Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Munirah Chronicle Offers 'Today in Black History'

1787 - Prince Hall, founder of the first African American Masonic

lodge, and others petition the Massachusetts legislative for

funds to return to Africa. The plan is the first recorded

effort by African Americans to return to their homeland.

1832 - A major insurrection of slaves on Trinidad occurs.



1901 - Cyril Lionel Richard James is born in Tunapuna, Trinidad. He

will become a writer, historian, Marxist social critic, and

activist who deeply influenced the intellectual underpinnings

of West Indian and African movements for independence. He was

born into an educated family in colonial Trinidad. At the age

of nine He earned a scholarship to Queen's Royal College, in

Port of Spain, Trinidad, and graduated in 1918. In 1932 James

left Trinidad for England. He will become involved in socialist

politics, gravitating toward a faction of anti-Stalinist

Marxists. He applied Leon Trotsky's views about a worldwide

workers' revolution to his colonial home. The result, in part,

was "The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British

Government in the West Indies" (1932), in which he called for

Caribbean independence. For a time in the 1970s he taught at

Federal City College in Washington, D.C. He lived the last

years of his life in London. Three volumes of his collected

works appeared as "The Future in the Present" (1977), "Spheres

of Existence" (1980), and "At the Rendezvous of Victory"

(1984). He will join the ancestors on May 31, 1989 in London,

England.

Click HERE for more --

No comments:

Post a Comment