CHAPTER SEVEN

Facing Multiple Realities

“The revolutionary crisis is here,” C. L. R. declared in a letter to his comrades in the United States in the fall of 1956. The dramatic confrontation with “totalitarian power” embodied in the recent eruptions of popular protest and challenges to Communist Party rule in Poland and Hungary, he said, unmistakably announced its arrival. “From now on the whole world knows that the European proletariat as well as the colonial peoples [are] ready to settle the problems arms in hand.” C. L. R. urged the group to turn its attention to Europe and the Third World. Correspondence, he insisted, because of its history and its theoretical orientation, had a unique and specific contribution to make to what he saw as world-historic developments. His letter asked everyone in the group to respond to each of the points he raised—“I must ask you to reply, numbered paragraph by numbered paragraph”—and to make this the focus of their work, turning their powers of interpretation and analysis to these global developments. Above all else, he insisted that they look to Hungary as the most important of all.1

“The Hungarian Revolution Is the Ultimate”

On October 23, 1956, a spontaneous antigovernment protest broke out in Budapest and spread across Hungary. It quickly grew into a mass movement, creating a revolutionary challenge to the established order of the Communist Bloc. News of this uprising immediately excited and energized C. L. R., and it generated a new mood of possibility and intellectual activity in Correspondence. The group championed the Hungarian Revolution as a historic experiment in direct democracy and a great leap in the world working-class movement. Most of all, the group was excited by Hungary’s workers’ councils, which industrial workers formed during the revolution as their own rank-and-file organizations. Correspondence, and C. L. R. in particular, took the Hungarian Revolution as historical validation of the group’s most central ideas: a belief in the spontaneous organization of the working class, an unequivocal opposition to bureaucratic state management, and an unshakable faith in the capacity of working-class self-activity and workers’ self-governance not only to expose the bankruptcy of the bureaucratic elite but to ultimately replace it.

C. L. R. penned his letter about the current revolutionary situation on November 3. The next day, 6,000 Russian tanks entered Hungary and put down the revolt. Yet, the event did little to temper his enthusiasm, and C. L. R.’s directives to the group multiplied in the days and weeks that followed. The day after Soviet troops crushed the rebellion (and only two days after his initial letter), C. L. R. wrote to the group again, emphasizing the importance of Hungary and elevating it above other developments. “I don’t think you all recognize what the Hungarian Rev’n means,” he insisted. “Since 1917 nothing has so shaken the world.”2 Allusions to the Russian Revolution of 1917 appeared frequently in C. L. R.’s assessments of Hungary, and he did not use them lightly. Since his earliest days in the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s, and especially during the intense ideological and organization battles around the Russian Question in the 1940s, the Russian Revolution loomed in his consciousness as a singular event in modern world history and an undisputed flashpoint for Marxist theory. He used the Russian Revolution both as a reference point to mark time in the history of revolutionary struggle and as a barometer of Hungary’s historical significance. He repeatedly asserted that Hungary represented something new in the theory and practice of revolution. Just ten days later, he wrote the group again: “I hope you realise that the present crisis is one of the greatest turning points of history. The Hungarian Revolution is the ultimate. There cannot be a future revolution that can surpass it. I doubt if there will be many to equal it.”3

This unequivocal elevation of Hungary above anticolonial movements might have given pause, as C. L. R. was writing in the shadow of the Bandung Conference, in the midst of the Suez Crisis, and less than four weeks after colonial authorities had arrested Kenya Land and Freedom Army (“Mau Mau”) leader Dedan Kimathi. Indeed, in the past two years C. L. R. and Correspondence had arranged for Grace’s work with Mbiyu Koinange and published The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves to tell the story of Kenya’s independence struggle and advocate for the liberation of Africa. Broadly speaking, Hungary occurred contemporaneously with the civil rights movement in the United States and rising nationalist movements across Africa that threatened to overthrow the global racial order and remake societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet Hungary rose to the fore of C. L. R.’s thinking and claimed his attention in the fall of 1956. He believed that Correspondence had a unique role to play in interpreting Hungary as part of a world revolutionary advance. Thus, his bold statements about the Hungarian Revolution can be read as a charge to his comrades in the United States to celebrate the group’s unique theoretical perspective and to seize this opportunity to show, through the ideas of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT) and Correspondence, that Hungary represents the most advanced embodiment of revolutionary theory and practice for the contemporary world. “This endurance of the Hungarian workers is a social thing,” he declared. “We have to analyse it and draw the theoretical conclusions. I don’t know anybody else who can.”4

With the notable exception of Jimmy, and to a lesser extent Grace, most of the organization agreed with C. L. R.’s assessment of the Hungarian Revolution, sharing in his excitement about the future it seemed to suggest. The group rather quickly decided to write a pamphlet articulating this future, a collective project that eventually turned into the book Facing Reality. In addition to the impact they expected the Hungarian Revolution to have in Eastern Europe, Correspondence believed (without much basis, it turned out) that the events in Hungary would impact workers in the United States, perhaps even inspiring them to political action. To hasten this, the group resolved to advance public consciousness and discussion about the Hungarian Revolution through public forums. They held their first forum in early November in Detroit, and then the New York office of Correspondence held one over Thanksgiving weekend.5 Titled “Hungarian and Polish Workers Show the Way to a New World,” the New York event was billed as a “discussion meeting on the recent exciting events in Eastern Europe”6 featuring an introductory talk by Martin Glaberman followed by questions from the floor and general discussion. A press release from the Detroit office announcing the New York event suggested that Hungary was important to American workers because it showed “the people’s ability to take politics out of the offices of government and the halls of Parliament and transfer it directly to the factory floor, college campuses and neighborhood communities.”7 In its promotion for the forum, the New York office explained that this discussion of events in Hungary and Poland was a direct expression of the mission of the group and its paper: “The purpose of Correspondence is to report, interpret and encourage the independent activity of ordinary people everywhere in their struggle for freedom and self-government and against domination by leaders, beginning at their place of work.”8

Indeed, the Hungarian Revolution became a featured topic in the pages of Correspondence, which was still being published as a “Discussion Bulletin” in the fall of 1956. The December 1956 bulletin, the first to appear since the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, featured a front-page article on the uprising. Carrying no byline but likely written by C. L. R., the article repeats his contention that the revolution was a decisive political and historical moment. “The Hungarian Revolution is the turning point in modern history,” the article began. “From now on, in every country (and sometimes in the country where it is least expected), the open struggle may erupt at any time between the factory councils of the workers and the centralized governments of Party and Plan or of Parliament and Executive.” The article strikes a forward-looking tone, advocating a solid break with past ideas and the embrace of new possibilities for revolutionary action, yet beneath this are echoes of old arguments. Indeed, this article, like the group’s analysis of Hungary more generally, seemed to use the revolution as evidence of the correctness of their theoretical projections. For example, in its list of the Hungarian Revolution’s accomplishments, the article rehearses ideas that animated the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s theory of state capitalism in the 1940s: “The Hungarian Revolution demolished for all time the idea that bureaucrats can plan the national economy. It has destroyed the idea that nationalization of property or government ownership means the end of the exploitation of labor in production.” Similarly, the article reaffirms the wisdom of the JFT’s abandonment of the vanguard party idea (which, as we have seen, was central to its desertion of Trotskyism and regrouping of itself as Correspondence in the early 1950s): “The Hungarian Revolution has struck a death blow at the concept of the Vanguard Party, the party to govern, the part to control the workers and administer the plan.… The new form of political organization is the total mobilization of the working class.”9

“I Can’t Get Half as Excited over the Hungarian Revolt as I Can over the Colonial Revolts”

Jimmy in particular, and to a lesser extent Grace, did not share this unbridled enthusiasm for the Hungarian Revolution. Grace essentially agreed with C. L. R. that a period of revolutionary activity was emerging, but she did not see Hungary as singular. She anticipated that the type of clashes between workers and centralized forms of power (governmental, labor organizations, or political parties) that occurred in Hungary would soon appear in various forms “in country after country,” and she further predicted that “forms of dual power” like the Hungarian workers’ councils “are going to appear suddenly” and often “with arms in hand.” But Hungary was only one aspect of this global picture. Of equal importance, she said, was the rising opposition to colonialism, which she believed carried as much weight in the postwar world. “One thing we have to get clear in our own minds,” she insisted in a letter to C. L. R., “is that the colonial people have been living since the end of WW II by a series of milestones—the freeing of India in 1947, the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949, the formation of an Asia-African bloc in the UN, the Bandung Conference.”10 Of course, C. L. R. recognized these milestones as well, and he agreed that they were, in the sense of a global picture of political upheaval, complementary to Hungary. The difference was that he saw the revolt of colonial people as secondary and subordinate to the Hungarian Revolution. Grace urged a different ordering, arguing that Hungary and the colonial revolt deserved equal weight and analysis.

Jimmy went much further. Writing to C. L. R. at the end of November, he took issue with Correspondence’s nearly singular focus on Hungary over the preceding month, and he sharply called into question the group’s excitement over Hungary relative to popular insurgency in Africa and Asia. “The whole organization is reading and talking about the Hungarian revolution night and day as if this is all that is happening in the world,” he wrote. “Now, with me, I am excited over any revolt. I don’t care if it is only a sporadic one in the shop that lasts only half a day. But I can’t get half as excited over the Hungarian revolt as I can over the colonial revolts.” Jimmy urged a fuller appreciation among his comrades of the revolutionary potential in the Afro-Asian states and liberation movements. He saw in this rising Third World, with its nationalist ferment and Bandung-style spirit of nonalignment, a political creativity with the potential to reconfigure global politics and fashion revolutionary change the world over. Moreover, Jimmy judged Hungary’s impact to be limited, in terms of both its historical significance and its potential to shape the contemporary political situation. “So far as I am concerned the Russians only had the Hungarians for about 12 years, but the British have had the Egyptians and all these countries for over a hundred years. I feel that the colonial question is going to go far beyond the Hungarian question,” he wrote. “The Hungarian revolt is small and isn’t going to have the world-wide repercussions that the colonial revolts have. It just isn’t,” he insisted. “That colonial question is going to shake up the whole world.”11

Three lines of argument undergirded Jimmy’s elevation of the colonial revolts over Hungary. First, he said that Hungary was having very little impact on the Western world, whereas the Western bourgeoisie, particularly in the United States and Britain, “are worried about the Middle East affair and the colonial question in Africa and also the Asian question.” Unlike Hungary, these movements in the Third World were “being thought about, worried about, felt here” because they were “threatening the whole lifeline” of Western nations and thus “threatening the whole country just as the Negroes in this country shut down the buses in the South.” Second, Jimmy challenged C. L. R.’s belief that Hungary could impact Western workers. He reported that American workers did not relate to the Hungarian Revolution as workers. They saw Hungary as a social or humanitarian crisis but not as a meaningful political event, and it remained far removed from their own lives. These workers did not draw from Hungary an inspiration to protest, political lessons to study, or methods of protest to emulate. “The same people who are sympathetic with the Hungarian revolution from the standpoint of cruelty are the same ones who will lynch a colored guy tonight and the same one who will be a company stooge in the plant too.” In short, the Hungarian Revolution had no impact on workers’ politics or their consciousness, either from “a revolutionary standpoint” or “from the point of view of production. I haven’t heard anyone talk about it from the view of production.”12

