Without Country:
Black Revolutionaries of the Caribbean Diaspora,
1932-1975
Dissertation Prospectus
William Christopher Johnson
African American Studies and History
Yale University
January 28, 2010
[Laughter.] Actually what I think about the Black Atlantic is that it really is a very close funky little room with all the men
in it—and they're all speaking English. [Laughter.] And that's really what that is; it really is a way to, I think, escape the
female again. In fact I am thinking that maybe the introduction of the global model, and the transculture, these are all
ways, perhaps, to escape the messiness of gender.
Hortense Spillers, “Whatcha Gonna Do?” (2007)1
I do not pretend to have the definitive answers to these questions. I would not be so presumptuous because I believe
that what is involved at this stage in human development is a transformation of human activity at least as profound and
radical as that which took place when men stopped being nomads and began to settle down to plant food and
domesticate animals…Looking back at the Black movement over the past thirteen years, it is possible to discern a
historical and logical development which characteristic of all revolutions: namely, a movement toward involving deep
layers of the oppressed masses whose grievances are deeply rooted in the nature of the system and who are ready for
increasingly desperate actions against it.
Grace Lee Boggs, “The Black Revolution in America” (1968)2
Each woman in her own home is making a revolution.
Selma James, “A Woman‟s Place.” (1953)3
Prologue, 1973: NUFF Said4
Hidden within the bush outside Caura, tucked into Trinidad‟s Northern Range, a small band
of fugitives—youth in their teens and early twenties—stood watch for the police that hunted them.
A few days before, in nearby Valencia, Superintendent Randolph Burroughs and his “Flying Squad”
raided their camp. Two men from Burroughs‟ special unit were shot. As the guerillas fled, they
taunted Burroughs to follow them at his own peril. For two years, the National United Freedom
Fighters (NUFF) had crisscrossed the island—from the Fyzabad forest of the south, to the hills and
mountains of the north—guns ablaze—and attacked police stations, oil companies, and Barclays
bank. By some estimates, NUFF was over three hundred strong, but only a dozen or so members
were armed and mobilized at any one time. NUFF‟s numbers, and resolve, had eroded with each
police ambush, arrest, and shoot-out.
Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan, “‟Whatcha Gonna
Do?‟: Revisiting „Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book‟: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers,
Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, & Jennifer L. Morgan” Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35, No.
1/2, The Sexual Body (Spring - Summer, 2007), p. 305.
2 Grace Lee Boggs, “The Black Revolution,” in Toni Cade Bambara, ed. The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1970, 2005), p. 270.
3 Selma James, “A Woman‟s Place,” in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of
Community, Third Edition (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975).
4 From the pamphlet, Nuff Speaks, cited in David , “Guerrilla War in Trinidad: 1970-1974,” published in Selwyn Ryan
and Taimoon Stewart, eds. The Black Power Revolution 1970: a Retrospective (St Augustine, Trinidad: ISER, 1995).
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“We coming in the bush now for all yuh,” Superintendent Burroughs hollered. An echo of
gunfire trailed him. NUFF strategist Terrence Thornhill ran for cover as his relief, seventeen-yearold Beverly Jones, was shot in her face, her legs, and killed. The girl that came to be known as the
“Heroine of the Revolution,” Beverly Jones, and her sister Jennifer, left a middle-class home for the
mountains and armed revolt. The Jones sisters joined a posse at war with the neocolonial
government of Prime Minister Eric Williams, with electoral politics, and with the failures of the
aborted Revolution of 1970. Three years before, that spontaneous, united front of black and Indian
workers, students, and a mutinous army regiment, promised to usher in the unrealized hopes of
1956: to overthrown the neocolonial regime, evict foreign imperialists, and deliver justice for the
poor and unemployed of Trinidad and Tobago.5
The generation of freedom fighters under siege that day in Caura came from all castes and
classes of Trinidadian society: men, women and youth; black, Chinese, and Indian. Many were the
daughters and sons of the nationalist movement against which they fought. Terrence Thornhill‟s
father studied at Cambridge as Eric Williams, the future Prime Minister, took his doctorate at
Oxford. After graduating from Tranquility Boys School and Queens Royal College—the alma mater
of, among others, C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul—Terrence went abroad himself. Matriculating at
Catholic University in Washington D.C., he immersed himself in the “Black consciousness”
simmering in the Capitol, where he “started to see the sufferings of black people and identified with
them.” Thornhill dropped out of school, saved money, and returned to Trinidad in the wake of the
Selma James, a veteran organizer of revolutionary movements in Trinidad, the U.S., and the U.K., dedicates her 1975
pamphlet Sex, Race and Class to Beverly Jones: Selma James, Sex, Race and Class (London: Housewives in Dialogue, 1986).
The most comprehensive treatment of NUFF is David Millette‟s undergraduate thesis, “Guerrilla War in Trinidad: 19701974, in Ryan and Stewart, eds. The Black Power Revolution of 1970; Victoria Pasley, Patricia Mohammed, and Rhoda
Reddock call for situating women like the Jones sisters within a broader narrative of indigenous feminist politics in
Trinidad and Tobago: Victoria Pasley, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad: An Exploration of Gender and
Cultural Changes and the Development of a Feminist Consciousness,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 3:1
(November 2001); Patricia Mohammed, “Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean,” Feminist Review 59
(Summer 1998); Rhoda Reddock, “Diversity, Difference and Caribbean Feminism: The Challenge of Anti-Racism,”
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 1 (April 2007). This project is an attempt to join their efforts.
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1970 uprising. His childhood friends, veterans of the National Joint Action Group (NJAC), a
student movement at the forefront of the fight in 1970, had abandoned the organization and its
“talking, theorizing” for more radical alternatives, for guns. A few months later, Thornhill left
Trinidad again for a long-planned European tour. “We got the motorcycles in Germany, went
through Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, going down to the border with Turkey, me and my
roommate (he was white American). At the Turkish border we were told it was impossible to go
through.” This was just after the coup. When he returned to Trinidad again, in December 1971, his
friends had fled to the hills. Thornhill‟s long absence from the political life of the island made him a
perfect ally. “I was what you could call a „cool man,‟” he recalled. “I wasn‟t wanted, wasn‟t known by
the authorities, so I could do anything, get medication, foodstuff, whatever.” Thornhill stayed cool
under fire too.
It‟s difficult to speculate where and when these young people received their political
education. Had Thornhill on U Street in Washington D.C.? At an NJAC meeting? On the Turkish
border? Travel and translation exposed him to global revolutions in disparate contexts, and this
travel enlisted him as an ambassador to struggles on his home island. Though I don‟t know the
itineraries of the Jones sisters travels, not yet at least, I do know that through personal connections
with migrants like Terrence Thornhill they, and NUFF, had connections to broader struggles in
Cuba, from which they borrowed tactics, to the United States and Europe. Like Thornhill, the Jones
sisters abandoned the comfort and trappings of a middle-class life for wilderness and the weight of a
gun. Seventeen, and ostensibly pregnant, Beverly Jones became a martyr. The slaughtered symbol of
the revolution was the nation‟s deviant daughter: an unwed (possibly pregnant) middle-class girl who
slept under the stars with a pistol in her hand.6
The first-person accounts included here are taken from Brian Meeks, “NUFF at the Cusp of an Idea: Grassroots
Guerillas and the Politics of the 1970s in Trinidad and Tobago,” Social Identities 5:4 (1999). Meeks elaborates on NUFF,
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NUFF formulated and inherited radical politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism that were
forged through travel, personal networks, and the long dialogue among diasporic intellectuals and
grassroots insurgents throughout the twentieth century. Drawing from recent scholarship on “the
long civil rights movement,” and the “transnational turn” in history and American Studies, Without
Country: Black Revolutionaries of the Caribbean Diaspora, 1932-1975 is an effort to expand the history of
black power in the Atlantic world chronologically and geographically, through the contestation and
maturation of radical politics across personal and professional networks, national borders, and two
generations of Trinidadian migrants—border-crossing elites and grassroots insurgents—who were at
the forefront of anti-colonial and anti-imperial battles that anticipated and buttressed the global
women‟s and black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Without Country will extend the
history of black power into the interwar period, among the anti-imperialist struggles of a core group
of West Indian migrants who studied, taught, and organized around the Atlantic world, and later
became principal allies and opponents of a new generation of student activists.
Rethinking radicalism, revolution, and the boundaries of the Caribbean, Without Country will
profile the networks of West Indian migrants, women and men, who theorized, practiced, and
abandoned an intersectional Marxist feminist politics that generated diverse strategies for a truly
transformative tomorrow. Generative as well as reactionary, founding organizers as well as
reformers, migrant radicals agitated and organized for a range of movements across four decades,
from anti-colonial nationalism to women‟s liberation to black power. Often outcasts in their own
homes, and enemies of the state, these radicals challenged the divisive campaigns that betrayed,
opposed, and metastasized around them as the warships of new empires fortified the investments of
and ties the organization into a broader, regional history in Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean (Mona:
University Press of the West Indies, 2000).
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old, neocolonial borders hardened, and the cult of black manhood strangled the possibilities for
revolution in the fist of patriarchy.
A history of the travel of people, and ideas, across national borders, Without County will
necessarily tread within and across specific nations and their archives, from Trinidad and Tobago to
the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and back. Why Trinidad as a port of departure and
(attempted) repatriation? Recalling the tributaries of his family‟s migrations around the Caribbean,
from “Monserrat, Grenada, Barbados, Antigua, Nevis, Tobago, and Panama,” to Trinidad, Stokely
Carmichael noted that his heritage was unremarkable. “An economic magnet for people from the
smaller territories,” with its sugar, cocoa, and petroleum industries, Trinidad was “a commercial and
administrative hub,” whose population was constantly reconstituted by waves of migrants of seeking
shelter, bread, and love.7 The growl of hungry bellies was especially loud during the global Great
Depression, as thousands of workers, and fellow travelers, arrived in Trinidad, colliding and
collaborating as the winds of change swept through Manchester, Manhattan, and the pages of the
Negro World.
