C. L. R. James

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born on 4 January 1901 in Tunapuna, a town in the British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, the son of Robert, a schoolteacher. Educated at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, the young James gave himself equally to literature and to cricket, and grew into a writer of extraordinary range who would move between the novel, history, philosophy, and the politics of liberation.

In 1932 James left for England, where he found his voice as an anti-colonial thinker. There he published his novel Minty Alley (1936) and, with the support of the cricketer Learie Constantine, argued the case for West Indian self-government. It was in this period that he became a leading Trotskyist and one of the foremost Pan-Africanist intellectuals of the inter-war years, standing alongside figures such as George Padmore in the cause of African and Caribbean freedom.

His masterwork, The Black Jacobins (1938), told the story of the Haitian Revolution and its leader Toussaint Louverture. It was among the first histories to place the enslaved themselves at the centre of their own liberation, honouring the mass movement that overthrew colonial power and founded the first Black-led republic. His later writings, from Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953) to the celebrated Beyond a Boundary (1963), joined art, politics, and cricket into a single vision of human dignity.

C. L. R. James died in London on 31 May 1989 and was laid to rest in Tunapuna, the town of his birth. He is honoured as a historian who restored to the enslaved the truth of their own greatness.