Finally, Jimmy insisted that because of the colonial peoples’ historically constituted subordinate position in the world political economy, the nationalist uprisings offered something that the other uprisings could not. “All I can see that Russia and the West can give to the world is technological advancement.” On the other hand, the anticolonial revolts were fighting for “a new form of organization of life,” a struggle that included but went beyond economic arrangements or relations of production. “Western civilization has been geared to production and all I see coming out of it is some psychological attempt to reorganize production. We have been so tied up in materialism in Western civilization.” The colonial nations, by contrast, had the potential to break from this. Admittedly, they have “a few corrupt puppets,” he said, who have “been paid off by both the U.S. and Russia” and who remain committed to the patterns and values of the existing order. “But the public in these countries have not been raised up in materialism and they have a much better chance to find a better civilization that isn’t directly wrapped up in production.” To amplify his point, Jimmy offered a comparison “between Nkrumah’s country” and its fellow West African nation of Liberia. “Liberia has its puppets from America and they are Negroes and they are profiting off the country. Nkrumah isn’t doing that.”13

Jimmy knew that his reference to “Nkrumah’s country” would be meaningful to C. L. R. Kwame Nkrumah was the leader of the anticolonial movement in the Gold Coast, the West African nation that was, at the time of Jimmy’s writing, less than four months away from achieving independence from Britain. C. L. R. and other members of Correspondence including Grace had met Nkrumah during World War II when the latter was a student in the United States and an aspiring anticolonial leader. C. L. R.’s work during the 1930s with George Padmore and others in the International African Service Bureau, including his editorship of its journal International African Opinion, had made him a prominent figure in the world of Pan-African politics, and he served as a political mentor to the soon-to-be leader of Ghana’s independence movement. When Nkrumah left the United States in 1945, C. L. R. helped to put the young freedom fighter in touch with Padmore and a network of anticolonial activists in London, which led to Nkrumah’s assuming a prominent role alongside Padmore in organizing the Fifth Pan-African Congress later that year. Nkrumah returned to his native Gold Coast in 1947 to join and eventually lead the anticolonial struggle. That struggle culminated a decade later in the transfer of power and the founding of the new nation of Ghana, with Nkrumah as its leader.

Grace and Jimmy took a particular interest in the nationalist movement in Ghana. Throughout 1956 they anticipated the coming of independence and plotted ways to contribute to the development of the new nation. “For over a year now, Jim and Willis and I have been talking about emigration to Ghana,” Grace wrote in a letter to C. L. R. in late March of 1957, just after Ghana achieved its independence. “We have discussed schemes for exchanging Chrysler workers with African workers and I have even discussed with an airline agency the idea of a raffle in the plant each week to choose workers to go abroad.” These conversations that Grace and Jimmy had with their friend Willis, who worked with Jimmy at Chrysler but was not a member of Correspondence, reflected a specific approach and attempt to contribute to the building of independent Ghana. “In our discussions, it has not only been a personal matter of wanting to go. We have seen it in terms of the building of the African economy, the need for investment, the types of technicians etc. the U.S. govt. would send, the types of help the Africans need from American workers, not in CARE packages and not only in technical skills alone but from that sense of building an economy.” She said this sensibility “exist[s] particularly in the American Negro workers.”14 Grace and Jimmy had raised the importance of African independence movements with black Detroiters in 1954–55 when they created Kenya Sundays and promoted The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. Now they were exploring the relationship between black Americans and new African nations in another way. Jimmy and Grace would revisit the links between Africa and black Americans again in the late 1960s, including a visit to West Africa to meet with Nkrumah to discuss a new set of political issues arising in the context of Nkrumah’s removal from power and the emergence of the Black Power movement in the United States. But now, in 1956–57, they were exploring questions and opportunities relating to building a newly independent African nation.

“The Greatest Political Achievement in Africa for a Hundred Years”

On September 18, 1956—a month before the beginning of the Hungarian Revolution—Nkrumah announced that a date had been set for the transfer of power in the Gold Coast: on March 6, 1957, the Gold Coast colony would become the independent nation of Ghana.15 C. L. R. apparently took little notice of this announcement. Despite his connections to Nkrumah and his long-standing interest in the Gold Coast’s anticolonial struggle, it seems that C. L. R. paid little if any attention to the movement during the months leading up to independence. There was no discussion within the group about the Gold Coast Revolution or its impending independence during the final months of 1956, nor are there references to it in the Correspondence discussion bulletins. That this would be the case is somewhat surprising, not only because of C. L. R.’s relationship to Nkrumah and the revolution in the Gold Coast but also because he had theorized and labored for African independence since the 1930s. As he would proudly recall in the preface to the 1963 edition of his book The Black Jacobins, originally published in 1938, the closing pages of the study “envisage[d] and were intended to stimulate the coming emancipation of Africa.” The new preface further boasts that when the book originally appeared, “only the writer and a handful of close associates thought, wrote, and spoke as if the African events of the last quarter century were imminent.”16 The “African events” to which he referred, of course, was the post–World War II upsurge of nationalist politics and mass protest in colonial Africa resulting in dozens of newly independent states. Ghana was the first of these south of the Sahara, and under Nkrumah’s leadership the new republic self-consciously became a touchstone for a renewed Pan-Africanist project and a vision of African liberation that owed no small debt to C. L. R. and his labors.

The Ghanaian and Hungarian Revolutions were essentially contemporaneous events, competing for the group’s attention and exposing its ideological fault lines. As noted above, the September 1956 announcement of the date for Ghana’s independence preceded by a month the start of the uprising in Hungary. Thus, the final preparations for Ghana’s independence coincided with the outbreak and aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution. C. L. R. and the group did come to focus on Ghana for a brief period during the spring of 1957, even affording it some priority over Hungary, but this was short lived.

Most of the group’s activity at the end of 1956, including discussions carried out in their voluminous transatlantic correspondence, centered on the significance of Hungary and the need to project the group’s analysis of it. “Towering above all,” C. L. R. wrote to Glaberman on December 13, “is the urgent necessity of a pamphlet on Hungary.”17 C. L. R. initially hoped that the pamphlet, written mostly by him but with editorial and production work done by members of the group in the United States, would be published by January. However, work on it continued well into the new year, as C. L. R. continued to devote considerable energy to the theoretical and political implications of the Hungarian Revolution. For example, after reading a mass of material on Hungary, he wrote a long letter to the group dated February 10, 1957, critically assessing the analyses of French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre and others. Engaging leftist interpretations of Hungary in this way expanded the scope of the pamphlet and pushed C. L. R. (and most of the group) to see the pamphlet as a major statement of contemporary Marxism and a defining statement of the group. “Sartre and the rest of them do not know, cannot recognize the significance of what has taken place [in Hungary],” he wrote. “I have said before that we and we alone are in a position to do so.” C. L. R.’s letter also seems to be an indirect response to the points Jimmy raised about Hungary and his detraction of the group’s view. For example, C. L. R. asserted, “There is a danger that these analyses may seem to the less experienced of you somewhat remote from conditions in the United States. You would be wrong. Completely wrong.” He insisted that the group make the Hungary pamphlet its priority, both theoretically and practically—that is, publishing and distributing it as widely as possible. “Let us get the Hungarian Revolution right and all will follow.”18

At the end of January, in the midst of the group’s many letters about the Hungary pamphlet, C. L. R. received an invitation from Nkrumah to attend Ghana’s independence ceremonies. C. L. R. initially greeted the invitation with only mild interest. He sent a copy of Nkrumah’s letter to his comrades in the United States, but he struck a rather neutral tone. “I have received the following letter from Nkrumah, the Prime Minister of the Gold Coast,” he wrote in his accompanying note. “Some of you will remember him in the U.S. and the time he spent with us.”19 C. L. R. surmised that his invitation reflected the new government’s desire “to get as many people of color with some reputation to the celebrations.” Moreover, he knew that his Pan-African organizing and advocacy during the 1930s “has always been remembered by the Gold Coast nationalists.” C. L. R. seemed to feel some obligation to attend Ghana’s independence celebration, but he did not demonstrate much intrinsic interest or enthusiasm. Indeed, his initial response showed him to be hesitant, even conflicted, about attending. “It makes a tremendous mess in many respects,” he wrote about the prospect of traveling to Ghana, likely referring to a combination of the interruption of his work, the financial strain it could pose, and the potential impact on his health.20 “But I am sure I ought to go,” he added. “I shall try to go and I certainly will enjoy it, learn a great deal, do my best to pass on certain ideas to all whom I meet and, when I return, pass on what I have seen.” Whatever his reservations, C. L. R. of course recognized the significance of Ghana’s independence. “How big the occasion is in the minds of the political world is shown by the fact that Nixon is going.”21

Its importance in C. L. R.’s own mind grew in the coming days. “As it is now,” he reported ten days later, “I think there is every possibility of me going.” He began planning a two-week trip, and he also began to conceive of a writing project to come out of the trip. “I hope to see something of the country and I intend to get hold of a typist and dictate what I hope will become a small volume, letters from Accra,” he told the group. “If everything is well with me I shall have it ready for publication within two or three days of my return.”22 Predictably, he did not meet this time frame, in part because it was overly optimistic, but also because his appreciation for Ghana’s independence movement and the scope of his planned book both expanded based on what he saw and experienced during the two-week visit.

C. L. R. left for the Gold Coast on February 24, allowing him to witness and participate in many of the independence activities culminating in the historic ceremony on March 6 formally marking Ghana’s birth. “I am getting around, twice as much as most folks here and seeing and hearing plenty,” he wrote in one of his many letters to his American comrades. He said this was giving him rich material for the book, starting with his observations and impressions from the many Ghanaians he met, from the university student who served as his guide and the man who served as his driver (and both of their families, whom he also met) to the hotel attendants, civil servants, and ministers. He spoke to people in the city of Takoradi, which he described as a “modern” part of the country “with a proletariat of 10,000. You could have picked up any one of them and dropped him in Detroit.” He also traveled to the interior, where he saw “the peasants,” and he took note of the market women, the segment of society that Nkrumah told him had “made the party.” C. L. R. similarly told his comrades about conversations and interactions he had with an impressively wide array of people who came for the celebration: Africans and West Indians “who hang on my words”; black Americans “who are here by the dozens”; two Poles with whom he had ongoing conversations; a Sudanese newspaper man who invited him to the Sudan; two Romanians, whom he met “by accident” (they were among the Stalinists there who “look at me with a strange look” and “wish me elsewhere, but they listen and keep silent, thinking”); and others from various places such as Laos, Cambodia, and Siam (Thailand). C. L. R. attended a ceremony to launch Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, the prime minister’s memoir of the movement published to coincide with the independence ceremony. And of course C. L. R. went to the dramatic midnight rally where the British flag came down and the flag of Ghana was raised for the first time.23

One of C. L. R.’s most impactful experiences was “a social evening” he spent with Nkrumah, his cabinet, and the Central Committee of the Convention People’s Party (CPP). His conversations with Nkrumah and others there deepened his laudatory assessment of the CPP, the mass-based political party that Nkrumah cofounded and led through the successful drive to independence. C. L. R. wrote to his comrades the next day telling them about this gathering, relating some of his conversations there, and sharing the analytical conclusions he was drawing about the Ghanaian Revolution. “I said quite in the course of things that the great achievement was the building of the party,” referring to the CPP, which C. L. R. saw as the embodiment of popular insurgency and mass political organization. He even described it as “the greatest political achievement in Africa for a hundred years.” Nkrumah apparently responded favorably to this, telling C. L. R. that he had simply narrated the story of CPP and the anticolonial movement in his just-released memoir, but his hope was for others to follow with the necessary political analysis of Ghana’s revolution. “N[krumah] says that he wants his story ‘philosophized’ and ‘put into principles,’ ” C. L. R. told his American comrades, self-assuredly accepting the task. “He practically asked me to do it and I told him I would.… Who else can do it but we?”24