In successive waves, Trinidadian migrants left for metropolitan shores. Yet the
literature and soapbox cries of their sons made an indelible mark on the history of black liberation
etched so deeply that the lives and labors of their daughters, sisters, and mothers, have been all but
gouged out.8
Just two examples: Elma Francois, of St. Vincent, left home, in part, to join the father of her son, Albert James, who
settled in Trinidad after fighting in World War I. Mabel Florence Charles, Stokely Carmichael‟s mother, was born in the
Panama Canal Zone and grew up in Montserrat. In Port of Spain to obtain her visa to the United States, where her
parents had moved, Mabel met Stokely‟s father, Adolphus Carmichael; see Rhoda Reddock, Elma Francois: The
NWCSA and the Worker‟s Struggle for Change in the Caribbean (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, p. 9;
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely
Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 16-17; Winston James details the ecological, economic, and meteorological
forces shaping Caribbean migration in “Caribbean Migration: Scale, Determinants, and Destinations, 1880-1932,” the
first chapter of Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso,
1998).
8 Outside the West Indies and the United Kingdom, principally within the United States, the impact of these men and
their Trinidadian heritage is similarly hidden, silenced by legacies of anti-communism and the pedagogy of “African
American history.” See historiography below.
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Overview: Education, Exile, and Desire; Youth and Rebellion
In July 1967, one year after he called for black power from the Mississippi Delta, Trinidad
native Stokely Carmichael visited London for a conference on “The Dialectics of Liberation.” Once
outside the stuffy lecture hall full of “armchair theoreticians,” he lifted his spirits among the African
and Caribbean communities of London, guided by Michael X, (né DeFrietas) the Trinidad-born
founder of the Racial Adjustment Action Society. “He was a black-consciousness militant,”
Carmichael remembered, “quick-witted with a real mastery of that sharp, in-your-face, verbal
comeback that in Trinidad they call picong…There was nothing British—much less Oxford—in the
brother‟s accent. It was pure San Fernando, back o‟ bridge.” 9 Throughout his stay, Carmichael met
with local West Indian leaders, students, and journalists. Using his London stage, and
Commonwealth roots, to connect movements in Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean.
Carmichael was astonished by the local organizing of African and Caribbean youth, and “to hear
Black Power resonating and to see the raised fists in the Asian communities, especially among
Pakistani youth.”10 Back at the conference, Carmichael lambasted colonialism and the British
Empire, drawing from his boyhood experiences in Trinidad to connect the plights of West Indians,
Africans, and the “very real colonies” of minorities in the United States. “I have something against
England,” he told his British audience. “I really do, because when I was young I had to read all that
rot about how good England was to Trinidad, while she was raping us left and right. And all I used
to read about when I was small was London, the beauty of London, and how peacefully everybody
lived, and how nice life was—at my expense.”11
Carmichael (Kwame Ture) with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, p. 574.
Ibid., p. 576.
11 Carmichael (Kwame Ture) with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, pp. 575-582; Carmichael, “The Dialectics of Liberation,”
in Stokely Speaks; Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 82-86, 94; Colin McGlashan,
“Mainspring of Black Power,” The Observer Review, 23 July 1967.
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The following day, “revolutionary elder statesman,” and fellow Trinidadian, C.L.R. James
addressed the conference. James had first heard Carmichael speak earlier that year, in March, at Sir
George Williams University in Montreal. James had been so impressed with Carmichael that he
quickly penned a letter to the twenty-four-year-old. “One of my most important and pregnant
experiences is my experience both personal and otherwise of West Indians and people of West
Indian origin who have made their way on the broad stage of Western civilization,” James wrote. He
then traced a long lineage of “West Indians who have played a role on the world political stage that
is not even properly understood by their own people,” including Marcus Garvey, George Padmore,
Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. “I say that I am one of them because it means that I understand the
type very well,” James continued. “And you are one. I suspected it when I was reading some of your
writings and having heard you I am absolutely certain of it.”12
Without County: Black Revolutionaries of the Caribbean Diaspora, 1932-1975 is an attempt to
excavate this genealogy of “West Indians on the world political stage.” Rather than retrace the welltrodden ground James describes—specifically, the biographies of elite fathers of pan-Africanism and
black Marxism—this dissertation will attempt to underline a broader concept of black migrant
radicalism that borrows from Hazel Carby‟s concept of “History‟s Hybrids,” and Carole Boyce
Davies metaphor for radical politics that were “Left of Karl Marx.” The stories of migrant subjects,
Carby argues, “are messily miscegenated and ambiguously hybrid,” and defy the “parochialism” of
national histories. Carole Boyce Davies‟s work on black communist Claudia Jones herald the
potential for writing histories of people who “lived and organized at the intersection of a variety of
positionalities (anti-imperialism and decolonization struggles, activism for workers‟ rights, the
C.L.R. James, “Black Power,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1967/black-power.htm, from Black
Power: It’s [sic] Past, Today, and The Way Ahead (Lansing, Michigan: Marcus Garvey Institute, 1968).
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critique of appropriation of black women‟s labor, the challenge to domestic and international racism
and their links to colonialism).”13
Though most historians have yet to acknowledge the lineage that James describes here—
black power as a transnational, Caribbean diasporic slogan—this neglected pedigree nevertheless
casts other silences, and overlooks the local stages from which these West Indian men catapulted to
world renown. The concept of radicalism at work in this dissertation, then, will encompass the
border-shattering work of these male elites, local economic and political yearnings, and the workingclass women‟s movements from which intersectional, radical possibilities emerged. At their
soapboxes and in their bedrooms, women organizing at the grassroots fought simultaneously, and
continuously, with their migrant comrades against colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy. Without
Country will explore the history of black power as a continuation of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, antisexist radicalism of the 1930s, through the travel, political thought, and networks of two generations
of Trinidadian anti-imperialists—insurgents on the ground, and intellectuals abroad—from the
renaissance of literary and radical activity in the middle of the 1930s to the violent suppression of
black power movements in the mid-1970s.
This history spans many years, across many territories. In order to tell it, Without Country will
eschew conventional, nation-bound narratives for a history of the processes of network building,
politicization, and radicalism in global/local spaces of intellectual and cultural exchange. 14 Education,
exile, labor, and desire are but four central themes that emerge from this long history of radicalism
Hazel Carby, “History‟s Hybrids,” The Women’s Review of Books 17:5 (February 2000), and Carby, “Becoming Modern
Racial Subjects,” Cultural Studies 23:4 (July 2009). Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black
Communist Claudia Jones (Durham and London: Duke, 2007), p. 25, pp. xiii, 2-5, 19-25, 66-67, 253 n. 59; Boyce Davies,
“Sisters Outside: Tracing the Caribbean/Black Radical Intellectual Tradition,” Small Axe 28 (March 2009); Boyce Davies,
“Deportable Subjects: U.S. Immigration Laws and the Criminalizing of Communism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:4
(Fall 2001).
14 Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton, N.J: Princeton
University Press, 2005), p. 6; Stuart Hall, “The Global and the Local: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Anne McClintock,
Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, ed., Dangerous Liasons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997); Carby, “History‟s Hybrids,” The Women’s Review of Books.
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and the Caribbean diaspora. Each of these factors presented obstacles and opportunities for
migration and network-building across borders, and each will serve as organizing devices for
individual chapters in the dissertation.
Rather than simply amend the well-documented black power movements that sprung from
the red clay of Mississippi and the cinders of Detroit and Watts, with stories from Fyzabad‟s oilfields
and Port of Spain‟s Carnival, Without Country will uncover circum-Atlantic networks fostered among
intellectuals and activists in spaces where education—formal and informal, academic and political—
took place. These include the open classrooms of public parks and factory floors, accredited
universities, and international conferences. From Woodford Square and Piccadilly Greens in Port of
Spain, the factories of Detroit and New York City, freedom schools in Mississippi and Alabama, to
the residential halls at Oxford, Howard, Lincoln, and Sir George Williams, migrant radicals
strategized, quarreled, and negotiated their constantly evolving relationship to nation, citizenship,
and empire, and the racial and gender scripts that these relationships imposed.
Exile, as an organizing structure, as a fact, and as a political persona, will also serve as an
analytical lens and an organizing structure for this dissertation. Although state repression—through
exclusionary immigration policies, deportation, and police violence—crushed political possibilities in
specific local spaces, exile also generated potential for their translation elsewhere.15 Furthermore, the
erotic economies of specific political movements—desire among individuals, across borders, and the
families that blossomed and collapsed in the process—fired the political imaginations of anticolonial nationalists and world revolutionaries.16 Yet all too often, heterosexism, and the “tense and
As Carole Boyce Davies shows, deportation was often only start of the story, Left of Karl Marx, p. 4.
Examples include the case of Elma Francois above, as well as the migrations precipitated by C.L.R. James‟s unions
with Constance Webb and Selma James. Exile, desire, and revolutionary labor likewise intersect in Stokely Carmichael‟s
union with Miriam Makeba. An embodiment of Carmichael‟s adolescent longing for Africa and black power, Miriam
Makeba provided Carmichael with familial links to the continent, just as he was in the process of relocating there.
Indeed, In Conkary, Carmichael engendered kinship ties on a number of fronts, accepting the name Kwame Ture from
his “political fathers.” Rewriting his heritage—colonial, national, and biological—and abandoning the nations that sent
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tender ties” among individuals tore at the seams of radical horizons, and presented stumbling blocks
to a liberatory, egalitarian, intersectional politics.17
The transnational family presented additional avenues and barriers to radical political action.
