When C.L.R. James, a Marxist mental and essayist from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, died in 1989 at age 88, the Instances of London lauded him as a “black Plato.” Many on the left at present would discover the newspaper’s accolade grating in its embrace of the classical West. James wouldn’t have favored it both, although not for its reference to historical Greece. He was, in any case, a celebrant of Athenian democracy, which he as soon as described because the type of authorities “beneath which flourished the best civilization the world has ever recognized.”
I spent a day with James in 1986, speaking to him for hours in his bedsit in Brixton—part of London that was then seen by the remainder of Britain as an indignant black ghetto. I‘d gone to interview him for a newspaper, and he purred fortunately when he discovered that the subject could be the sport of cricket—his lifelong ardour—and never dialectical materialism. Though modesty was not, as I recall, his most evident trait, James would have discovered the autopsy comparability to Plato overwrought. His major objection, nevertheless, would relaxation on his being distinguished by race. The poet Derek Walcott wrote of how laborious it was for James “to have been so good and but to have been considered an excellent black man.”