The planned book, then, was taking on a slightly different shape. C. L. R. told the group that it would still be a small book, for a “bourgeois publisher,” and it would be easy to write, but it would also speak to and for the Ghanaian masses who built the party and the independence movement, holding up for serious analysis and praise their contributions to the theory and practice of revolution. “We shall give them everything,” he said, excitedly projecting an analysis of their actions and achievements as a model for the whole of Africa and possibly Asia and Latin America as well. “The last chapter will be as serious an analysis as I can make of their experience, the party above all.”25

This was, like most of their intellectual work, to be a collective effort—“We are in a beautiful position to do it,” C. L. R. wrote excitedly—with Grace taking a lead role alongside C. L. R. “Now this is for Grace,” he declared in a letter addressed to the whole group, “though everyone is invited.” He said this to preface his thoughts on the CPP and Nkrumah’s autobiography, and he concluded with specific instructions: “Now G[race] must get his book, read it and do a job on it and send me letters.… Everyone can help, of course, but G[race] must do it at once.”26 Though he had been in London for more than four years, C. L. R. still operated as the leader of the group, as indicated by his brash directive, telling Grace what she must do. At the same time, his words affirmed Grace’s unique abilities, as well as his reliance on them. It was no surprise that C. L. R. relied on Grace in this way. She had the philosophical grounding and political experience C. L. R. valued and needed for this project. She was, as well, the member of the group most familiar with and perhaps most adept at this mode of theoretical and intellectual collaboration—for instance, the letters exchanged in 1948 that became C. L. R.’s book Notes on Dialectics—which he desperately tried to maintain despite his distance from the group. Moreover, among the Correspondence members who dated back to the early JFT days, Grace would likely be the one who most remembered Nkrumah. In this same letter, C. L. R. reported that Nkrumah asked how he might arrange for Grace to come to Ghana. C. L. R. responded that she should be invited to give a series of lectures on philosophy at a Ghanaian university, to which Nkrumah agreed. C. L. R. seemed excited about this prospect, and included Jimmy in the plans. “She and J[immy] will create a sensation here. Everything in time,” he wrote.27

This plan did not materialize, but Grace and Jimmy did eventually visit Nkrumah. It was, though, under very different circumstances. In 1968, eleven years after independence, they spent a week with him, not in Ghana but in Conakry, Guinea, where Nkrumah was living in exile after a coup deposed him in 1966. As conveyed by C. L. R.’s letters, this turn of events—the coup, Nkrumah’s exile, and Ghana’s retreat from its position of Pan-African leadership—could hardly be imagined in 1957. “There is such a collection of people here as have never been assembled in Africa,” C. L. R. wrote of those gathered for the independence celebration, all sharing in the triumphant and euphoric sense of possibility generated by the birth of Ghana. “It is not only the future of Africa,” he explained, “but the future of the world, that is in all minds.”28 C. L. R.’s presence certainly put Ghana, momentarily but prominently, on his mind and the collective mind of Correspondence.

Upon his return to London, C. L. R. gave his strongest statement yet about the importance of Ghana, his plans for the book, and its priority in his and the group’s work: “I propose to postpone the Hungarian pamphlet for 4–6 weeks and do instead a 70,000 word book on Ghana.” This reprioritization, which surely surprised the membership of the group, reflected the lofty expectations he had for the book. For one thing, he anticipated that it would be an immediate commercial success. He also believed it would serve as an articulation of “our whole program in a most concrete context, for Ghana and for everybody else.” As such, the book would be “a flying start for the general publicizing” of the group’s ideas in Europe, the United States, and Africa.29

C. L. R. laid out the structure and content of the proposed book, emphasizing in particular the three dimensions that he believed would give the book its unique and powerful quality. First was the rich set of insights gained from his observations during his visit to Ghana. “I saw and understood more in 14 days,” he wrote in his characteristically self-confident fashion, “than people who have been studying the subject for 14 years.” It was this, he surmised, that explained why Nkrumah and his government “spent so many hours with me in that busy time.” The new government was “looking forward to the book as the first satisfactory exposition of what has happened there,” C. L. R. assured his American comrades, adding that the Ghanaians “will give all possible assistance.” Second, he proposed to build on his past work, particularly The Black Jacobins, his study of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution published in 1938, the year that C. L. R. came to the United States. Here he would show how he had in that book anticipated the African revolution that Ghana represented, but he would break from the theory of colonial revolution articulated in The Black Jacobins in which the success of the colonial revolution was linked to European proletarian mass movements. This new book would reject that, presenting his revised view that “the African Revolution (as a process) is no longer to be seen as supplementary to or subordinate to the revolution in Western Europe.” This conclusion closely aligned with the position Jimmy had articulated back in the fall of 1956 when the organization began to analyze the Hungarian Revolution, a fact C. L. R. quietly acknowledged with this parenthetical statement identifying Jimmy by his old JFT alias: “I want Heinz to note this particularly.” C. L. R. also singled Jimmy out on a related point: “I shall expect from you all and from Heinz in particular a statement as to what is the attitude of the American Negroes in particular to Ghana.”30 The surviving letters show no response from Jimmy on either of these points; whatever ideological convergence may have been suggested here faded in the coming years. The third distinguishing feature of the proposed book, C. L. R. said, would be its close analysis of the CPP, including detailed assessments of both the success of the revolution and the challenges the CPP faced as it made the transition from a revolutionary party to a ruling party.

Grace had already given the subject serious thought. As she wrote in reply to C. L. R.’s letter instructing her to assess Nkrumah’s book and his political party, “I have not yet read Nkrumah’s autobiography. It is not obtainable here, so I have sent to NY for it. However, I am going to venture some analysis of what is involved in the Convention People’s Party movement on the basis of what I have read about it.” Her reading included three of the earliest books on Ghana’s independence movement—Richard Wright’s Black Power, George Padmore’s The Gold Coast Revolution, and David Apter’s Ghana in Transition—and the text of Nkrumah’s “Motion of Destiny” speech, which pushed the British government to set constitutional and administrative arrangements for independence. Delivered before the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly in July 1953, the speech marked a decisive step in the movement to end colonial rule and has subsequently been identified by Nkrumah’s biographers as “one of the most important speeches in his life” and “possibly the finest expression of his vision for Ghana and Africa.”31 Grace’s evaluation of Nkrumah’s speech reached even higher: “In my opinion it will go down in history as one of the great speeches of all time.” It was, she believed, comparable in significance to Pericles’s Funeral Oration and the speeches of Wendell Phillips. By identifying Athenian democracy and American abolitionism as historical reference points for what was taking place in Ghana, Grace was making a claim for the Ghanaian struggle as a political expression of “the age to which we are now entering.” She said that Ghana’s CPP, along with the workers’ councils in Hungary and Poland, most clearly evidenced this new age. “The essence of these movements is that they demonstrate the inseparability for our day between the struggle for total political freedom and the struggle for economic emancipation in the specific form of the liberation of the natural and acquired powers of mankind for cooperative labor.”32

The appearance of the phrase “natural and acquired powers,” which Grace had used in The American Worker and Essays by Karl Marx, and would appear in her later writings as well, highlights how her analysis of Ghana and the CPP extended from her philosophical thinking begun in graduate school and her Marxism from the JFT period. Her argument about the CPP as part of “the fundamental revolutionary character of the age into which we have now entered” began with showing how the party represented a leap beyond “the political ideologies that were created by the great philosophers for the political revolutions that ushered in rising capitalism,” summed up in the concepts of natural rights and social contract as seen in the philosophies of Hobbes, Hume, Locke, and Rousseau and culminating in that of Kant. She then moved to Hegel and Marx, who had identified a fundamental duality of capitalist society. “Hegel, and after him Marx, said that the key to the understanding of modern society is its duality,” she wrote, “that on the one hand, in political life every man is a citizen, equal to every other man, an end in himself; while on the other hand, in his actual empirical social and economic existence, he is unequal, a means to an end. In his political life his mission is to be social; in his actual social and economic life, his economic ties are constantly being broken up and destroyed.” Reminiscent of the JFT days, Grace then cited a long passage from Marx to illustrate this point. She followed this with further discussion of how Hegel and Marx developed ideas about the duality between the state and society and the alienation of the modern capitalist order characterized by the separation of the wage earners from their land and social ties, the intellectual from the masses, the mind from the body, and science from ethical values, ritual, and religion. “In the city-state in Ancient Greece there was no such separation. The polis was not just a means of maintaining order. It was a religious confession, an economic concern, a cultural association and an ethical society,” she wrote. “That is what is being created under our very eyes in Hungary, Poland, and Ghana.”33

This brought Grace to the concluding point of her analysis: the theoretical and historical significance of the Convention People’s Party. “For 400 years we have lived through this duality” of the state and society, she said, and the political party as an institution in the democratic states of the West, England and the United States in particular, emerged to mediate this duality. The emergence of state capitalism began to break down the separation of the state and society, with the Communist and Nazi movements, she said, trying to remove this separation from above by incorporating society into the state. This, in turn, created the movement from below to assume the functions of the state. “An understanding of this general world movement enables us to understand what is taking place in the CPP of Ghana,” Grace insisted, “and the CPP of Ghana in turn enables us to understand what is taking place in Hungary and Poland.… The essence of the CPP, as I understand it, is that it unites the struggle for political freedom with the tasks of education, economic activity and political activity.”34

One week later, Grace again wrote to C. L. R., this time responding to his letter describing his plans to review and update the premise of The Black Jacobins. “As soon as I got your letter,” she began, “I went to the library and got out two copies” of the book, “one for myself and the other to make available. I have since re-read it. It is the greatest book that you have ever written, comparable in range and sureness of judgment only with the 18th Brumaire.… I say that not in praise but because of what I think it means for the forthcoming book.”35 Intended or not, this was the highest of praise. Karl Marx’s book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which chronicles the revolution in France during 1848–51 leading to the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte, articulates fundamental Marxist theories of historical materialism, class struggle, proletarian revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. With this comparison, Grace was placing C. L. R.’s book on par with “one of the masterpieces of Marxism,” as the editors of the 1963 edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire labeled it.36 Though written in the months immediately following the events it describes, The Eighteenth Brumaire has come to be regarded as a powerful work of history. It stands, one scholar noted, as “one of Marx’s most important and glittering historical writings.”37 Grace gave The Black Jacobins parallel praise, saying that it was at once “human, social, [and] individual,” containing “a dramatic tension and suspense that I know of in no other history.” Most importantly, she felt that the analysis achieved in the book gave C. L. R. standing to write the book on Ghana. “It is because of the vision of African freedom reached in [The Black Jacobins] 20 years ago that today you have the right, freedom, and responsibility to project your criticism of the newly independent state on such a profound level.”38