Kinship networks stretched across generations, and oceans, distancing youth from the political
assumptions, habits, and loyalties of their parents. Travel and alienation fostered introspection and
relentless self-reflection of the migrant child‟s place in the world, fueling the fires of rebellion. Yet
rebellion had many strains, and targets. Just as Stokely Carmichael, eight years estranged from his
mother, rebelled against her “conventional immigrant optimism” for the United States, Elma
Francois‟s son Conrad, who was raised by his grandmother in St. Vincent, embraced empire instead
of his mother‟s revolutionary vistas.18 Overall, Without Country embraces Mariarosa Dalla Costa and
Selma James‟s demand for the recognition of children and women as “integral to history,”
specifically a history “of young people's participation (and of women's) in revolutionary struggles.”
Pairing the political rebellion of youth and the women‟s movement as “intimately connected,” Dalla
Costa and James wrote in 1973, “We are dealing with the revolt of those who have been excluded,
who have been separated by the system of production, and who express in action their need to
destroy the forces that stand in the way of their social existence, but who this time are coming
him into exile, Carmichael likewise disowned the biological father that, so he claimed, never fathered him; Carmichael
(Kwame Ture) and Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, p. 628.
17 Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)
Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (2001); M. Jacqui Alexander offers a way of telling a history of ideological
and political formations across the imperial and colonial, and the neocolonial and neo-imperial, through the
“palimpsestic character of time,” and the reproduction of “modernist claims about statehood and nationbuilding,”
specifically citizenship—defined by heterosexual marriage practices—that is applicable to the family choices of diasporic
intellectuals and the limits of their political visions for national or diasporic citizenship; Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing:
Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Radical feminists
articulated and practiced alternatives to conventional heterosexual marriage in tune with their radical political practices
on the public stage; see Boyce Davies, “Deportable Subjects: U.S. Immigration Laws and the Criminalizing of
Communism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:4 (Fall 2001), and Left of Karl Marx, pp. 50, 259 n.59; Reddock, Elma
Francois, p. 18.
18 Carmichael (Kwame Ture) with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, pp. 50, 96; “Mainspring of Black Power,” The Observer, 23
July 1967; Reddock, Elma Francois, p. 54.
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together as individuals.” These personal connections and networks, and the political work that they
generated, are at the core of this dissertation project.
The narrative threads of the project will be drawn generationally, as well as geographically,
from the renaissance of literary activity and labor activism in the 1930s to the collapse of black
power politics in Trinidad in the mid-1970s. In between, the dissertation will criss-cross the Atlantic
with the Trinidadian radicals it follows. But what is Trinidadian in the context? And what is radical?
Several of the principal characters within this story were born to families who had settled in Trinidad
and Tobago for only one or two generations—if they were born there at all—and spent part, if not
most—of their lives as exiles overseas. Others arrived to the islands as migrants, toilers, spouses and
lovers from other shores, and planted roots as defenders of the exploited and the unemployed. As
highlighted above, the settlement of this two-island colony, then nation, was constantly in flux,
suckled and sapped by the “overlapping diasporas” of African, Indian, and Chinese workers to its
shores, and out again to the metropoles that competed for its labor, its resources, its political and
economic spoils.19 Radicalism, in this fluctuating, ever-changing social landscape, marinated in the
constant interaction and dialogue among migrant travelers, and travel helped engender radicalism
among middle-class, formally educated men, expatriate students, teachers, and journalists—as well as
women who crossed racial, national, and oceanic divides to link local, grassroots battles against
imperialism, patriarchy, and the exploitation of workers. While the literary and political work of
these male, formally educated, intellectuals has been told before, the grassroots anti-colonial and
anti-imperial struggles, and feminist practice, of working-class women is less clear. And historians
have rarely traced the concrete connections among these deceptively disparate movements.20
Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” The
American Historical Review 100: 3 (June 1995), pp. 765-787.
20 Carole Boyce Davies, Ula Taylor, and Cathy Cohen, among others, have catalogued the erasures of women from
studies of the black radical tradition; see Ula Y. Taylor, “Read[ing] Men and Nations: Women in the Black Radical
Tradition,” Souls 1:4 (Fall 1999); Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of
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Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1:1 (2004), Boyce Davies, “Sisters Outside: Tracing the Caribbean/Black Radical
Intellectual Tradition,” Small Axe 28 (March 2009).
Recent work seeks to revise these accounts, most notably the essays in Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and
Komozi Woodard‟s superb anthology, Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York:
New York University Press, 2009). But erasures remain, and women are marginal to the concept of “black
internationalism” in Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Touissaint to Tupac: The Black
International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), whose contributors, with the
exception of Vijay Prashad, hardly mention women at all, let alone gender. Brian Meeks‟s essay on “The Rise and Fall of
Caribbean Black Power,” while attentive to Trinidad, ignores women. Furthermore, the editors‟ choice of contemporary
evidence of “the black international”—hip hop as embodied by Tupac Shakur—evokes sexism, homophobia, and rape
as much as it does hip hop as “a productive technology in the current global mapping and moving of black political
subjects via the social workings of diaspora,” Marc D. Perry, “Hip Hop‟s Diasporic Landscapes of Blackness,” p. 233.
Another recent volume, Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power
Era (New York: Routledge, 2006), includes three essays on black feminists in organizations like the Black Panther Party
and The Third World Women‟s Alliance. Rhonda Y. Williams‟s essay on “Black Women, Urban Politics, and
Engendering Black Power,” is particularly poignant. Williams calls attention to black power movements “precursors,
influences, overlaps, and coexistence with other activist traditions,” specifically those grassroots activists working outside
organizational frameworks, p. 82. Essays by Kimberly Springer and Stephen Ward, on the other hand, describe black
feminisms emergence from, response to, and extension of black power politics in the U.S., rather than an interactive
(and transnational) process with a longer history: Springer, “Black Feminists Respond to Black Power Masculinism,” and
Ward, “The Third World Women‟s Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics.”
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Historiography and Interventions: Immigration, Black Power, and the “Outside Agitator.”
Following in the footsteps of recent books like Glenda Gilmore‟s Defying Dixie: The Radical
Roots of Civil Rights 1919-1950, Without Country is part of a broader historical turn to extend the
chronology of “the long civil rights movement.”21 Like Gilmore, I am dissatisfied with simply
extending timelines, but “in expanding the temporal and geographical boundaries of the war against
Jim Crow.”22 Jim Crow, however, was only one front in a world war against colonialism, racism, and
patriarchy. Because this topic covers broad chronological as well as geographic territory, the
dissertation will intersects several subfields in twentieth-century U.S., Caribbean, British, and
Atlantic history, and incorporate methods and theories from postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, and
black and Caribbean feminist writers.23
Without Country intervenes most directly in the burgeoning subfield of Black Power Studies.
Currently, as scholars have paid increased attention to black power movements in the Caribbean,
principally in Jamaica, Guyana, and Grenada, much work done remains to be done on “Black Power
Revolution of 1970” in Trinidad and Tobago, and the subsequent NUFF guerilla movement.24
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History
4: 91 (March 2005).
22 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, p. 6.
23 My engagement with, and interventions in, feminist historiography and transnational feminist theory is conspicuously
limited. As a new student to these fields, I will continue to study, and depend more heavily, on these particular
genealogies as the dissertation develops.
24 Peter Fryer‟s classic, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984) concludes during the
black power period, but only glosses over its history, like many studies of black immigrants to Britain. At the time, Times
reporters published a narrative history of revolutions in Africa, the United States, and Britain, The Black Man in Search of
Power: A Survey of the Black Revolution Across the World (London: Nelson, 1968). Reporters at the Observer Review and the
Guardian, while providing more detailed coverage of movements in the West Indies, and their dialogue with those among
immigrants in the U.S. and the U.K., inverted Harold Cruse‟s thesis, and highlighted the exportation of black struggles in
the United States to “mimic men” in the Caribbean, see, for instance, Brian Lapping, “More Cooperation by
Immigrants,” The Guardian, 29 September 1967; Malcolm Dean, “Doctor on the Spot,” The Guardian, 23 April 1970;
participant accounts and biographies include Michael Abdul Malik, From Michael De Freitas to Michael X (London:
Deutsch, 1968), and Derek Humphry, False Messiah: The Story of Michael X (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1977).
Recent studies of black power in Guyana and Grenada include Anthony Bogues‟s article, “Black Power, Decolonization,
and Caribbean Politics: Walter Rodney and the Politics of The Groundings with My Brothers” boundary 2 36:1 (2009), and
David Scott‟s forthcoming book on Bernard Coard and the Grenada Revolution. Histories of the student movement and
black power in Canada, particularly Montreal, include David Austin, “All Roads Led to Montreal: Black Power, The The
21
14
Participant accounts dominate the few studies of black power movements in Trinidad and Tobago,
and only a handful of scholars have uncovered feminist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s. 25
The burgeoning field of Black Power Studies in the U.S., however, overshadows this
transnational, intersectional history of black power and migrant radicalism across these four decades.
Indeed, the explicit aim of Black Power Studies, as explained by Peniel Joseph in a recent “State of
the Field” article in the Journal of American History, “is to demystify, complicate, and intellectually
engage demonized, dismissed, and overlooked actors and struggles by providing nuanced, wellresearched, and weighty narratives that document the profound implications of black power politics
for the study of African American history and U.S. history more broadly.”26 Thus Black Power
Studies revitalizes the period of the black power movements in the United States in the 1960s and
1970s, principally the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, as a paradigmatic movement worldwide.
Expanding the chronology of these movements into “the heroic period” of civil rights history from
1954 to 1965, Black Power Studies situates black activists “at the center of Cold War intrigues,” by
chronicling the lives and revive the reputations of “both the iconic and unglamorous” figures that
have been hidden by popular images of militancy and violence, as well as “contribute to, and expand
the scope of, a larger contemporary discussion about the legacy of civil rights.” Additionally, Joseph
Caribbean, The Black Radical Tradition in Canada,” Journal of African American History 92. 4 (Fall 2007), pp. 516-539, and
Keith Pruden, “The Georgian Spirit in Crisis: The Causes of the Computer Centre Riot,” M.A. thesis, Concordia
University, 2004.
