Book Review: Making of the Black Jacobins: C.L.R. James and the Drama of History by Rachel Douglas

Abstract

Cyril Lionel Robert James (C.L.R. James), a West Indian native born on the cusp of the twentieth century, grew to adhere to the political and social ideology of Karl Marx. The United States had already considered Communism a revolutionary ideology as it had a subtle stronghold among black intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois. Thus, these two revolutionaries' philosophies converged into the same goal, to liberate a people from systemic oppression. These were two astounding individuals; one Black American who graduated from an Ivy League university and asserted that the improvement of Blacks could only be achieved by the “talented 10th,” while James, a Trinidadian born playwright, understood that revolution was not silent nor accomplished by using the established framework of the very society with a long-standing history of subjugation and tyranny.