By this time Grace had secured a copy of Nkrumah’s autobiography, and she included her analysis of it in the same letter. “I got the Nkrumah autobiography the other day and read it through at practically one sitting,” she wrote. “Although I found my eyes warm with tears at the climax and the certainty of Independence, I was on the whole disappointed in the book.” Her disappointment derived from the theoretical and analytical limitations she saw in the book and its author, basing her analysis not only on the book but also on the JFT’s interaction with Nkrumah during World War II when he was in New York and her rereading of C. L. R.’s The Black Jacobins. “What the book lacks and what Nkrumah lacks still,” she wrote sharply, “is a sense of the economy and of economic interrelations as they become embodied in human beings and human sensitivities.… I emphasize ‘still’ because I have some idea of what he lacked in the way of knowledge of organization when he left here in 1945 and what he acquired in a few short years with Padmore.” She concluded that if Nkrumah “does not acquire this, consciously cultivating it … he will find himself left behind as Toussaint was by Dessalines.” In addition to her reference to the leadership rivalry of these two figures of the Haitian Revolution, Grace’s analysis of Nkrumah’s autobiography included comparisons to Marx and his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the relationship of Chinese workers to the Chinese Communist Party, and “the new social-economic ties” being forged by Ghanaian rowers, uranium miners in the Congo, and Rhodesian copper workers.39

This intense though brief transatlantic exchange about Ghana showcased Grace’s intellectual practice. By this time she was a committed radical, a fifteen-year veteran of Marxist organizations secure in her identity as a revolutionary. She forged this identity through a pattern of impressive intellectual work anchored in her prodigious reading. As these letters show, the probing and purposeful way in which she had read Hegel, the dedication with which she read Marx, and the focused intensity with which studied Marxist theory all informed her engagement with contemporary political questions and the books she read to understand them. Throughout her political life, specific books made meaningful and lasting imprints on Grace’s thinking, with a small number of them, such as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, becoming foundational and lifelong reference points and many others serving as guideposts in particular moments or for certain political questions.40 These letters reflect this, showing the importance she assigned to her reading, the excitement she derived from books, and the ways her reading informed her political analyses and shaped her political work.

Of course, the letters also revealed dimensions of C. L. R.’s intellectual practice. Just as he had used this correspondence to quickly shift the group’s attention to Ghana, one of his letters written shortly after his return to London introduced another shift in the group’s focus. “Tomorrow night I am going to meet the Rev. Luther King,” he informed his comrades. Martin Luther King Jr., newly famous for his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott concluded just three months earlier, had also been in Ghana for the independence celebration. He and C. L. R. did not meet there, but King and his wife were traveling through Europe on their way back to the United States, and a mutual friend arranged for them to all attend a dinner in London. C. L. R. was excited about exploring the parallels he saw between Montgomery and Ghana. “Nkrumah has worked on much the same ideas as Luther King,” he offered, saying that both had accomplished something “profoundly” revolutionary. The Ghana book would include a section on the Montgomery Bus Boycott that “should make both sides of the Atlantic aware of what is involved.”41 This letter clearly showed that C. L. R. had an appreciation for the Montgomery struggle before he met King; this appreciation would grow even stronger after he had a conversation with him.

“One of the Most Astonishing Events in the History of Human Struggle”

On the afternoon of March 24, 1957, C. L. R. and Selma James welcomed to their London home Martin and Coretta King for lunch and conversation. Joining them for what turned out to be a full afternoon of discussion were two prominent members of black Britain, Barbadian writer George Lamming, author of In the Castle of My Skin, and political aspirant Dr. David Pitt. Ghana’s independence served as impetus for this gathering. All but Lamming had attended the independence ceremonies two and a half weeks earlier, and Lamming planned to travel to Ghana in the near future through a literary prize he had recently won for In the Castle of My Skin. The group shared a wide-ranging conversation that inevitably turned to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Kings related the remarkable story of the boycott, giving a firsthand account of the mood occasioned by Rosa Parks’s act of defiance, the response of local leaders, the rallying of the black community, and the building of a mass movement.42 The opportunity to hear about the boycott from its celebrated leader deepened C. L. R.’s enthusiasm for the Montgomery movement and reinforced his conviction that a new, world revolutionary situation was afoot.

The next day C. L. R. penned a letter to his comrades back in the United States eagerly recounting the meeting. “I have stopped everything to do this,” he began, “because in my opinion it is extremely urgent that you study it and penetrate as deeply as possible into what I have been trying to say over the last week or two.”43 He related in some detail the events of the boycott’s initial days, focusing especially on the process by which King emerged as the leader. C. L. R. then offered commentary on the movement’s political and theoretical implications. Throughout the six-page letter James issued unreserved praise for the boycott. Ranking it “one of the most astonishing events in the history of human struggle,” he implored his comrades not to miss the profound historical statement registered by the Montgomery movement. “I hope no-one underestimates the tremendous inner power of a movement which results in 99% of a population refusing to ride in the buses for over a whole year.… It is one of the most astonishing events of endurance by a whole population that I have ever heard of.”44

While these statements might seem to suggest that C. L. R. saw Montgomery as singular, in fact it was the connections he drew between Montgomery and Ghana—and between both of them and Hungary—that most interested and excited him. “The more I look at this,” he wrote, referring to the parallels between Montgomery and Ghana, “the more I see that we are in the phase of a new experience which demands the most serious analysis.”45 He had initially identified this “new experience” with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution. Now, his experience in Ghana, followed almost immediately by the conversation with King, led C. L. R. to the belief that these were not only world-historical events important in their own right, but, even more significantly, they dramatically and irrefutably revealed a new stage in the history of popular struggle. Hungary, Ghana, and Montgomery were, as he saw it, constitutive of something entirely new in the history of mass protest and revolutionary change.

C. L. R. took the commonalities and parallels that he identified in all three movements as empirical support for his theoretical formulations regarding the revolutionary potential of mass action. “The most astonishing thing about the Gold Coast Revolution,” he wrote, “is the fact that the masses of the people in a few months recognised Nkrumah as their leader and were prepared to go to the end with him. In Montgomery, Alabama they recognised King as their leader in a few hours and were prepared to go to the end with him. In Hungary I doubt if they recognised any particular person as the leader at all. Yet they went to the end, organising and recognising the leadership as they went along.” These parallels in political development, along with their parallel timing—the Hungarian Revolution, the successful conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Ghana’s independence all occurred between late October 1956 and early March 1957—led C. L. R. firmly to this conclusion: “The general level of the mass movement in both advanced and backward countries, particularly since the end of World War II, is such that they recognise immediately any leadership which is saying that thing that they want to hear.” He urged his American comrades to see Hungary, Ghana, and Montgomery as parts of an interconnected whole that served as a “warning to all revolutionaries not to under estimate the readiness of modern people everywhere to overthrow the old regime.”46

On the face of it, the attention that C. L. R. devoted to Ghana and Montgomery during the spring of 1957 seemed to suggest a narrowing of the distance between his and Jimmy’s positions as articulated in the fall of 1956. The historical and theoretical significance that C. L. R. assigned to the Ghanaian Revolution—declaring it a milestone in world revolutionary activity; linking it with Montgomery, a major event in the black American struggle; and placing it on par with (rather than subordinate to) Hungary—might be read as C. L. R.’s answering Jimmy’s plea, issued in his letter strongly dissenting from C. L. R.’s analysis of Hungary, for the group to give more attention and weight to the anticolonial revolts. In fact, differences in their positions remained in the spring of 1957. The core of these differences was this: Jimmy highlighted the racial assertion at the heart of these two movements, while C. L. R. highlighted popular insurgency as the most salient feature. For example, Jimmy took Montgomery as evidence that the black masses were ready to confront Jim Crow. He therefore championed the boycott as a forward leap in black protest and as an advance in the challenge to the southern system of racial oppression. C. L. R., by contrast, found a different meaning: for him the most meaningful and most revolutionary characteristic of the boycott was the relationship between the masses and their leaders.47 Thus, while the more familiar analysis of Montgomery emphasized the significance of this local black population rising up in confrontation of the larger white society and its system of racial oppression, C. L. R.’s lens on Montgomery emphasized the boycott as a mass movement and looked for its greatest lessons in its leadership dynamics.

Theoretical questions about the relationship between masses and leaders in popular struggles had interested C. L. R. since at least the 1930s, when he published The Black Jacobins, and such questions drove his analysis of Ghana and Montgomery. He emphasized how both movements grew out of rapidly developing popular protests, which he believed ultimately demonstrated to the world “the always unsuspected power of the mass movement.” In both cases, the masses called for and continuously supported the leadership that they desired and needed. Indeed, C. L. R. believed the great gift that these two leaders shared was the ability to recognize the determination of the masses, identify the directions in which they wanted to move, and then “put forward decisive programmes”—King’s nonviolence and Nkrumah’s Positive Action campaign—that fit the political circumstances, provided what the people themselves wanted, and therefore mobilized the masses. He judged Nkrumah and King to be remarkable political figures, but he insisted that the masses were instrumental in propelling each leader and his program. In the case of Nkrumah and the formation of the CPP, he identified “critical moments when the leadership seemed to waiver,” at which point “it was always the demonstration by the mass of its force and determination and its confidence in them that enabled them to take the forward step.” He drew a parallel to a “precisely similar situation” during the earliest stages of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when its future was uncertain but the leadership was “impelled to go on by the thousands who were lining up since afternoon for the meeting that they had called that night.”48

C. L. R. surely recognized these two movements as marking major advances in black and Pan-African political struggle, but unlike Jimmy, this was not the framework within which he analyzed or approached them. Jimmy had urged the group to see Ghana and other anticolonial revolts as revolutionary breakthroughs precisely because they wrote the newest and most transformative chapter in the struggle against colonialism and the domination of Western Europe over racialized people in the Third World. He similarly judged Montgomery to be full of revolutionary possibility because it represented an irreparable rupture in the system of Jim Crow and the practice of racial subordination in the United States. By contrast, C. L. R. celebrated Ghana and Montgomery not primarily as great moments in African liberation or black struggle, but for what they contributed to a more general theory of popular protest and a history of revolutionary change. When he traveled to Ghana for the independence ceremonies, and when he hosted Martin Luther King in his home, he was doing so as a black man and a colonial whose earliest political influences and experiences included Caribbean nationalism and African independence, but he was also a revolutionary socialist whose deepest political commitments grew from a quarter-century-long engagement with Marxism and radical politics. Specifically, his engagement with Marxism provided the worldview and intellectual framework through which he evaluated the Montgomery Bus Boycott, interpreted the protest, and analyzed its leadership following his meeting with King in March 1957.

The next Correspondence “Discussion Bulletin” following the meeting with King reflected C. L. R.’s newfound interest in Montgomery and his analysis of it alongside Ghana and Hungary. Nothing about the boycott had appeared in Correspondence during the nearly thirteen-month protest (from December 5, 1955, to December 21, 1956), during which time the group produced seven bulletins. Now the April 1957 bulletin contained two references to Montgomery, one of them an announcement about Correspondence’s future publishing plans saying that recent “world events” underscored the need for the paper to move to a weekly format. The announcement lists the Montgomery Bus Boycott as one of these events, along with the Suez Crisis, the uprisings in Hungary and Poland, and Ghana’s independence. The other reference to Montgomery came in the peculiarly titled “Montgomery and Melville,” a short piece about an upcoming civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., called the “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom.” King and the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was created to carry forward the momentum of the boycott, conceived the Prayer Pilgrimage as a response to President Eisenhower’s refusal to speak in support of desegregation.49 The significance of the upcoming pilgrimage, according to the Correspondence article, was a firm demonstration that southern blacks—“this supposedly most backward section of the Negroes in the United States”—were determined to challenge Jim Crow.50 The article also referenced C. L. R.’s 1953 book, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, to suggest a link between Herman Melville’s allegorical novel Moby-Dick and African Americans’ rising protest mood embodied in the Prayer Pilgrimage.