25 The Black Power Revolution of 1970: A Retrospective (St. Augustine, Trinidad: I.S.E.R., University of the West Indies, 1995);
Raoul Pantin, Black Power Day: The 1970 February Revolution: A Reporter's Story (Santa Cruz, Trinidad and Tobago, West
Indies: Hatuey Productions, 1990); Brian Meeks, Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr (Barbados: The Press
University of the West Indies, 1996); Victoria Pasley, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad: An Exploration of
Gender and Cultural Changes and the Development of a Feminist Consciousness,” Journal of International Women’s Studies
3:1 (November 2001); Patricia Mohammed, “Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean,” Feminist Review
59 (Summer 1998); Rhoda Reddock, “Diversity, Difference and Caribbean Feminism: The Challenge of Anti-Racism,”
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 1 (April 2007). Rhoda Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics in Trinidad & Tobago: A History
(London: Zed Books, 1994); Ron Ramdin, From Chattel Slave to Wage Earner: A History of Trade Unionism in Trinidad and
Tobago (London: M. Brian & O'Keeffe, 198). Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations Among Indians in Trinidad, 19171947 (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002). In his recent biography of Eric Williams, Colin Palmer has describes the “Black
Power Revolution” as the most “serious extralegal challenge to his administration,” and “a psychological blow of
inestimable proportions,” Colin A Palmer, Eric Williams & the Making of the Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006);
26 Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 96.3 (December
2009).
15
has called for attention to “the international historical context” of the Black Power movement,
principally through the travels of U.S.-born black activists abroad.27
This emphasis of Black Power Studies on U.S.-born subjects diminishes the long history of
black activists traveling to and from the United States, the social and political movements in locales
like Port-of-Spain, Montreal, and Brixton that precipitated the slogan, and the heterogeneity of
movement participants that made black power a transnational banner before Stokely Carmichael
ever stepped foot on U.S. soil. In their efforts to cross racial boundaries within the U.S., these
authors also fail to address the traffic of ideologies and political strategy beyond tracking the oneway commerce of black power slogans to the Chicano, Asian American, and American Indian
movements.” Consider a woman like Elizabeth Martinez, SNCC field secretary, co-author of Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation, and Stokely Speaks, and attendee with Carmichael at the First
Conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity in Cuba in July of 1967. Martinez‟s
trajectory from SNCC leader and political theorist of black power to becoming a principal founder
of the Chicano movement suggests that the conversation on black power influences should be
redirected away from influences and toward intersections and interactivity among radical
movements.28 Scholars must not only bridge histories across ethnic divides, but must also attend to
Peniel E. Joseph, “Preface” and “Introduction: Toward a Historiography of the Black Power Movement,” in Peniel E.
Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. xi-xii, 89, 13. Joseph is currently writing a biography of Carmichael and the transformation of “American democracy” that ends
in 1969, when Carmichael migrated to Guinea. See Joseph, "Revolution in Babylon: Stokely Carmichael and America in
the 1960s,” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9:4 (2008): 281-301, and “The Black Power
Movement in the King Years,” American Historical Review 114 (October 2009), pp. 1001-1016.
28 On provincialism and black studies, see Carby, “History‟s Hybrids,” The Women’s Review of Books 17:5 (February 2000);
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, a historian of the Black Panther Party, has traced such effects. “The Black Panther Party served as a
paradigm of radical ethnic nationalism and a vanguard party for the revolutionary nationalist movement,” Ogbar argues,
suggesting that Black Power inspired Yellow Power movements like the Asian American Hardcore and Yellow
Brotherhood. Ogbar is right to show the interactivity of these movements, but he overstates the importance and
uniqueness of the Black Panther Party, whose appeal, he claims, “was unprecedented in the annals of radical struggle.”
This is a hard argument to accept in light of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions alone. While schooled in the political
thought and theory of Huey Newton and Angela Davis, Thornhill‟s fellow fighters, like the student insurgents in the
Turkey from which he was barred, took their principal cues, and inspiration not from the radicals in the United States,
but in Cuba; Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, “Yellow Power: The Formation of Asian-American Nationalism in the Age of Black
Power, 1966-1975,” Souls 3:3 (Summer 2001), pp. 29-38; and Ogbar, “Rainbow Radicalism: The Rise of the Radical
Ethnic Nationalism,” pp. 193-228. For a revealing look at the links between Black Power and the Chicano movement,
27
16
and reckon with their interactivity, and the history of race-making in the United States that has
obscured differences within the category of black, and erased the lives of migrant actors whom
scholars like Winston James have shown have had a role in U.S. politics disproportionate to their
populations.29
Simply put, for far too long African Americanist historians, and black studies scholars more
generally, have been anchored to a homogenous idea of blackness, an uncritical acceptance of racial
codes that have cracked the foundations of even the most innovative scholarship in diaspora studies
and black transnationalism. Ten years ago, Robin D.G. Kelley reflected on the turn toward
international and transnational perspectives in United States history in an often-cited essay that
reminded readers that black intellectuals had always already resisted “a bounded national history set
in isolation from the world.”30 At the time, scholars in African American Studies, American Studies,
Asian American Studies, and U.S. history were adopting strategies from cultural and postcolonial
theorists to uncover the movement of people, ideas, and culture across borders, “the global within
the local,” imperial circuits of knowledge production, and the “tense and tender ties” between
colonizer and colonial subject. Subsequent studies shifted focus from elite subjects in the metropole,
to colonial encounter, cultural hybridity, “global imaginaries,” and the constant construction and
reconstruction of racial hierarchies in local, regional, and transnational contexts.31
see Stephen Pitti, “Chicano Cold Warriors: Cesar Chavez, Mexican American Politics, and California Farmworkers” in
Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser ed., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 273-307.
29 Manning Marable, “Transforming Ethnic Studies: Theorizing Multiculturalism, Diversity, and Power,” Souls 3:3
(Summer 2001), pp. 10, 11, 15.
30 Robin D. G. Kelley, “„But a Local Phase of a World Problem‟: Black History‟s Global Vision, 1883-1950,” Journal of
American History 86: 3 (December 1999): pp. 1045-1077.
31 Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)
Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (2001). For an exhaustive review of the “transnational turn” in history
and American Studies, see Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: Historical Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical
History Review 91 (Winter 2005); see also David Thelen, "The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United
States History," Journal of American History 86 (December 1999); Lisa Brock, "Questioning the Diaspora: Hegemony,
Black Intellectuals, and Doing International History from Below," Issue. A Journal of Opinion 24: 2 (1996).
17
But the field of black internationalist history is still reticent to budge from the safety and
hegemony of U.S. black identity. Clear in Kelley‟s essay, historians of “black internationalism” still
cling to assumptions about an uncontested U.S.-born orientation, “Black History‟s Global Vision”
outward, and an undefined “we” differentiated from outsiders: “the Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans,
Dominicans, Barbadians, Haitians.” It is no coincidence that Kelley positioned himself, in the first
sentence of his essay, “as a scholar who owes his formative intellectual training to ethnic studies
programs and Third World solidarity movements.” The “internationalist” thesis draws from this
sense of “solidarity,” of the gaze black subjects born in the U.S., and the practice of comparison
between themselves and black and Asian others across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the
Caribbean Sea.32 Entangled in import-export arguments about the influences of U.S. radicalism on
movements abroad, these scholars depict the United States as a lodestone for the filaments of global
radicalism. In contrast, Without Country will refocus this framework of African American history
towards its literal subjects—and the global within—through the stories of Africans living in the
United States and, borrowing from Carmichael, “African-Americans of the Americas.”33
The student movement, as it came to be known, was composed and lead by not only black
and white activists from the urban centers of the U.S., but “outside agitators” of another kind,
African and West Indian migrants who felt more than solidarity with the Third World. They were a
part of it. The civil rights movement in the United States was always already a long-standing part of
a protracted global struggle. Local movements for Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s inherited a
system of international resistance that spanned the Atlantic during the depression, embodied by a
network of West African and West Indian migrants who traversed the world. As C.L.R. James
Robin D. G. Kelley, “„But a Local Phase of a World Problem‟: Black History‟s Global Vision, 1883-1950,” Journal of
American History 86: 3 (December 1999), pp. 1045-1046.
33 Carmichael, “Solidarity with Latin America,” Stokely Speaks, pp. 101-110.
32
18
reminded Stokely Carmichael in 1967, migrant activists “have played a role on the world political
stage that is not even properly understood by their own people,” or, I should add, historians.
Histories of the student movement in the United States, though sensitive to the role tensions
of northern students as “outsiders” in the southern communities they helped organize, miss the
opportunity to highlight the role of immigrants, and depict these conflicts as regional, between
Northern and Southern, educated and uneducated black Americans. Noting that “by 1967, most
[SNCC] members thought of themselves as anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist members of the Third
World,” Payne doesn‟t address those organizers, like Carmichael, who didn‟t just think of themselves
in alliance with struggles in third world countries, but were actually born there.34 Some of the best
histories of black power have noted that the movement was as much a “revival as a reversal.” Black
power animated values, strategies, and political movements that were sown in the 1920s and 1930s
in the Deep South, articulated in the philosophies of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey,
and practiced through the armed organizing work of sharecroppers unions. Historians of the New
South have also challenged the idea of the South as a “closed society,” arguing against the
exceptional racism in places like Mississippi by showing their connections to postwar racial politics
in the North and West. Through their work of tracing the intersections of regional and ethnic
movements, especially in freedom struggle during the 1960s and 1970s, these scholars have
challenged the very idea of balkanized histories of the South and the Southwest, African Americans,
Asian Americans, and Chicano Americans, which mute the forces of travel, mobility and shared
struggle.35 While tracing connections to movements within U.S. borders, work remains to tell the
story of activists who crossed them.
See Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), esp., pp. 376-389.
35 See Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press), p. 291; Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative
Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in
34
19
The field of African American history, already at the margins of U.S. history, has avoided the
power such a periphery has to destabilize nation-bound, and thus incomplete, narratives of panCaribbean, pan-American, and transatlantic migrations. Likewise, African American history has
relinquished the opportunity to place outcast black subjects at the core of nation-building projects,
citizenship, and as a link to broader histories of migration, colonialism, and empire. 36 Unfortunately,
the bulk of “African American” historiography continues to perpetuate the “race-nationality
concept” Ira de Augustine Reid critiqued in 1939, “a polyglot collection of racial mixtures and
cultural adaptations,” reduced to the paradoxical category African American.37 The very framing of
African-American history, as such, erases black subjects born outside of the United States, and
naturalized citizens, like Carmichael, who spent only seventeen years living there. In positioning
Carmichael as a principal actor in twentieth-century “African-American history,” scholars have
merely footnoted his experience as an immigrant, and a child of two empires, using it as an
anecdote, an insignificant detail about a militant narcissus that shattered King‟s dream. 38
Without Country seeks to illuminate the relationship of its migrant subjects to citizenship and
exclusion. Immigration scholars have divided migrations to the United States and Great Britain into
four distinct periods. The first of these periods, covering the first three decades of the twentieth
the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Kevin M. Kruse. White
Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Stephen Pitti, “Chicano
Cold Warriors: Cesar Chavez, Mexican American Politics, and California Farmworkers” in Gilbert M. Joseph and
Daniela Spenser ed., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008),
36 Two fields that have deep intellectual debts to Black Studies—Asian American Studies, and studies of whiteness—
have done just that.
37 Published in 1939, Ira de Augustine Reid‟s The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment,
1899-1937 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) remains the foundational text for historical and sociological
studies of black migration to the United States, particularly during the first wave that has garnered the most scholarly
attention. Reid criticized of the field of immigration studies in the first three decades of the twentieth century: “Negro
immigration as a modern aspect of the phenomenon has received only passing attention in the myriad works on the
immigration policies and problems of the United States,” Reid wrote. “A sentence here and a paragraph three—
frequently to the effect that this immigration is not extensive.” Ira de Augustine Reid, The Negro Immigrant, pp. 13, 23-24,
39, 227.
38 Carmichael‟s colonial origins have become so insignificant to historians of the United States that Trinidad and Tobago
is sometimes synonymous with other territories in the West Indies. See Carmichael, the “Jamaican-born New Yorker,” in
Thomas Sugrue‟s latest book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2008),
p. 337.
20
century, has attracted the most scholarly attention due to the vast numbers of migrants, more than
100,000 by some estimates, who joined migrants from the U.S. South in the new “Black Metropolis”
of Harlem.39 These studies focus on the personalities and political organizations built by individuals
like Hubert Harrison, Marcus Garvey, and Cyril Briggs, and other prominent political figures from
the British West Indies who unified vast numbers of African descended peoples in the Americas
through race-based ideologies of unity. This period usually concludes with the Immigration Act of
1924, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Provisions for national quotas in the
Immigration Act of 1924 slowed migration, though West Indians continued to enter the U.S.
through Great Britain‟s quota. The second period, which U.S. immigration historians have largely
overlooked, falls between the years that ushered in the “Windrush Generation” to Britain after 1948,
and the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, when the U.S. closed its doors. Nearly a
decade later, these migrations reversed. The Commonwealth Act of 1962 banned the entrance of
Britain‟s black subjects, and the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 facilitated the second great migration of
Caribbean to the U.S., along with educated professionals and skilled laborers from Asia, the Middle
East, and Africa.40
Within the past few decades, U.S. immigration studies have challenged euro-centric
narratives of “melting pot” assimilation with more complex portraits of the interplay of colonialism,
migration and racial formation. These studies have revised generations of scholarship that celebrated
the pioneering spirit of European immigrants, and illuminated histories of alienage, imperialism, and
Ira de Augustine Reid, The Negro Immigrant; David L Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981),
Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Tony
Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1976); Heather Hathaway, Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule
Marshall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global
Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Mary C Waters,
Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999); Brent
Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967).
40 An exception is Joshua Guild‟s dissertation, “You Can‟t Go Home Again: Migration, Citizenship, and United in
Postwar New York and London,” PhD Diss., Yale University, 2007.
39
21
exclusion. Yet for all the great work that these scholars have done, they continue to ignore black
immigrants from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. 41 Slighted by scholars, the period of Caribbean
Exclusion from the U.S. between 1952 and 1965 deserves closer attention, as do the effects of
overlapping cold war immigration policies on movement and radical political organizing across
borders. A particular political culture developed among migrants during the cold war, as civil rights
and decolonization movements raged within the Caribbean and the United States. As an earlier
generation of West Indian radicals were evicted from the United States under a tide of McCarthyism,
and changed course to the U.K., smaller numbers of Caribbean travelers and their families traveled
well-trodden roads to the United States through provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act that
permitted family unification and student visas. The worldview of this civil rights generation, and
their concrete connections to the archipelago, revise pervasive academic theories about transnational
imaginaries, “solidarity,” and “Third world consciousness.”42
Historians and sociologists have been unable to account for black heterogeneity and
differences among people born in the U.S. and Caribbean without racializing them in the process.43
John Higham, Strangers in the Land; Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955); Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1973);
John E Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985); Lisa Lowe: Immigrant Acts: Asian
American Cultural Politics (1996); Donna Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant
Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (1999); Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (1999); Dirk
Hoerder, “From Euro- and Afro-Atlantic to Pacific Migration System: A Comparative Migration Approach to North
American History,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (2000), 195-235; Bonnie Honig,
Democracy and the Foreigner (2001); Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
(2003); Mae M Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); Mary Lui, The Chinatown
Trunk Mystery (2005); Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (2005);
Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (2006).
42The solidarity thesis continues to shape the foundational assumptions and questions of scholars of black power, and
“black internationalism” in the twentieth century from William Van De Burg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power
Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), to recent issues of the journal
Souls: “Radicalism in Black America,” Souls 1:4 (Fall 1999), “Blacks and Asians: Revisiting Racial Formations,” Souls 3:3
(Summer 2001); The New Black Power History, Souls 9:4 (2007); Another recent example of the solidarity thesis that
overlooks so-called third world populations within U.S. borders is Cynthia Ann Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and
the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
43 This thesis extends from Harold Cruse‟s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black
Leadership, introduction by Stanley Crouch (New York: New York Review Books, 1967, 2005). Writing in the late 1960s,
Cruse compared Caribbean participants in the civil rights movement to Marcus Garvey, and attributed their “militant
stand on racial discrimination,” to “a psychology of non-identification with American Negro status and accommodation
to American white bourgeois values.” Black people born in the U.S., on the other hand, were “not being militant
41
22
For seventy years, since Ira de Augustine Reid published The Negro Immigrant in 1939, scholars have
rehashed racist portraits of industrious immigrant sojourners, and native-born blacks with a deficient
“attitude toward employment, work, and American society.” 44 Shrouding “race” under the terms
“ethnicity” and “ethnic difference,” and racial-ethnic traits of “radicalism” and “militant
consciousness,” this scholarship echoes the historical xenophobia of its sources—from the anticommunist U.S. government officials to nativists in the U.S. black press.45 “Radicalism” and
“militant consciousness” have come to signify inherent characteristics of Caribbean peoples, and the
“lack” of such radicalism among the U.S.-born have come to indicate cultural and racial deficiencies.
While praising the Caribbean immigrant as a virtuous, hardworking organism, these scholars chastise
her shiftless, paranoid, cowardly U.S. cousin.46 Despite the best intentions of some of these scholars
enough.” p. 255, and pp. 119, 427, 430, 432-433.
Thirty years later, in the award-winning Black Identities, Mary Waters repeated some the central claims in Cruse‟s
book, particularly the essential militancy of West Indians, and their use of national, “ethnic” affiliation as a strategy to
escape white supremacy in the U.S. “Because they come from a society with a majority of blacks and with many blacks in
high positions, the immigrants have high ambitions and expectations. Yet their experience with blocked economic
mobility due to race and their strong racial identities lead them to challenge blocked mobility in a very militant fashion
when they encounter it,” pp. 6-7; see also Dennis Forsythe, “West Indian Radicalism in America: An Assessment of
Ideologies,” in Frances Henry, ed. Ethnicity in the Americas (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1976).
For a thorough and convincing critique of Waters‟s book see Jemima Pierre, “Black Immigrants in the United
States and the “Cultural Narratives” of Ethnicity,” in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11(2004), and, to a lesser
extent, Winston James devotes a chapter to rebutting Cruse in Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia. James does so—within
the book as a whole—by praising the radicalism of Caribbean immigrants, rather than vilifying it.
Histories of black immigrants in the United States cluster around the 1920s, Garveyism, and tensions among
U.S.-born and West Indian subjects in New York: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue; Heather Hathaway,
Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule; Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the
Harlem Community, 1900-1930.
Recent sociologies of black immigrants to the U.S., specifically the post-1965 generation, include Philip
Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Nancy Foner,
ed. Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
44 Describing the character of these West Indian immigrants, Reid cited the history of slave rebellion as evidence that
“the Caribbean Negro has developed into a spirited, aggressive culture type.” This aggressiveness found voice in projects
like the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which reflected a Caribbean inclination to rebel against racist
barriers to social and economic mobility. “The Negro immigrant is beyond a doubt more radical than the native,” Reid
argued. “Protests against social and economic conditions are more pronounced among groups not so adjusted to their
peculiar functioning within society,” Reid, The Negro Immigrant, pp. 54, 68, 71, 27, 35-38, 40-41, 49, 217-221.
