C. L. R. James was one of the great political and intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad, James spent much of his life in Britain and the United States. His long career as a writer and activist brought him into contact with everyone from Paul Robeson and Richard Wright to Eric Williams and Kwame Nkrumah.

James wrote several books, including his study of cricket, Beyond a Boundary, a pioneering exercise in the social history of sport. But he’s still best remembered for his classic history of the slave revolt in Haiti, The Black Jacobins, which opened up an entirely new field of study, showing the vital role that slaves had played in their own emancipation.

Paul Buhle was the founding editor of Radical America and the author of a pioneering biographical study, C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, published shortly before James died in 1988.