“Montgomery and Melville” typified the group’s mode of political engagement as well as its optimistic mood in the spring of 1957. The political ferment created by these “world events” of 1956–57 generated within the organization a heightened confidence in their ideas and in their ability to interpret these events for an international audience. The rather odd act of connecting Melville and Moby-Dick to the Montgomery movement reflected the excitement that the organization felt about their writing projects and the opportunities, as they saw them, to apply Correspondence’s specific brand of Marxism. They saw these writing projects as a means of projecting Correspondence’s interpretation of popular protest and socialist revolution in the modern world; these books and pamphlets were so many opportunities to intervene in the contemporary political situation.

A Return to London and the Return of Correspondence

Correspondence was also to be a vehicle for this intervention. However, the paper was to be a different type of intervention, and it brought its own set of challenges and potentially competing imperatives. While the group exchanged transatlantic letters analyzing Ghana and Montgomery during the spring of 1957, the American comrades, and especially those in Detroit, also worked on relaunching Correspondence as a biweekly newspaper. Indeed, the planning of the paper became a consistent topic in these letters alongside discussion of the Ghana book and the Hungary pamphlet, and the relationship between the two endeavors—moving Correspondence from “Discussion Bulletins” to a weekly paper, on one hand, and carrying out a writing program of books and pamphlets on the other—proved to be a source of contention. At issue was the group’s capacity to simultaneously publish the paper and carry out its other writing projects, and how best to relate them to each other. The paper’s function was to cover current affairs and global political developments, document popular protest, and give voice to the experiences and perspectives of ordinary people. The books and pamphlets, by contrast, were theoretical works designed to project in the most direct sense the organization’s politics. As C. L. R. wrote of the proposed Ghana book, “We shall put forward our whole program in a most concrete context.”51

Jimmy and C. L. R. again found themselves articulating competing visions of the group’s work. For C. L. R., the paper and the theoretical work were in fact two parts of a whole; the organization could and should pursue the two simultaneously. However, he gave the books and pamphlets priority over Correspondence, believing that new global political realities had created the opportunity for projects like the Ghana book to find a receptive readership and earn wide distribution. This, in turn, would generate a broad-based international audience for the group’s ideas. “Once we get the larger books out,” he explained, “they will read the paper.”52 By “they” C. L. R. meant colonial peoples as well as European and American workers, all of whom “have to be prepared for the next great upheaval along the lines of Hungary and to know what side to take immediately.”53 They would be searching for the type of theoretical insights that the Ghana book and the Hungary pamphlet would deliver, C. L. R. insisted. Therefore, these works would help the group “meet the reception that is waiting for us.” This was yet another expression of his unbounded confidence in the group’s analysis of the contemporary world political situation. “You never can tell when the break will come,” he wrote in a letter to the membership. “The thing is to see it and seize it, in fact sometimes to push out into the darkness confident that events are shaping and will come to meet you.”54

Jimmy made a less favorable assessment of the group’s ability to navigate these events. During a discussion of C. L. R.’s letters, Jimmy gave his view that “the organization goes to pieces every time something new is proposed. We can’t go from pillar to post. Every time a new event takes place, we get lost.” He also questioned whether the Hungary and Ghana projects had any meaningful relationship to the goal of putting out the paper. “To me the [Hungary] pamphlet is now obsolete. Maybe in 20 years it will have the same effect as [The Black Jacobins]” but now it served to detract from the group’s efforts to relaunch the paper. “We have to have a fixed program,” he urged, one based on a sober assessment of resources and that could be reasonably sustained when new political developments and opportunities arose, as they surely would, whether they be created by events like those in Hungary and Ghana, or experiences such as C. L. R.’s trip to Ghana and meeting with Martin Luther King.55

Grace’s view fell between these two positions. She firmly believed that the group needed a fixed program for the paper, and she agreed with Jimmy that there was a tendency in the organization to let world events justify further delays in relaunching the paper. “Until this is cleared up,” she wrote to C. L. R., “every new opportunity, every new revolutionary development, is going to plunge the organization into a crisis, as the Hungarian revolution has already done.”56 But she was less skeptical than Jimmy of the viability and significance of the books and pamphlets. Indeed, while Jimmy wanted the paper to take primacy over the theoretical works, and C. L. R. leaned in the other direction, Grace believed each one served a unique and vital purpose and therefore the two should claim equal attention. “We have to realize,” she continued, that “revolutions and revolutionary crises are going to break out” in various places, “demanding from us continuously analytical pamphlets of a fundamental character which demonstrate our theory and drive it forward. But the only form total enough, big enough, to embrace the new ferment, is the paper. The two must go side by side, each enriching the other.… I believe that it has to be posed as pamphlets and the weekly paper, not pamphlets or the weekly paper.”57

Grace’s efforts proved to be pivotal in advancing both. In Detroit she was one of the members of the organization working most directly in the effort to relaunch the paper, including in her role as editor when Correspondence resumed regular publication. At the same time, C. L. R. relied heavily on her input and help on the Hungary and Ghana projects. As we have seen, much of C. L. R.’s correspondence with the group was letters between him and Grace in which she provided much in the way of helping him clarify his ideas for the Hungary pamphlet and then the Ghana book. As early as December 1956, she and other members of the organization began considering the possibility of her going to London to more directly assist C. L. R. with the Hungary pamphlet as she had done in 1954 to work with him and Mbiyu Koinange on The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. By March 1957, with the expansion of C. L. R.’s proposed writing program following the trip to Ghana and his meeting with Martin Luther King, Grace gave the idea of her going to London serious consideration.

C. L. R. was adamant that he needed Grace’s assistance to do all that he planned. In mid-March he lamented, “God help us how I wish Grace was around” as he discussed his writing plans upon returning to London.58 A week later, at the end of a long letter laying out his emerging plans for the Ghana book, he urged the group to “free Thompson as much as you can,” referring to Grace by one of her aliases. “I want to, I have to, lean heavily on Thompson,” he confessed, “or I couldn’t do it at all.”59 Nine days later he wrote to Glaberman with an even stronger plea: “After weeks and weeks of looking at it from every possible angle, I am certain that you should send Thompson here by April 15th if you can.”60

It was not, of course, for Glaberman or C. L. R. to decide if and when Grace would go to London. The manner in which the two men discussed the matter suggests a measure of male presumption and prerogative. C. L. R.’s words also betrayed a gendered, male-centered leadership style. At the same time, his directive reflects how thoroughly he and all members of the group, including Grace herself, viewed such matters in organizational rather than personal terms. Still, the decision would not be without personal implications. Jimmy had reservations about Grace going to London. As she surveyed the possible strain on their marriage of her absence for several months, Grace explained to C. L. R. that “the separation this time [would be] a lot different from before,” referring to the four months she spent in London working with C. L. R. in 1954. That trip occurred at an earlier point in Grace and Jimmy’s relationship, just before they were married. Since then they had grown closer, personally and politically. “Over the past years,” Grace continued, she and Jimmy “have become very close and dependent on one another.”61

Indeed, through three years of marriage, Grace and Jimmy were growing together, learning from each other, and benefiting from each other’s intellectual and political strengths. Grace provided a glimpse of this in one of her letters to C. L. R. discussing Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana: “As I write, I have in my mind a picture of the rowers in Accra who take the cocoa bags out in canoes to the ships in deep water … and in my ear is the music they sing as they work which I heard over the TV last week on the Report of Nixon’s Tour. In this work, in these rowers, are not only the limitations, but [also] the perspectives of the African economy as part of the work economy. In one sense they remind me of rowers at Pirseus in Ancient Greece. In another more important sense, they make me think of what I learned from [Jimmy] on our cross-country trips—that sense of the continent as having been created by human labor, a sense of the inter-relations of labor which is now in the personality of each worker.”62

By highlighting what she learned from Jimmy on these cross-country trips, Grace was affirming the political wisdom that he derived from his background and experiences that differed from hers—namely, his rural upbringing, experiences riding freight trains, and many years as an autoworker. She was also asserting the significance of their divergent backgrounds for their relationship.63 Decades later, after they had made many more such trips over many years, she reinforced this point with a telling description of their trips: “Traveling along the highway, I would have my head in a book, while he was pointing out the cows and sheep, counting the freight cars and trying to figure out what they were carrying based on his knowledge of industry and agriculture in the region.” And this, she said, reflected not just their divergent personal styles but also their differing political styles: “My approach to political questions came more from books, his from experience.”64

This duality of books and experience may have been exaggerated—theoretical concepts informed Jimmy’s political practice more than the statement would suggest—but it captures the complementary and cumulative nature of their collaboration. Combining their respective approaches to the politics that they engaged together, Grace and Jimmy could learn from each other, influence each other’s thinking, and grow together. This mutual growth came to be a crucial dynamic of their intellectual and political partnership, and this is what Grace was coming to see, and reporting to C. L. R. in their 1957 correspondence, as she weighed the decision to join him in London for several months.

Grace did decide to make the trip, and by early April she was arranging her plans. She and Jimmy apparently agreed that this was best, despite his clearly registered reservations. Nonetheless, Grace assured C. L. R. that Jimmy “will do everything he can to make it possible, whatever his doubts. That is the sort of person he is.”65 In addition to the personal toll, one of his doubts was that Grace’s absence would further distract the group from the goal of reestablishing Correspondence as a biweekly newspaper.

