Frank Rosengarten - Urbane Revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for a New Society

URBANE REVOLUTIONARY

Photograph copyright Val Wilmer, London

C. L. R. JAMES

and the Struggle for a New Society

FRANK ROSENGARTEN

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of
American University Presses.

Copyright 2008 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2008

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosengarten, Frank, 1927

Urbane revolutionary: C. L. R. James and the struggle for a new

society / Frank Rosengarten.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-934110-26-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-934110-26-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. James, C. L. R. (Cyril Lionel Robert), 1901

Criticism and interpretation. 2. James, C. L. R. (Cyril Lionel Robert), 1901 Political and social views. I. Title.

PR9272.9.J35Z856 2008

813.52dc22

2007021091

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

TO JIM MURRAY
In Memoriam

During the approximately six years I devoted to researching and writing this book, I acquired a number of debts that I would like to acknowledge here.

Jim Murrays untimely death on 21 July 2003 deprived me and many others of a good friend, and the community of James scholars of a person who used his collection of documents, books, and other materials to help everyone who had a serious interest in C. L. R. James. I benefited greatly from the insights that Jim offered in his essay The Boy at the Window, which ranks high among attempts to grasp the method James employed in his best writing.

Anna Grimshaw, whom I met through Jim in 2001, has also been a friend and adviser on all things related to James studies. She let me share her insights into many corners of Jamess life and work that grew out of the years she spent in the 1980s working on a daily basis with him. Without her extraordinary efforts, such books as American Civilization and Special Delivery might not have been published. Her anthology of Jamess writings, The C. L. R. James Reader, and her three invaluable booklets of notes and commentary based on her study of the documents administered by Jim Murray at the James Institute, have been crucial to my own work.

I met Selma James at the C. L. R. James centennial conference in Trinidad in September 2001, when I had a brief chat with her about C. L. R. James and Marxism. I reestablished contact with her in October 2005, at which time she clarified a number of facts and ideas related to her work for the womens liberation movement and to her many years of marriage and close political collaboration with C. L. R. James.

Selma Jamess elder sister, Edith Ziefert, shared with me her vivid memories of C. L. R. James, and her first-hand knowledge of certain aspects of the Johnson-Forest Tendency.

During my months of work in Detroit in 2003, I met and exchanged ideas with Grace Lee Boggs and Andy Sufritz, both of whom played important roles in the Johnson-Forest Tendency from its inception in the early 1940s to the split that took place in 1955 leading to the founding of the News and Letters Committees. Grace Lee Boggs was a central figure in Johnson-Forest; she was one of Jamess most assiduous and intellectually productive correspondents throughout the almost twenty years that the two worked together. Today, in her nineties, Boggs is as active as ever in community work and outreach. She shared with me her still warm personal memories of James but her decidedly critical opinions of his ideas.

Andy Sufritz, known in the movement with the pseudonym Andy Phillips, is a former mineworker born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, and coauthor, with Raya Dunayevskaya, of a pamphlet on the coal miners strike of 19491950. Andy spoke to me at length about his experiences at the time that Johnson-Forest split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1951, which was followed in the next four to five years by a widening rift within the Johnson-Forest Tendency between James and Dunayevskaya over the meaning and political application of Marxist Humanist philosophy. He was among those who joined forces with Dunayevskaya in News and Letters.

Among my personal friends who have taken an interest in my work on James and offered me their opinions about it, I would like to mention here Eli Messinger, George Bernstein, and Arthur and Sandi Mager. At my behest, the Magers visited with the widow and family of Tim Hector in Antigua and came back with vivid stories of their meetings with them. Messinger has been particularly helpful to me because of his affiliation with and intellectual contributions to the News and Letters organization. Bernstein gave me some helpful suggestions about several chapters of my study.

Peter Hudis, national coordinator of News and Letters, was good enough to provide me with explications of the role that Dunayevskaya played in initiating projects undertaken by the Johnson-Forest Tendency, especially its English translations of three of Karl Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

Librarians and archivists provided an abundance of materials about and by C. L. R. James, particularly at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, part of the Walter P. Reuther Library of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City; the Tamiment Library of New York University, which houses microfilms and audio tapes belonging to the Oral History of the American Left set up mainly by Paul Buhle and Jonathan Bloom; the Research Institute for the Study of Man in New York City, which contains an unusual collection of newspapers, magazines, and books on the Caribbean region; the Trotsky Archives housed in the Houghton Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Lilly Library Manuscript Collections at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana; and the James collection at the library of the University of the West Indies in Saint Augustine, Trinidad.

Of the librarians and archivists on whose knowledge and expertise I have relied over the past five years, Id like to thank in particular William LeFevre, reference archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University; Peter Filardo at the Tamiment Library of New York University; Saundra Taylor, curator of manuscripts at the Lilly Library of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana; and Dr. Glenroy Taitt, Special Collections librarian at the Main Library of the University of the West Indies in Saint Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Damie Sinanam and Melisse Ellis unearthed articles by and about James in local Trinidadian newspapers, and also deserve my thanks.

I am grateful to Jamess literary executor, Bobby Hill, for permission of the James Estate to cite various published and unpublished materials; and to William LeFevre, for permission to cite from the collections at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.