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen, at least so far as the revolution is concerned.” That does not prevent right wing historians from trying.
Strikingly tall and always immaculately attired, he made a huge contribution to the Marxist tradition. In their introduction to this series of essays, its editors suggest that The Black Jacobins retains a “continued potential to illuminate and inspire - and contribute to the process of ‘setting the past in relation to the present in order to distil from it a politics for a possible future’.”ĬLR James, the author of that great work, was a towering figure both physically and intellectually.
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