Publishing their discussion bulletins was part of this effort, and the one released just as Grace prepared to leave for London carried a front-page story by Jimmy (using his pseudonym Al Whitney) that captured his thinking and political focus. “A Report on the March on Washington” gave a firsthand account of the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. the preceding May, a major civil rights demonstration. Thousands of people from across the country congregated at the Lincoln Memorial to register their support for civil rights and to call for federal legislation. They listened to a series of speeches by civil rights luminaries, capped off by a rousing, crowd-pleasing address by Martin Luther King. While the SCLC named their protest “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” its stated goals of expressing black unity and urging federal action on civil rights made the moniker that Jimmy gave it, “the March on Washington,” equally appropriate. That name, of course, was subsequently claimed by the much larger and more famous civil rights demonstration six years later. The huge crowds and celebrated oratory of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Justice” completely superseded the Prayer Pilgrimage in both size and importance, but the thousands who attended the 1957 affair made it the largest civil rights demonstration to date and a significant moment in the rising civil rights movement of the mid-1950s. Jimmy concluded his article with this assessment of the impact of the Prayer Pilgrimage: “The southern people went home determined beyond the expectations of even King. No one in the South is big enough to stop this march of people and no one can call it off.”66

C. L. R. felt an equal conviction about the movements in Ghana and Hungary, and his next letter to the group laid out specific and ambitious plans for the writing projects on them that he and Grace would carry out upon her arrival. In close collaboration with Selma James, who had moved to London in 1956, Grace would provide intellectual, editorial, and secretarial contributions to these projects that were in various states of planning or preparation. The most important of these were three books. The first was to be the Ghana book, then the book on the Hungarian Revolution, and finally a book on cricket that would make an analysis of the sport alongside analyses of British society and political history. This partially autobiographical work aimed to tackle “the question of what constitutes an education” in “human terms” and through a writing style “uniting the profoundest universals with the concrete, the individual.”67 These books would be “written in a style that can be understood at once by thousands of people,” C. L. R. explained shortly before Grace’s arrival. He wanted them all to “appear quickly” and to contain “from the first the basis for wide circulation among all strata, [in] many countries, forming the bulwark of mass support.”68

Grace set sail toward the end of April, arriving in London at the end of the month. She would spend four months there, working closely with C. L. R. and Selma. The trio quickly fell into “a fixed program” of work, as Grace explained in a letter to her comrades back in the United States shortly after her arrival. Their schedule called for “so many hours each day, so many words to be written each day, a total of 200,000 in four months.” She was also glad to report that “the daily program includes time for a walk on the heath every morning before breakfast and time to listen to the radio after dinner for an hour before doing more work.”69 There were other diversions from the hectic pace of work as well, such as the cricket season. They mostly took in the matches on a television set rented for that purpose to save on the time and expense of attending matches while facilitating C. L. R.’s cricket journalism.70

The most important diversion for Grace was Jimmy, who spent about one month with her in London.71 The previous two or three summers, Grace and Jimmy had driven to Los Angeles to spend his vacation from Chrysler with Freddy and Lyman Paine. This year they decided Jimmy would travel to London for his vacation. This provided a nice interruption of the long separation that Grace’s trip was causing. It seems that there was also a therapeutic goal behind Jimmy’s going to London. He had recently recovered from an illness, and members of the group, including C. L. R., believed that this vacation would be a much needed and deserved respite,72 which it turned out to be. This was Jimmy’s first trip abroad, “and he was intrigued by what was happening all around him,” Grace recalled many years later. For example, “Jimmy was fascinated by the fact that plumbing pipes were still outside and therefore much more accessible than the enclosed ones in the United States.” Among their many activities, Grace and Jimmy attended African independence rallies, visited Windsor Castle in England and Cardiff Castle in Wales, and even took an excursion to Paris.73

Grace still managed to be especially productive during her four-month stay in London. This time gave her and C. L. R. their first opportunity since his departure from the United States in 1953 for daily collaboration, where they could develop a rhythm and a productive pace while working simultaneously on multiple writing projects.74 Indeed, part of C. L. R.’s insistence that Grace join him and Selma in London may have been his attempt to re-create the exciting intellectual partnership they had built in the JFT in New York during the 1940s.75 They made progress on all three writing projects during the spring and summer of 1957. However, the books did not all “appear quickly,” as C. L. R. had hoped they would, nor were they completed in the order he had projected. C. L. R.’s initial plan called for the Ghana book to be completed first. He had already developed much of the book before Grace got to London, and it was that book on which they focused upon her arrival. She indicated in a letter written to the group shortly after that they expected the book to be done by the end of May. However, the Hungary book quickly took primacy, and they devoted much of their time and effort to that project. This rather suddenly adjusted the group’s writing and publishing priorities—as recently as April 13, C. L. R. had restated his plan that the Ghana book would precede that on Hungary. In the months to follow, the organization made the publication and promotion of the Hungary book a central focus; the Ghana and cricket books, though both had been mostly completed in 1957, were published years later.76

Jimmy and Grace returned to Detroit in late August, in time to participate in the final work to relaunch Correspondence. On September 21–22 the organization held a national convention in Detroit attended by the full membership across the country, just as they had done with the initial founding of the paper. During the convention Jimmy and Lyman were elected as the cochairmen of the organization.77 This reflected a solidification of Jimmy’s leadership of the organization. In title Jimmy and Lyman shared responsibility, but in practice, with Jimmy there in Detroit and Lyman in Los Angeles, “90% of the burden of national leadership rest[ed] with” Jimmy, as Glaberman described the situation. In a letter to C. L. R., Glaberman reported that Jimmy had been “the key figure in the convention” and “he remains that today. He consciously and vigorously took over the direction of the organization and his leadership was accepted by everyone.” Given the many activities and spaces in which Jimmy had taken responsibility for building the organization—leading editorial committees and reaching out to workers in his neighborhood and at Chrysler—Glaberman expressed concern that Jimmy not overextend himself: “The organization looks to him to give direction on all these things and he is not very cooperative when any attempt is made to slow him down.”78

The convention also confirmed the decision that Grace would be the new editor of Correspondence. They published the first issue under her editorship, and the first in this new phase of the paper as a monthly, in October 1957. It appeared just days after the nation witnessed the dramatic scenes of the Little Rock school desegregation crisis. In early September, nine black students attempted to enroll in the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in accordance with a plan adopted by the local school board. The students faced the opposition of white mobs and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who ordered the National Guard to prevent the students from enrolling. Following three weeks of court proceedings, Faubus’s refusal to fully comply with the federal court, and ultimately mob violence, the escalating crisis compelled President Eisenhower to send federal troops to Little Rock, opening the way for the students’ admission to Central. As the first full-blown confrontation between the federal government and southern resistance to school desegregation (and the first use of federal power to enforce equal treatment of African Americans in the South since Reconstruction), the nearly month-long crisis became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement as well as one of the earliest major news stories of the still-young television era. Little Rock claimed the nation’s (and the world’s) attention during the latter part of September 1957 as Correspondence prepared the October issue of the paper. This is reflected in the three editorials on Little Rock in that issue appearing under the banner “Events in Little Rock Mark the End of an Era.”79

Jimmy likely wrote all three editorials, and one, titled “Who Is for Law and Order?” carried his byline. He argued that the spectacle, seen in other recent conflicts and then repeated most dramatically in the Little Rock crisis, of white people defying police as well as state and federal troops raised the question, “If white people defy the Constitution, who then are the law-abiding citizens of the U.S. and who is for democracy?” Inherent in his answer was a reshaping of the relations between blacks and whites. On one hand this meant the loss of white people’s claim to civic and moral authority. “The Little Rock crisis has put an end to the era of the white man’s burden to preserve democracy,” he asserted. “The white man’s burden now is to prove that he believes in democracy and that he can follow the example of the colored people in upholding law and order.” As for black Americans, their newfound racial assertion struck a blow to the edifice upon which their subordination had long rested. “For years untold colored people have been forced to maneuver in all directions trying to avoid a head-on collision,” Jimmy wrote. “They have allowed white people to name them ‘Negroes’ by which the whites mean a thing and not a person. They have stayed out of the public parks, restaurants, hotels and golf courses, walked on the cinder path when meeting whites on the sidewalk, gone to separate schools, worked on the worst jobs under the worst conditions, smiled and acted unhurt when abused in public places.” But the recent tide of black protest revealed that African Americans were making “an about face.” Black people, he wrote, were not only pressing for their rights but were also beginning to “denounce” the people and practices that had denied them those rights.80

Jimmy’s analysis of Little Rock differed from other commentaries, which tended to emphasize it as an advance in the struggle for integration, highlight the moral questions it raised, or discuss it as a crisis of authority played out through conflict among the local, state, and national governments. Instead, Jimmy said Little Rock represented a rather sudden transformation now taking place among black people. The importance of Little Rock for him was in revealing how black people were seeing themselves differently and thus making this “about face,” no longer accepting the southern way of life and even rejecting the standards by which white people had organized society and elevated themselves. This analysis, and all of the editorials on Little Rock more generally, continued the focus and tone of Jimmy’s previous writings in the paper, but they also reflected the greater attention that Correspondence was soon to give to the escalating civil rights movement. The paper no longer had the “Special Negro News” page. Instead, material on civil rights protests, what the group still called the Negro Question or the Negro Struggle, appeared with increasing frequency and more widely throughout the paper under Grace’s editorship and Jimmy’s leadership of the organization.

Different Worlds of Work

The FBI took note of these developments within the organization and newspaper through its continued surveillance of Grace and Jimmy. The bureau maintained its contingent of informants, who provided often detailed and usually accurate information on the Boggses’ activities. FBI agents kept in regular contact with these informants, who reported on such things as the meetings Jimmy and Grace attended, their writings and speaking engagements, the publication plans for the paper, their financial contributions to the organization, and their travel. As with her 1948 trip to Paris, the FBI took particular note of Grace’s London trip, and informants gave it information regarding her travel dates, the purpose of her trip, and Jimmy’s visit. Informants served as just one of many means of surveillance. FBI agents also conducted “physical surveillance” of Jimmy and Grace at their home, checked a credit bureau and the files of local law enforcement agencies for damning information on them (of which there was none), and conducted “pretext interviews” by calling the Boggses’ home under assumed identities, in one case posing as an insurance salesperson. The FBI even obtained a sample of Grace’s handwriting by securing a copy of The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves that Grace had signed and given to the owner of the mail service that she used to distribute the book.81 Agents also extended their surveillance into Jimmy’s and Grace’s places of employment. In what became a yearly practice, agents spoke with Chrysler’s Employment and Employee Services office to confirm Jimmy’s employment.82 Grace’s employment was intermittent and more difficult to confirm, leading the FBI to use the even more surreptitious tactic of monitoring her at work. According to Grace’s FBI file, “the Subject was observed by a Special Agent of the FBI at her employment as a receptionist” on multiple occasions and at different employers over several years.83

While the FBI was able to learn Grace’s work history and employment patterns, its agents did not discern the relationship between her employment and her politics. On the surface it would seem that the two were not related, as politics were central to Grace’s life, whereas employment seemed to occupy only a small corner of her time and attention. However, her choices of and approach to employment reflected an important dimension of her political identity and practice. Remarkably, Grace never considered pursuing a career and very rarely sought consistent employment. At no time in her long life was Grace driven by the question of how to make a living. Accordingly, political considerations frequently guided her choices about employment, including where to work, for how long, and even whether to take a job. This set of choices, of course, was available to her because of the relative material security she enjoyed at most stages of her life: her comfortable middle-class upbringing and the family support she continued to enjoy when she returned to New York during the 1940s; her marital union with Jimmy; and the support of her political community, as she sometimes worked as a member of the organization’s (minimally) paid staff and later received financial support from Freddy and Lyman. But that alone does not explain her employment decisions. Grace’s indifference to career and upward mobility reflected her decidedly nonacquisitive personality and a complete disinterest in status or the trappings of any sort of professional life.

This was evident in 1940 when Grace earned her Ph.D. Securing an academic job “was never on my mind,” she said decades later, thinking back to her mind-set and priorities while completing the degree. With no aspiration of becoming a professor—“I had not studied philosophy in order to teach it”—Grace had allowed herself to sink into her studies without regard for where they would lead, intellectually or materially. The need to eventually find employment beyond what she had already been doing “was never in my consciousness. It just never bothered me,” she recalled. “What I knew was that by and large I had been able to make a living because I was a very good typist and I figured, if I needed money I can type.”84 And that is what she did over the next two decades, taking various secretarial and clerical jobs, most of them short term or temporary and some of them part time.