45 For critiques of ethnicity and “prior histories of racialization,” see Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the
Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 41; and Pierre, “Black
Immigrants in the United States and the “Cultural Narratives” of Ethnicity.”
46
This argument has been popularized by public intellectuals as well. During an interview with the New York Times,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. famously said, “we need to learn what the immigrants‟ kids have so we can bottle it and sell it,
because many members of the African-American community, particularly among the chronically poor, have lost that
sense of purpose and values which produced our generation.” This comment, of course, contains a familiar
23
to avoid treating identity as “a zero-sum process,” their comparative work—grounded in the
assumption that that there are such things as essential, static Caribbean and U.S. cultures, and that
these cultures have unchanging national characteristics—does nothing more than perpetuate the
division of West Indian and “black American” societies into separate racial spheres.47 In method as
well as argument, these scholars deny the dynamism of identity formation, and the lived experience
of generations of migrants who balanced multiple national and regional identities, and in the process
transformed local cultures that were always already global. These scholars would have you believe
that a young Trinidadian shouting black power from the Mississippi Black Belt was so thoroughly
assimilated into the culture of “black America” as to have forgotten the first eleven years of his life
in an island of black and Asian majority, and that he meant that call for the United States alone.
mythologizing of the civil rights movement, and the civil rights generation, which perpetuates other erasures about this
“heroic period,” respectability, poverty, and class; Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson, “Top Colleges Take More Blacks,
but Which Ones?” New York Times, 24 June, 2004; see also Malcolm Gladwell, “Black Like Them,” The New Yorker, April
29, 1996.
47 Waters, Black Identities, p. 6.
24
Chapter Summaries
Introduction
Outlining the themes of education, exile and desire, youth and rebellion, this introduction will
propose alternative definitions of radicalism and revolution, as well as an unbounded history of a
transnational Caribbean, through the stories of black and Asian workers, students, and intellectuals
who combated structures of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism from the Great Depression to the
oil boom of 1970s Trinidad. This chapter will profile the disparate sites of education and
transnational exchange where West Indian migrants courted, networked, and strategized for a better
future, often under the threat of state violence. Foregrounding black feminist struggles as
foundational and generative of the radical traditions of the Caribbean diaspora, the introduction will
question the stakes of revolution as accounted in conventional narratives of black radicalism and
black power. In turn, it will offer alternative visions, articulated by migrant revolutionaries
themselves, of a more complete transformation of structures of power—from bedrooms to the
Black Belt.
Chapter One
“From Woodford Square to Where?”: A Radical Caribbean Renaissance (1932-1935)48
Detailing the parallel renaissance in literature and radical politics during the early 1930s Trinidad and
England, chapter one asks how gender, class and education—formal and self-taught—shaped the
radical politics, sense of West Indian identity, and division among the colony‟s divided castes: elite
intellectuals who left Trinidad for the metropole, and grassroots activists who cast their buckets in
local politics and anti-colonial struggle.
Following World War I, burgeoning migrant populations and an outpouring of political and
intellectual activity in Trinidad and Tobago gave rise to an unprecedented level of literary
production, union organizing, and radical activism. While some teachers and intellectuals cast their
political hopes with gradual reform and the Trade Workers Association of Captain Arthur Cipriani,
and their personal futures to the winds of emigration, working-class women were freedom fighters
for the growing numbers of unemployed people. Growing numbers of Cipriani‟s so-called “barefoot
masses”—the unemployed workers in the streets of Port of Spain, and the oil and sugar fields of the
south—were left out of Cipriani‟s middle-class reform movement. Black and Indian women forged
coalitions to challenge Cipriani and the colonial government. Defending the poor and disaffected
was a vibrant, discordant number of grassroots women‟s, labor, and ethnic nationalist movements—
fractured along race, gender, and class—that staged hunger marches, and organized unions and
political parties.
Chapter Two
“Struggle or Starve”:
The title for this chapter comes from a song by Brother Valentino, who, with other calypsonians, was one of the best
chroniclers of black power period. One of the few books that considers the history of this period through the lens of
music, and culture, is Louis Regis, The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago 1962-1987 (Gainesville,
University of Florida Press, 1999). On the revolution and the literary renaissance, see Hazel Carby, “Proletarian or
Revolutionary Literature: C.L.R. James and the Politics of the Trinidadian Renaissance,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 87: 1
(Winter 1988).
48
25
From the Abyssinian Crisis to a Transnational Women’s Movement (1935-1939)49
The mobilization of women during the Great Depression and in the wake of the Italian invasion of
Ethiopia generated the widespread labor strikes in the late 1930s, and laid foundations for broad
transnational coalitions that endured for more than thirty years. Chapter two bridges the divide
between migrant intellectuals who emigrated to the metropole, and working-class activists who
remained in the colonies, through the correspondence and intersecting politics between the
International African Service Bureau in London and the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social
Association in Trinidad. As Africans and West Indians in the U.K. mobilized in support of Ethiopia
and the emancipation of Africa from European imperial powers, feminist intellectuals in England
and Trinidad fostered transatlantic dialogues, and demanded relief for the staggering numbers of
unemployed and hungry in the Caribbean. While men like C.L.R. James rested his hopes for world
revolutions on African revolution, women like Amy Ashwood Garvey and Sylvia Pankhurst were
attuned to the revolutionary potential of movements for self-government unfolding in the West
Indies among self-educated migrant workers like Elma Francois, Christina King, and their Negro
Welfare Cultural and Social Association (NWCSA).
From her pulpits in Woodford Square, and the sugar and oilfields of Trinidad, Elma Francois
lectured on imperialism and the history of African cultures. Circulating publications from Amy
Ashwood Garvey and Pankhurst, Francois, an advocate of racial pride, nevertheless fought for
interracial solidarity among black, Indian, and Chinese workers. On a more intimate level, Francois
and her compatriots, including her domestic partner Jim Barrette, practiced alternatives to
patriarchal marriage, and the gendered division of labor in the home. Francois‟s public talks about
workers and women‟s rights, as well as African history and politics, connected her with fellow
travelers from the U.S., and individuals like Uriah Butler, who has dominated historical accounts of
the period.50 Newly unemployed from an injury in the oilfields, Butler signed on to Francois‟s
movement, and eventual split with Francois to found the British Workers‟ and Citizens Home Rule
Party in 1936. In 1937, during the violent repression of widespread strikes in Trinidad, Butler,
Francois, and NWCSA members were arrested and tried for sedition. At her trial, Elma Francois
delivered her speech, “World Imperialism and Colonial Toilers,” and was subsequently acquitted.
Butler was imprisoned until 1939, and then again until the conclusion of the war, despite his
enduring loyalty to Britain and the war effort.
Chapter Three
“A Clean Break With Past”: Teaching Revolution on the Assembly Line (1938-1948)51
The politics of decolonization and civil rights merged—in concrete ways—through the interaction
of actual people. U.S. universities were incubators for strategies of independence movements, as well
as platforms for anti-colonial nationalist politics. Traveling into the classrooms of Howard, Lincoln,
and Penn, the factories of New York and Detroit, the chapter will profile spaces where African and
From “Struggle or Starve: No War But the Class War,” Fight: Workers of the World Unite, London, August 1938, in Fight:
facsimile edition of the British Troskyist journals of the 1930’s, preface by Al Richardson.
50
Notably Gerald Horne‟s recent, Cold War in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the
British West Indies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007).
51 From Selma James‟s introduction to Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the
Community, p. 13.
49
26
West Indian migrants had direct contact with black liberation struggles outside the British Empire. A
trip to the U.S. broadened the possibilities of revolution, as the mobilization of young feminists,
workers and students expanded the horizons of anti-imperial struggle into an intersectional
movement.
The Johnson-Forest Tendency, as Adrienne Rich notes, “predated not only the Women‟s Liberation
Movement but the student movements and the escalation of the Black Struggle in the 1960s.”52
Chapter three focuses on this understudied interracial, multi-generational, international movement,
and the open classrooms of the Third Layer School, as antecedents to the radical liberation
movements of the 1960s. Deployed by Trotsky to the United States in 1938 for a six-month trip,
James spent fourteen years pondering “the Negro Question,” and the “Woman Question,” while
organizing and educating workers and students, including Kwame Nkrumah. With Raya
Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, James split from the Socialist Workers Party to organize the
independent Johnson-Forest Tendency, a Marxist workers and youth movement. Opening with the
Fourth International Congress in 1938, when C.L.R. James left London for a short trip to the United
States, the chapter will conclude seven years later, with the Pan-African Conference in Manchester in
1945 made possible by transatlantic networks built in the U.S.
Chapter Four
Cold War Crossroads: Education, Independence, and Exclusion (1948-1962)
Nationalist politics in the Caribbean, and exclusionary immigration policies in Washington, imposed
new obstacles and opportunities for the political work of migrant radicals. Chapter four extends the
history of the Johnson-Forest Tendency into the cold war, when two of its members, C.L.R. James
and Selma Weinstein, shifted their political focus from the women‟s and black liberation movements
in the U.S. to the movement for the independence of Trinidad and West Indian federation.
After a period of study, teaching, and politicization at Howard University and the Caribbean
Commission, Eric Williams returned to Trinidad in 1948. During the early 1950s, Williams
Woodford Square as his own pulpit for his own assent to power, lecturing Trinidadians on cultural
nationalism, independence, and the future of higher education in the colony. “The University of
Woodford Square” became the seat of a divisive nationalist movement in Trinidad, built on the
political foundations of the workers struggles in the 1930s. Though Williams tried to co-opt the
women‟s movement, the dissent of trade unions, radical organizations, and Calypsonians grew
stronger as the Peoples National Movmement (PNM) cemented power within a minority brown
middle class, and marginalized the voices of Trinidad‟s sizable Indian population.
