Tag: Black radicalism
C.L.R. James, Man of Paradox
Cyril Lionel Robert James was a man of paradox. The Trinidadian-born revolutionary was a lanky 6-foot-3—“lean as a pole,” with “long pianist fingers” that one could easily imagine flying across a typewriter keyboard as well. However, as we learn in John Williams’s new biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries, he “never learned to type and relied on women to type up his handwritten articles and manuscripts,” of which there was a veritable tsunami.
The Obscured and Forgotten History of Black Communist Women
Hubert Harrison, Giant of Harlem Radicalism
Hubert Harrison represents one of the clearest examples of the difficulties of being a Black intellectual and activist in the 20th century. Upon his death in 1927, Harrison was recognized in many magazines and journals for the prominent role he’d played in this country’s socialist and Black radical politics. As someone who’d organized a number of advocacy groups, as well as edited Negro World for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro
Improvement Association, Harrison was
The Long History of Resistance That Birthed Black Lives Matter
Donna Murch is one of the foremost historians of Black radical movements in the 20th century. Her first book, 2010’s Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, retold a seemingly familiar story with new insights drawn from oral histories and untapped archives. Murch saw the story of the Panthers as a product of the Great Migration and as a fight for, among other
Cedric Robinson’s Radical Democracy | The Nation
On the morning of December 17, 1979, several Miami police officers stopped Arthur McDuffie on a 1973 Kawasaki. The initial police report said McDuffie had run a red light, forcing officers on a high-speed chase through Miami, and falsely characterized the incident as a bike accident and a scuffle with officers. McDuffie was taken to the hospital with multiple skull fractures; four days later, he was dead.
In a turn of events that
The Black Arts Movement’s Revolution in the South
In the 1960s, the Free Southern Theater, an organization founded by a group of activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), traveled to a church in a predominantly Black, rural corner of Mississippi. There they staged Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, an absurdist drama about characters conversing as they wait for someone