Grace held a string of such office jobs in Detroit during the second half of the 1950s.85 She thought about her employment through the prism of her politics and the needs of Correspondence, making decisions about the type of jobs to seek, which offers to accept, and when or how often to work with the organization foremost in mind. “I got a job today and started this afternoon,” she wrote to C. L. R. in April 1955, describing what may have been her first office job in Detroit. It was as a receptionist in the office of an auto parts supplier located on West Grand Boulevard. “It’s temporary and it doesn’t pay much by Detroit standards, but it’s just the sort of thing I want, and when this one ends (at the end of the week) I’m quite sure there will be others.” The job fit well into her plan for the type of work she sought. “What I have in mind is this,” she explained. “I don’t want an executive secretary job which demands thinking about your job all day long and outside of working hours as well. I could probably get one of those if I tried hard enough, and it would probably pay quite well. But then I would have to be responsible on the job.” Instead, she wanted jobs where she would use her strong typing and shorthand skills but that required little commitment from her; she wanted jobs that would not impede, and would possibly even facilitate, her political work. She found an agency that would match her with such jobs, and it brought immediate results. “I went down there this morning, the fellow there was impressed with my qualifications and sent me out immediately.” A hidden benefit to this arrangement was that the companies who utilized the agency were, as Grace noted, “usually in a tight fix so they can’t be particular about race.” Her statement suggests that she had previous personal experience with workplace racial discrimination, or that she simply recognized the possibility of facing it. She made no further reference to race, other than to say that her boss at the new job was a white southerner. The two of them “got along remarkably well,” and the man repeatedly told Grace that she was doing a good job. If he reported the same to the agency, they would call Grace for other jobs.86

Perhaps the greatest benefit was flexibility. The agency gave her the option of refusing any job without jeopardizing future opportunities. This meant that at those times when political or organizational matters demanded her attention, “I can be free to do whatever is needed.” Her paid work would not interfere with her political work. “So all in all, I am quite satisfied … for the time being,” Grace concluded. She acknowledged “an element of uncertainty” regarding pay. “This week I may make $25. Next week perhaps nothing. The following week $60 or the like.”87 She earned the $25 working only two and a half days that week, during which time she received a permanent full-time offer: “While I was working there, a man from an office on the same floor came in and asked if I would like to work full time for him. I told him that I was working part-time because I was a writer and needed free time for myself and I didn’t want to tie myself down to any particular job.” The man responded by saying the job only required her to answer the phone and write letters, leaving her with a great deal of time to herself. “It is very tempting,” Grace admitted, but still declined.88

Grace’s and Jimmy’s respective employment patterns and relationships to the world of paid labor marked another significant contrast between them. While she worked intermittently and often part time at various jobs, he worked full time at Chrysler continuously. Grace’s jobs gave her the flexibility and time to engage in her political work, sometimes working two or three days per week and devoting the other days to organizational or political activities. Jimmy’s job afforded no such opportunity. Grace’s office jobs also allowed her to use time and other resources. “I am making these notes while at work, on my lunch hour,” she wrote at the beginning of a letter to C. L. R. “One good thing about an office job is that you are never too far away from a typewriter.”89 Working at Chrysler afforded Jimmy something very different: the factory and the union were primary sites of his political development and political activity. From his participation in strikes, the flying squadron, and political education work during his early years as an autoworker to his activism in the Discrimination Action Committee and his ongoing work with Chrysler Local 7’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, Jimmy’s employment at Chrysler significantly configured his politics.

By the mid-1950s, Jimmy’s political engagement at work and in the union was largely distilled through his daily interactions and relationships with his coworkers. In 1957 Grace described an ongoing conversation that she and Jimmy had about his experiences at work: “Every day in the shop he is under pressure from hundreds and indirectly thousands of guys expecting from him answers on everything—from the history of Egypt to the climate in Africa. Being able to answer these questions is almost a question of survival for him.”90 Jimmy’s coworkers learned to rely on him in this way through years of his demonstrated knowledgeability and active engagement with the wider world, and this dynamic was just one dimension of the relationships Jimmy built with people in the plant. He shared close friendships with all types of people at Chrysler Jefferson, such as Nick DiGaetano, who mentored him; Willis, who joined with Jimmy in several political activities; and coworkers like Joe Maddox who were not political. Maddox and Jimmy worked together in the material control department, and they got to know each other very well starting in the late 1940s. “Jimmy was one of the best persons that I ever met, one of my best friends,” Maddox recalled. He said everyone in the shop knew that Jimmy was very active and committed to his political views, but Jimmy never forced them on anyone. Maddox recalled the “sick club” as an example of Jimmy’s organizing and his relations with his shopmates: “Jimmy said we should form a group to help each other when we get sick.” Club members paid dues and held monthly meetings in each other’s homes. When a member fell sick, the club paid $25 to help them until they returned to work.91

The union continued to be an important space for Jimmy’s activism, though the character of that activism and the weight it carried relative to his other political concerns had shifted by the mid-1950s. He remained active in his home local, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 7, but was a staunch opponent of the union leadership. Jimmy was especially critical of Walter Reuther, who had been elected president of the UAW in 1946 and then president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1952, and the union machine over which he had presided during the preceding decade. Writing to radical pacifist, preacher, and labor organizer A. J. Muste in 1956, Jimmy said Reuther “has red-baited more than any statesmen with the exception of McCarthy, and particularly against his opponents in the union” and he derided the head of the CIO for his racial politics: “Reuther will go to India or Europe and out-do the State Department in lauding the democratic virtues of America by explaining how Negroes and whites work side by side in the shop. But he says nothing about the fact that the moment the whistle blows, each race goes to its separate neighborhood.”92 Jimmy challenged the union leadership at various turns, including through Local 7’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, of which he was a founding member and the secretary for ten years. At the time of his exchange with Muste, Jimmy was also challenging the leadership through union politics surrounding the recent election at Local 7. An antiadministration slate narrowly lost the election in a runoff vote, which Jimmy and Willis believed reflected a weakness in the Reuther administration and a new willingness among Chrysler workers to challenge it, and the two men began developing a strategy to stimulate and grow this “revolt against Reuther.”93

The plan was to create a year-round program of education and agitation among their coworkers that would galvanize anti-Reuther sentiment and lead to future election victories. To do this, Jimmy and Willis would distribute leaflets in the plant monthly designed to show the prospects for a new path beyond the Reuther machine. Covering topics such as the powers and limits of a chief steward, the duties of a shop committeeman, and the working of machine politics, the leaflets would expose two competing views, contrasting “what the rank and filers are thinking” with “the union set-up.” Parallel to this, the anti-Reuther forces would need to be building a slate for the next election. Some of the leaflets would lay out the views of the people on the slate and show how they were against the machine and supported the rank and file. The goal was “not just opposing” the administration but also “giving the workers something. Explaining to them … facts.”94 Jimmy and Willis would write and run off the leaflets, and they hoped to enlist others who opposed the Reuther administration to help with distribution. All of the leaflets would be anonymous, signed with a fictional name such as “Eagle Eye” or “Watch Dog.”95

Jimmy’s strategy for union elections showed another emergent point of ideological divergence in Correspondence. Jimmy and Willis met with Martin Glaberman to share this plan, which Glaberman received “with a great deal of reserve.” The next day he wrote to C. L. R. expressing his fears that Jimmy was reverting back to two things the group had left behind when they left Trotskyism: “small mass partyism,” and the idea of the “backwardness of the workers.” The former related to Jimmy’s role in the plant. “It is not the same,” Glaberman acknowledged, but Jimmy and Willis’s plan “strikes me as being mighty close to the old Trotskyist trade union policy of writing revolutionary leaflets which left-wing bureaucrats could use to their advantage.” Jimmy and Willis, he explained, were known throughout the plant as radicals and thus would not be distributing the leaflets as rank-and-file workers. Rather, they would be acting as “politicos, impatient politicos,” meaning they were driven by a desire to “shake up the local.” In his view, the leaflets would not be what Correspondence valued most: a spontaneous articulation of rank-and-file workers’ thoughts. This related to Glaberman’s second concern, which spoke to Jimmy’s role in the organization. He felt that Jimmy and Willis’s plan lacked “an attempt to find out what workers were thinking and doing, or are willing to do” in relation to the organization Correspondence or Correspondence newspaper. In this sense, he believed that Jimmy, if only temporarily, had given up on a core principle of the organization and purpose of the paper. “To me,” he concluded, Jimmy new activism in the plant “reflects a turning away from” Correspondence and toward “the milieu where he is most at home and at ease.”96

The Age of Automation

In fact, during the second half of the 1950s, Jimmy began turning from both the milieu of the union and the worker-centered politics of Correspondence. A central reason was his analysis of automation. Since the beginning of the decade he had made a serious examination of this technological innovation that was bringing rapid changes to the factory, increasingly impacting workers, and exercising the minds of a wide range of social commentators and policy makers.

By the early 1960s he had concluded that automation represented a new stage in capitalist production. This formed the basis of his analysis of the nation’s economic and technological development—and along with it his analyses of the meaning and potential of the black struggle and of the prospects for an American revolution—in his 1963 book The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, which threw Jimmy into a decade-long national conversation about the impacts of automation.

That conversation had its origins in the immediate postwar years, when this new technology began to generate great interest, even fascination. The term “automation” could apply to a range of new production technologies, at times being used as an all-encompassing term to describe widespread, rapid technological change, but the generally accepted use of the term was to describe specific, new production processes involving three components: automatic machines to perform the production, specific devices to pass material from one automatic machine to another, and a control mechanism with feedback capacities to regulate the entire series of operations.97 The potential for drastic economic and social implications sparked wide interest.

The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.”98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed.99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period.100

The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines.101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s.102

Jimmy’s writings about automation coincided with a national debate about its meaning and impact. Initially, the debate leaned more toward celebration as automation’s enthusiasts successfully generated great interest in and positive press for the new technology during the early 1950s. Periodicals such as Business Week, Time, and U.S. News and World Report extolled the virtues and coming advances of automation, giving readers excited forecasts of fully automated factories in articles titled “Automation: A Factory Runs Itself,” “Coming Industrial Era: The Wholly Automatic Factory,” and “Push Button Plant: It’s Here—Machines Do the Work and a Man Looks On.”103 Corporate interests raised a nearly unified voice heralding automation as a certain and universal beneficial advancement. However, some observers saw the new technology as a cause for concern and cautioned that the final word on automation would depend on the choices that industry and the nation made in the face of difficult questions regarding the pace of automation’s implementation, the uses of the new productivity, and the fate of displaced workers as well as depleted or eliminated job classifications, communities, and even industries. Norbert Wiener, for example, a prominent MIT mathematician and pioneer in the science of cybernetics, emphasized the potentially calamitous economic and social consequences of the new production technology. Wiener had begun to express concerns about the impacts of automation on labor and the entire society during World War II, and he authored two books in the immediate Cold War years warning that potentially disastrous unemployment and related social problems may come from industry’s drive toward automation. He characterized automation and computer controls in the production process as the “modern” or “second” industrial revolution, which even more than the first held “unbounded possibilities for good and evil.”104 In particular, Wiener feared that the larger impact of the changes caused by automation would be a massive displacement of workers, compounded by the profit-driven indifference of industry. “The automatic machine … will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.”105

If not quite to the level of the Depression, automation did exact a considerable toll on Detroit’s economy. It has been identified as the single most important force in restructuring Detroit’s economy after the war, with black workers hardest hit.106 Automation-related job loss in Detroit-area Ford plants rose above 4,000 between 1951 and 1953.107 Chrysler’s flagship plant, Dodge Main, reduced employment in its paint shop by almost 2,500 and by more than 3,000 on two of its assembly lines. At his own plant, Chrysler Jefferson, Jimmy saw how the company, which pushed an aggressive program of automation during the 1950s in an effort to catch up with Ford and General Motors, eliminated an entire shop by sending the work to the newly automated plant in Trenton, Michigan, where it took only 596 workers to do what 1,800 had done at Chrysler Jefferson.108 He also witnessed the impact on suppliers and independent auto manufacturers who were forced to close, such as the Packard plant located near his east side neighborhood. After reducing its workforce from 16,000 to 4,000 during the preceding four years, Packard closed the plant in 1956. With several other plants in the area also closing around the same time, Detroit’s east side lost over 70,000 jobs between 1954 and 1960.109 These numbers bespeak Detroit’s protracted and painful process of deindustrialization, with automation at the center of enormous job loss, economic decay, and social disaster.110

Jimmy was among the earliest to give serious consideration to the impact of automation on workers and their world in the plant. Writing to C. L. R. in 1955, Grace reported that early on Jimmy had gone to the central Marxist text as a guide. With the first sign of implementation of automation in his plant, Jimmy “took down Capital from the shelf, began reading it and drawing up charts of the workers in his shop, the number of skilled, the number of unskilled, the assembly, the shipping workers etc.”111 A decade later his analysis of automation would in part lead him to challenge and eventually reject key tenets of Marxism. Along the way, he grappled with questions that went beyond the immediate problems of worker displacement and unemployment to larger questions of production. What did automation mean for the next generation of would-be autoworkers? Rather than simply taking a defensive posture of protecting jobs, how should autoworkers respond to automation? What new social possibilities could this new productive capacity open up? Did automation signal a new era of production? If so, what new roles should workers and unions assume in production?

