When C.L.R. James, a Marxist intellectual and essayist from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, died in 1989 at age 88, the Times of London lauded him as a “black Plato.” Many on the left today would find the newspaper’s accolade grating in its embrace of the classical West. James wouldn’t have liked it either, though not for its reference to ancient Greece. He was, after all, a celebrant of Athenian democracy, which he once described as the form of government “under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.”
I spent an afternoon with James in 1986, talking to him for hours in his bedsit in Brixton—a part of London that was then seen by the rest of Britain as an angry black ghetto. I‘d gone to interview him for a newspaper, and he purred happily when he learned that the topic would be the game of cricket—his lifelong passion—and not dialectical materialism. Although modesty was not, as I recall, his most obvious trait, James would have found the post-mortem comparison to Plato overwrought. His main objection, however, would rest on his being distinguished by race. The poet Derek Walcott wrote of how hard it was for James “to have been so brilliant and yet to have been thought of as a brilliant black man.”
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