This is precisely the same type of serious study of history that James promoted throughout his life.ĭudley was one of the leaders of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), for which James was an important figure. Richard Owen Dudley gave me one of those mimeographed chapters and he said to me, “Read this, and come to me and come on Monday morning and tell me what this is about.” On an August Friday in 1979 when I was in high school, I was asked to come to the vice principal’s office. James and the Drama of History’ (Duke University Press), Grant Farred, now literary scholar at Cornell University, explained how he first came across this history: In an interview for my book, ‘ Making The Black Jacobins: C.

There, as the historian and auto worker Marty Glaberman pointed out, the book became an “underground textbook,” which was clandestinely copied and distributed in installments to the next readers. The above epigraph is adapted from James’s account, in the 1980 foreword of The Black Jacobins, of “one of the most remarkable experiences” he had with the book, especially in apartheid South Africa. James would often talk of the impact that The Black Jacobins had across the world, in places such as Haiti and South Africa.

The Trinidadian historian and journalist C.L.R.

The black jacobins book review