Overlapping immigration policies in the U.K. and the U.S. shifted the course of Caribbean
migrations as the Commonwealth Citizenship Act of 1948 ushered in the “Windrush Generation” to
Britain, and anticommunists in the United States instituted an era of Caribbean exclusion through
the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. During this era of McCarthyism, anti-communists
in the U.S. racialized West Indians as inherently subversive, militant, and radical. After a fourteenyear stay in the United States, C.L.R. James, like other black “deportable subjects,” was imprisoned
in Ellis Island and expelled from the country.53 Following him to England, and beyond, was the
young Marxist feminist theorist Selma Weinstein.
52
53
Adrienne Rich, “Living the Revolution,” The Women’s Review of Books 3:12 (September 1986), p. 3.
Boyce Davies, “Deportable Subjects.”
27
From her columns in Correspondence, and her acclaimed pamphlet, “A Woman‟s Place,” Selma
Weinstein fought for class solidarity among housewives and encouraged women to start revolutions
in their own homes. After the United States deported C.L.R. James, Selma Weinstein abandoned her
country to marry him. In 1957, just before Selma and C.L.R. James left England to join the
independence movement in Trinidad, George Padmore, James, Grace Lee Boggs, Eric Williams and
Kwame Nkrumah—whose Gold Coast had fast become a lodestone of Black Power—met at the
Dorchester Hotel during the Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers.54 Though the content
of their conversation is unknown, they met at the cusp of radical change around the black Atlantic.
Or so they must have hoped. A year after the conference, Selma and C.L.R. James joined the
Peoples National Movement in Trinidad, where C.L.R James edited PNM paper The Nation, and
Selma James organized local women and workers. Supporters of West Indian federation, Selma and
C.L.R. James ultimately split from Williams over his abandonment of this project, and his
concessions to Britain, Canada, and the U.S., principally over allowing the U.S. military base to
remain at Chaguaramas. The two revolutionaries returned to Britain, and exile, just before the formal
independence of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, and the passage of the exclusionary Commonwealth
Immigrants Act in the U.K.
Chapter Five
Little Third Worlds: The West Indian Roots of Black Power in the U.S. (1962-1966)
Focusing on the interactivity of hybrid subjects, and the generative sites of radicalism in local
contexts, chapter five will revise pervasive theories about black internationalism, third world
solidarity, the politics of black power through the stories of immigrant subjects in the U.S. student
movement. West Indian leaders of CORE and SNCC, who drew from their formative experiences in
the Caribbean as they called for self-determination from the Black Belts of Mississippi and Alabama,
where they received their political educations among grassroots movements led by women.
The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 marked a generational shift in West Indian radical activity in the
U.S. Though the immigration of Caribbean subjects to the United States ostensibly ebbed after
1952, exemptions for family reunification and education facilitated the entry of the next generation
of West Indian youth. These youths were exposed to radical traditions and union organizing early,
more often than not by the “mother who really fathered”—unionized women in the Caribbean and
in the U.S.55
During the 1960s, African and West Indian migrants in U.S. universities were attuned as much to
the domestic civil rights movement as the decolonization struggles abroad. In the United States,
students drew comparisons among conditions in the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S., and rebelled
against oppressive social hierarchies around the world. Young black migrants negotiated multiRichard Wright‟s Black Power (New York: Harpers, 1954), heralded the emerging independent nations of Africa,
principally the Gold Coast, later the Republic of Ghana.
55 From George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, fourth edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p. 11.
Stokely Carmichael refers to the line from Lamming‟s novel as he recounts his childhood away from his birth parents,
and raised by his grandmother and aunts, in Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, p. 13; see also
Edith Clarke, My Mother who Fathered Me: A Study of the Families in Three Selected Communities of Jamaica
(Mona: The University of the West Indies Press, 1999).
54
28
positional identities, and drew from colonial gender scripts as they formulated strategies of
resistance, or practiced sexism. This chapter traces the politicization of this generation in the U.S.
Deep South, focusing specifically on the Nonviolent Action Group at Howard and SNCC,
culminating with the Lowndes County movement and the black power electoral politics of 1966.
Chapter Six
Without Country: Black Power and the Transformative Politics of Exile (1966-1969)
The global rebellions in the name of black power threatened the stability of world superpowers and
newly emergent postcolonial nations alike. As black power traveled around the Atlantic, and around
the world, those who carried its banner were met with state and vigilante violence, deportation, and
exile. From closed gates emerged new possibilities. Though the limitations of electoral politics
became evident in Alabama and Trinidad, black power invigorated broader campaigns against racism
and sexism in the U.K., among a rabble of black and Asian movements.
In March 1965, as SNCC organized the Lowndes County Freedom Party to run and independent
slate of candidates in the 1966 election, C.L.R. James returned to Trinidad as a cricket reporter for
the London Times and Sunday Observer. Prime Minister Eric Williams had James arrested immediately
and placed under house arrest for six weeks. At the time, Indian sugar workers staged a series of
strikes, leading Williams to declare a state of emergency. That summer, James, Oilfield Workers
Trade Union president George Weekes and Democratic Labour Party member Stephen Maharaj
founded the short-lived Workers and Farmers Party to challenge, unsuccessfully, Williams and the
PNM in the 1966 election. Losing the vote, James once again left his birthplace for England.
A few months later, James saw Stokely Carmichael speak at Sir George Williams University, and
again that summer, in London. From 1967 to 1969, West Indian, African, and Indian
organizations—principally, for this chapter, Selma James‟s Campaign Against Racial Discrimination
(CARD), and Black Regional Action Movement—employed black power as a banner for action
against racism and xenophobic violence. Other veterans of Trinidad‟s labor movement like John La
Rose, founder of New Beacon Books, merged migration, worker radicalism and the cultural
renaissance of black power—the union of literature and labor, poetry and picket-line politics—
through the Caribbean Artists Collective. Following Enoch Powell‟s anti-immigrant “Rivers of
Blood Speech” in April 1968, a Black People‟s Alliance convened in a national conference of more
than twenty organizations of Indians, West Indians, Pakistanis and Africans.
Chapter Seven
“African Americans of the Americas:” West Indian Students and the Long Revolution of
1970 (1969-1975)56
For a few months during in the spring of 1970, divided classes of Trinidadian society came together
to stage the first black power revolution in the Caribbean. The spontaneity that was their spark, and
their strength, was not enough to sustain this movement that lacked cohesion and a clear political
strategy. Moreover, the oil boom of the 1970s subdued rebellious youth and discontent masses with
prosperity and material comforts. Sexism was especially destructive to this coalition, as the
chauvinist strains of black power diluted radical programs, and alienated local women who were the
dynamos and veterans of political struggle throughout the twentieth century. The black power
56
From Carmichael, “Solidarity with Latin America,” Stokely Speaks, pp. 101-110.
29
movements in Trinidad, heirs to the legacies of labor and working-class politics lead by women,
turned its back on the them, and their networks. Because only a handful of few contemporary
scholars have documented the political action of women in Trinidad during this period, this chapter
joins their effort to shed light on this moment, and the continued dialogue among women‟s
movements in Trinidad and anti-racist and anti-sexist organizations in the U.K.57
The dissertation concludes with this short-lived alliance of organizations, some borne directly out of
the campaigns of the late 1930s, that erupted out of student movements at Sir George Williams
University and the University of West Indies, St. Augustine in 1969. In January of 1969, during an
action against racist policies at Sir George Williams University, several Trinidadian students were
arrested and charged for the destruction of computer equipment. As the students stood trial in
February 1970, Port of Spain watched. Out of Carnival, revelers demanded the immediate expulsion
of Canadian banks and companies. During the following weeks, cries against economic imperialism
and foreign investments only grew louder and more assertive. The National Joint Action Committee
(NJAC), a student group from UWI St. Augustine, attempted to lead the movement of a rapidly
growing anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist alliances of students, union members, black oil workers
and Indian sugar workers, and an army regiment that mutinied rather than subdue the protestors.
This “revolution” in the making fragmented under the weight of its many interests, and the PNM
split over Prime Minister Eric Williams‟s response. Williams again declared a state of emergency, and
U.S. and Venezuelan warships sailed offshore, prepared to evacuate their citizens and defend their
oil leases.
The February Revolution politicized a new generation of Trinidadian freedom fighters, and its
implosion gave purpose to a youth guerilla movement that abandoned the program of rebellion and
electoral reform entirely. Taking their cues from Cuba, Watts, Malcolm X and Walter Rodney, the
National United Freedom Fighters demanded the evacuation of foreign capitalists, and the absolute
transfer of power to the excluded and exploited. This subsequent, understudied period of violence
among guerrilla fighters and police left fourteen young fighters dead, including seventeen-year-old,
and possibly pregnant, Beverly Jones, “Heroine of the Revolution.”
57
As noted before, I am indebted here to the work of Rhoda Reddock, Patricia Mohammad, and Victoria Pasley.
30
Research Plan
Without Country: Black Revolutionaries of the Caribbean Diaspora, 1932-1975 will intersect the
histories of several territories over four decades, but will be unburdened by the depth of detail
required of a national history, or a history of local political movements in any one of these places.
Rather, as an analysis of the intersections among local movements, and the transmission of
knowledge and ideology across a bevy of personal and professional networks over vast distances in
time and space, this dissertation will bridge intellectual history, literary studies, and biography
through the close readings of texts—fiction, biography, editorial, political pamphlet, and
broadside—that were parts of a global front against empire, patriarchy, racism, and cold war.