These questions grew from Jimmy’s identity and experiences as a worker, but they reflected as well his growing disengagement with the worker-centered politics of Correspondence. Meanwhile, the organization celebrated a publication that further projected those politics.

Facing Reality

The June 1958 issue of Correspondence included a “Correspondence Special Book Supplement,” marking a significant step in the group’s publishing program. Under the headline “Facing Reality—1958,” the supplement presented an excerpt from Facing Reality, a book being published that month by Correspondence Publishing Company. The book carried no subtitle, but explanatory words on the cover declared its focus:

The New Society …

Where to look for it

How to bring it closer

A statement for our time

The organization touted the book’s arrival as a milestone in socialist thought, and they also celebrated the book as a major achievement for the group itself. Written largely in the fall of 1956 and the spring and summer of 1957 when Grace was in London, the project grew in scope from a pamphlet on Hungary to a book analyzing the Hungarian Revolution in relation to other world events. Members of the organization began referring to it as “the manifesto,” reflecting their determination to present the book as a major statement of the group’s ideas. During the end of 1957 and the first half of 1958 the group expended considerable energy in the arduous task of self-publishing the work. Jimmy, as we have seen, held strong reservations about the project, but as chair of the organization, he continued to support the group’s work in its publication. In fact, it was Jimmy who suggested the book’s title.112 The group organized a book release party, and subsequent issues of Correspondence carried announcements for the book as well as material from it. This sentence from the book appeared on the top of the second page of several issues: “Our Purpose: ‘To recognize that the new society exists and to record the facts of its existence’ ” (from Facing Reality).

The focal point of Facing Reality is the Hungarian Revolution and C. L. R.’s contention that it marked a decisive moment in the history of ordinary people’s struggle against the bureaucratic state and its control over their lives. The book’s analytical and narrative starting point is the workers’ councils that sprang from the revolution. They were, for C. L. R. and most members of Correspondence, the antidote to official society and “the shadow of state power” that it cast all over the world. “By the total uprising of a people,” the book asserts, “the Hungarian Revolution has disclosed the political form which not only destroys the bureaucratic state power, but substitutes in its place a socialist democracy, based not on the control of people but on the mastery of things. This political form is the Workers Councils, embracing the whole of the working population from bottom to top, organized at the source of all power, the place of work, making all decisions in the shop or in the office.”113 The book travels well beyond Hungary for examples of popular insurgency—the reader learns of struggles in the United States and Britain, Russia and France, and Ghana and the other “new nations” of the Third World. Likewise, Facing Reality examines multiple sites and sources of struggle, including wildcat strikes, shop-floor organizations, African Americans’ fight for full citizenship, and the roles to be played by artists, intellectuals, and the middle classes. Another concern of the book is the appropriate form and function of a Marxist organization in the revolutionary upheavals to come, reflecting Correspondence’s own history. But Facing Reality drives inexorably toward the conclusion that workers’ councils are the purest and most sure form of contemporary socialism.114

The book’s discussion of automation provides one example of how it arrives at this conclusion and also reveals how C. L. R.’s analysis of automation differed from Jimmy’s. A section titled “Automation and the Total Crisis” argued that the new technology went to the heart of workers’ struggle with management because automation had begun to “dominate American industry and all forms of economic organization.” In some ways the analysis of automation in Facing Reality closely paralleled Jimmy’s analysis. Both said that automation constituted a new stage of production. The stage of mass production—and with it the assembly-line worker—was coming to an end. Thus, unlike the introduction of previous stages, automation represented a change in production technology that would reduce rather than grow the workforce. Similarly, both believed that the trade union movement—itself an outgrowth of mass production—had no answer for automation because it had conceded to management all control over production. Thus, Jimmy and C. L. R. agreed that the advent of automation was pushing society toward crisis. However, Facing Reality came to a conclusion that was very different from Jimmy’s regarding the ultimate meaning of automation for workers and social transformation. “It is from the growing realization that society faces total collapse,” C. L. R. wrote in Facing Reality, “that has arisen the determination of American workers to take the control of total production away from the capitalists and into their own hands. Up to now American workers have only organized to defend themselves from the machine inside the individual factories. Now, in defense of all society, they are being driven to organize themselves to regulate total production.… Far more than in any country, the automation of industry in the United States is creating the actual conditions for a Government of Workers Councils.”115

Jimmy’s experiences as an autoworker inspired no such confidence in the acumen or political vision of American industrial workers. He saw no indication that workers would seize the control of production and respond to automation in the way Facing Reality predicted. To the contrary, based on what he saw happening in his plant and in Detroit generally, Jimmy argued that automation was further weakening workers’ power. Moreover, he feared that it would deepen their participation in and ideological commitment to the consumption-driven progress that he lamented in his early Correspondence articles on the impact of automation.

Jimmy and C. L. R. were increasingly in disagreement regarding the role of the American working class. For C. L. R., automation would propel the working class to assume its historic role: by taking control of production and then creating structures of self-government in the plant, workers would lead the way in transforming society and thus fulfill the role assigned to them in Marxist theory as the agents of revolutionary change. By contrast, Jimmy argued that automation, as a new stage of production, forced a rethinking of Marx’s scenario of revolution. By the early 1960s, Jimmy believed that black Americans, not the industrial working class, constituted the social force best suited to lead a revolution in the United States. In 1961–62, this theoretical difference would contribute to larger political differences and an organizational crisis culminating in the collapse of Correspondence.

The roots of these contending theoretical perspectives and their attendant political trajectories were evident in 1958, the year that Facing Reality appeared. The book reinforced the worker-centrism that had been at the heart of the organization since the founding of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. This emphasis on worker-centered self-organization served as the original guiding principle of Correspondence, and it now animated Facing Reality’s celebration of workers’ councils. However, as Grace and Jimmy busied themselves within an ever-wider network of black radicals, Correspondence began to shift away from its previous identity as a workers’ paper. Under Grace’s editorial direction, material on the civil rights movement and black protest politics supplemented and eventually supplanted the paper’s coverage of workers’ and workplace struggles. For example, the July 1958 issue of Correspondence, the issue immediately following the one with the Facing Reality book supplement, ran a front-page story on the continuing efforts to secure compliance in the Little Rock school desegregation case. Subsequent issues carried a political cartoon comparing the Little Rock case to the U.S. involvement in Lebanon, more coverage of Little Rock as well as other actions to force school desegregation across the South, and articles on a large youth march for integration in Washington, D.C. These pieces shared a common theme of emphasizing grassroots initiatives in the civil rights movement and reflected the paper’s editorial tenor of highlighting the potential of grassroots political mobilization to both bypass established black leadership and confront the fulcrums of power in official society.

The November 1958 issue of Correspondence carried an article by attorney Conrad Lynn titled “Accommodating Negro Leadership” that epitomizes this editorial focus. It also points to Jimmy and Grace’s presence within a national network of black radical activists and thinkers in the late 1950s. Lynn was a civil rights attorney with a long record of activism and leftist political activity. As a student at Syracuse University in the late 1920s he joined the Young Communist League. By 1934 he was a lawyer and Communist Party activist in New York City, where he worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), participated in various popular front activities, and interacted with various black intellectuals in Harlem and tendencies of the Left. Expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 after sharply dissenting from the party’s position on a Trinidadian oil workers’ strike during which British forces killed several strikers, Lynn continued his law practice and participation in left-wing activities, including serving as legal counsel for the Socialist Workers Party in 1939. Through this he met C. L. R. and became close friends with him in the early 1940s. During World War II he waged an extraordinary fight against discrimination in the armed services, including mounting a legal challenge (with famed lawyer Arthur Garfield Hayes) of his brother’s arrest for refusing induction into the segregated army and then submitting to the draft himself and challenging his discriminatory treatment. After the war, he went on to participate in the Journey of Reconciliation, the 1947 direct action protest sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality that served as the model for the Freedom Rides in 1961. During the 1950s Lynn mounted several impactful cases against civil rights violations and McCarthy-style repression, including the defense of Carl and Anne Braden, who were arrested in 1954 for selling their home to a black couple in an all-white neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky.116

Lynn’s article in Correspondence presented his considered perspective on the current state of the African American struggle. “In contemporary America,” he wrote, “the Negro has a unique opportunity [to] strike out boldly for first class citizenship.” The major impediment, however, was “timid, inept leadership.” The article called upon historical and contemporary examples of black leaders to demarcate two persistent currents of black thought and to illustrate the conflict and tension between them. “After the Civil War we witnessed the rise to esteem of the Negro ‘Uncle Tom,’ Booker T. Washington being the prime example.” In the contemporary moment, with the potential upsurge of the masses, the problem lay with the likes of Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Lester Granger of the National Urban League, and A. Philip Randolph—“the present moderates who make up the hierarchy of Negro leadership.” Citing machinations involving recent protest efforts, Lynn derided these leaders for their cozy relationship to the White House or other levers of power and their demonstrated willingness to “pour oil on the waves of Negro discontent.” Lynn approvingly referenced a “second echelon” of black leaders, including stalwarts Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, who were “uncorrupted in the main.” But he lamented that they “have been slow to give voice to their dissatisfaction,” thus clearing the way for the “supine leadership” of the current civil rights orthodoxy. Ultimately, Lynn called for a militant, principled, and more effective leadership, one that would be fully committed and responsive to the black masses. “Until the current leadership is exposed,” he concluded, “the Negro will continue to be betrayed.”117

Lynn would receive a phone call in early November that seemed to be a direct response to his plea for new leadership.118 The caller was Robert Williams of Monroe, North Carolina, who in the coming months would emerge as perhaps the most fitting candidate for precisely the type of leader called for in Lynn’s article. The purpose of his call was to enlist Lynn and his legal skills in what became known as the Kissing Case.