My primary source, then, is the literary corpus—published and unpublished—of these
prolific writers. Supplementing materials unavailable in the collections at Yale University and the
Schomburg Center for the Research in Black Culture (or through interlibrary loan) will require
research trips to Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Montreal, and to a
few archives in the United States. As the themes of exile and exclusion are major organizing devices
for the project as a whole, I will also have to take a trip to the National Archives in College Park,
Maryland to consult immigration and Justice Department documents relating to the process of
racializing Caribbean migrants as inherently militant, subversive, and unfit for citizenship, as well as
the legal wrangling that allowed for their deportation.
I plan to set aside at least the next year, with any luck two, for full-time research. Currently, a
combined award from Yale University and the Ford Foundation will fund my studies until the end
of my sixth year. Next year, my fourth, I will defer funding from Yale and register in absentia in
order to travel to Trinidad and Tobago and the United Kingdom. During my fifth year, provided I
do not win an outside award—like the Fox International Fellowship—I will return to Yale, teach,
31
and visit nearby archives in New York City, Washington D.C., and Montreal as necessary. In my
sixth year, I will take the University Dissertation Fellowship and apply again for outside funding,
specifically the Erskine A. Peters Dissertation Year Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame.
Next fall, I plan to spend two to three months in Trinidad and Tobago consulting
collections at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (UWI), and the National
Archives in Port-of-Spain. In addition its exhaustive collection of secondary sources related to
Caribbean history and culture unavailable in the U.S., including literature on the labor and black
power movements in Trinidad and Tobago, UWI St. Augustine library contains the records and
publications of Trinidadian writers, trade unions, and student groups active in the political rebellions
and revolutions of the twentieth century. The Eric Williams Memorial Collection and the C.L.R.
James Collection at UWI St. Augustine contain the largest treasury of primary documents,
correspondence, manuscripts—as well as the personal libraries—of these two intellectuals,
colleagues, and rivals. These collections span their political lives, and the collections shed particular
light on their trans-Atlantic crossings, the independence movement in Trinidad, and their public
conflicts over the newly emergent nation‟s future. The Eric Williams Memorial Collection
includes documents relating to his time at Howard and the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission,
as well as his long tenure as Prime Minister, which encompass his government‟s suppression of the
black power movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The National Archives in Port-of-Spain house additional governmental and colonial
documents related to the labor movements of the 1930s, and have dossiers on Elma Francois and
Uriah Butler. Other collections include a series on Carnival and Calypso, which offer documents on
the explosive Carnival in 1970, several series of historical photographs, and a comprehensive
historical newspaper collection that stores, to name a few, The Independence Chinese Weekly, Port-of-Spain
Gazette, Trinidad Guardian, Trinidad Express, Daily Mirror, the Independent, Newsday, Trinidad and Tobago
32
Mirror, and Vanguard, the organ of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union, one of several unions which
emerged from the labor movements of the 1930s, and went on to be integral to the February
Revolution of 1970.
Following a trip to Trinidad and Tobago, I will spend at least three months at archives in
Britain. Collections in Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, and London are rich with materials on the
black history in Britain, and Afro-Asian liberation struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. In Manchester,
The Working Class Movement Library and the Labour History Archive of the People’s
History Museum—which will reopen after major renovations in February 2010—have a
considerable collection of journals, newspapers, pamphlets and ephemera related to black and Asian
anti-racist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the 1945 Pan-African Conference in
Manchester. Rather than narrate a comprehensive history of black power in Britain, with complete
profiles of these many organizations, the dissertation will account for the writings and networks of
Selma and C.L.R. James, John La Rose, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, the Black
Regional Action Movement, and the Universal Coloured People‟s Association, which was formed
following Stokely Carmichael‟s visit to London in 1967. Copies of the journal of the Black Regional
Action Movement, Black RAM, which was edited by Selma James, are available at the British
Library reading room in West Yorkshire.
The Birmingham City Archives and the Birmingham Central Library also have
considerable collections chronicling anti-racism, black and Asian coalitions, and black power politics
in the 1960s and 1970s. The archive of the Indian Workers Association (IWA) contains news
clippings, pamphlets, and journals relating to a number of organizations with which the IWA
corresponded and formed alliances.
Rhodes House Library at The University of Oxford houses collections on colonial
administrations and international labor organizations in the 1930s—specifically the Arthur-Creech
33
Jones Papers of the Colonial Manuscripts Collection, and the papers of the Fabian Colonial
Bureau—which were in direct correspondence with Elma Francois, Uriah Butler, and the NWCSA.
The Labour Party Archive at Manchester University houses documents relating to the
West Indian Federal Labour Party, which enlisted C.L.R. James as its secretary for a time. Additional
materials relating to the party are available tucked into the C.L.R. James Papers at the Institute of
Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Also in London, I will visit the George
Padmore Institute, which houses the periodicals Race Today, The Leveller, Race and Class, Spare Rib, as
well as the papers of John La Rose, Trinidadian labor organizer and founder of New Beacon Books,
the Caribbean Artists Collective, and the Black Parents Movement.
While in Britain, I will make an excursion to Amsterdam to view the E. Sylvia Pankhurst
Collection at the International Institute of Social History. Pankhurst‟s personal archive, which
includes papers and correspondence relating to her support for Ethiopia, and publication of the The
New Times and Ethiopia News, will hopefully reveal fruitful connections to the women‟s, labor and
anti-fascist movements in Trinidad.
Additional correspondence and documents relating to Pankhurst, Ethiopia, and suffrage, are
part of the Mary E. Gawthrope Papers at The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor
Archives in New York City. The New York Public Library holds the National American Woman
Suffrage Association Records, and its branch the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture holds The New Times and Ethiopia News and the J.R. Casimir Papers.
The Schomburg Center houses additional materials related to Kwame Nkrumah, C.L.R.
James, Claudia Jones, and Amy Ashwood Garvey: the Council on African Affairs Papers, Marika
Sherwood‟s Kwame Nkrumah Research Materials and Claudia Jones Research Materials, The Claudia Jones
Memorial Collection, the Ralph Bunche Collection, Benjamin J. Davis Papers, Clarence L. Holte Papers, the
Phelps-Stokes Fund Papers, William Alphaeus Hunton Papers, St. Clair Drake Papers, John Henrik Clarke
34
Papers, Julian Mayfield Papers, C.L.R. James Letters to Constance Webb, the Larry Neal Papers, and other
collections.
Adding further flesh to the material on C.L.R. James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency from
collections in Trinidad, Britain, and New York, I will spend a summer in Detroit consulting the
Martin and Jesse Glaberman Collection, the Raya Dunayevskaya Papers, the James and Grace Lee Boggs Papers,
and the Frances D. and G. Lyman Paine Papers at the Walter P. Reuther Library of Wayne State
University. These collections comprise the definitive archive on the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the
Correspondence Publishing Committee, Facing Reality, and their many publications.
A colleague of the Johnsonites, student of C.L.R. James and George Padmore, and mentor
of Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Nkrumah studied at Lincoln University and the University of
Pennsylvania in the 1930s and early 1940s, and traveled frequently to New York and Washington
D.C. Documents related to Nkrumah, and the generations of future West African nationalist leaders
in the U.S. are held at the Lincoln University Archives, the University of Pennsylvania Archives
and the University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives, Temple University Archives, the Horace
Mann Bond Papers and the Rayford Logan Papers at the Library of Congress, the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst the Anson Phelps Stokes Fund Papers and James Weldon
Johnson Papers at Yale University, and the Dabu Gizenga Collection Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center at Howard University.
Should the time and resources materialize, I would eventually like to consult the Nkrumah
collection at the Ghana National Archives, and the Ackah Watson Papers at the University of
Ghana, Legon, which house records and correspondence related to Nkrumah‟s early years in Britain
and the United States, and his involvement in the 1945 Pan-African Conference in Manchester.
In addition to the SNCC Papers and CORE Papers on microform, I will consult the
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center for records relating to Eric Williams, West Indian students
35
and the Nonviolent Action Group at Howard. If I have the time and resources, I will consult the
Stokely Carmichael-Lorna D. Smith Collection at Stanford University Library as well. Student
publications and university records related to the West Indian student politics at Canadian
universities during the late 1960s, the 1969 “Computer Riot” at Sir George Williams University, and
the subsequent trial, are held at the archives of McGill University, Concordia University, and
McMaster University.
36
Select Bibliography
Documents
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers (on microform).
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Stokely Carmichael File, 100-446080.
Newspapers and Journals
The Beacon
Chicago Daily Defender
Christian Science Monitor
Fight: Facsimile Edition of British Trotskyist Journals of the 1930's.
The Guardian
The Movement
New York Amsterdam News
New York Times
The New York Review of Books
The Observer
The Student Voice
Literature, Pamphlets, and Manifestos
Azikiwe, Nnamdi. My Odyssey: An Autobiography. London: C. Hurst, 1970.
Bambara, Toni Cade ed. The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970
[2005].
Belfrage, Sally. Freedom Summer. New York: Viking Press, 1965.
Boggs, Grace Lee. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998.
C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James 1939-1949.
Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Humanities Press, 1994.
Carmichael, Stokely. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Random House,
1967.
---. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner,
2003.
---. Stokely Speaks; Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1971.
Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Selma James. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.
Bristol: Falling Wall Press Ltd, 1972.
Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries; a Personal Account. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
James, C. L. R. At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings. London: Allison & Busby.
---. Beyond a Boundary. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
---. Black Power: It's [sic] Past, Today, and the Way Ahead. Lancing, Michigan: Marcus Garvey Institute,
1968.
---. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways; the Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. New York,
1953.
---. Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization. Jackson, Miss: University Press of
Mississippi, 1999.
---. Minty Alley: A Novel. London: M. Secker & Warburg, 1936.
---. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. Westport, Conn: L. Hill, 1977.
37
---. Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
---. The Black Jacobins; Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Dial Press, 1938.
---. The Case for West-Indian Self Government. London: L. and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth press,
1933.
---. World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. London: Martin Secker
and Warburg, Ltd, 1937.
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