Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989),[1] who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer.

[3] Characterised by one literary critic as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician",[4] James was known for his autodidactism, for his occasional playwriting and fiction, and as an avid sportsman.

[9] In 1910, James won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College (QRC), the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Port of Spain, where he became a club cricketer and distinguished himself as an athlete (he held the Trinidad high-jump record at 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) from 1918 to 1922), as well as beginning to write fiction.

[10] After graduating in 1918 from QRC, he worked there as a teacher of English and History in the 1920s;[10] among those he taught was the young Eric Williams, who became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

[11] His short story "La Divina Pastora" was published in October 1927 in the Saturday Review of Literature,[12][13] and was widely reprinted.

[15] James had brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work, partly based on his interviews with the Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, which was published with financial assistance from Constantine in 1932.

An abridged version of his Life of Captain Cipriani was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933 as the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government.

[23] In 1967, James went on to write a second play about the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, which became the first production from Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, coinciding with the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier.

[26] In 1937, he wrote the foreword to Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of revolution and the civil war, by Juan Ramón Breá and Mary Stanley Low.

In a new foreword to the 1980 Allison & Busby edition of The Black Jacobins, James recalled that "Nemours used coffee cups and books in Paris cafés to bring to life the military skills of revolutionary Haitians.

[30] Following several meetings in New York, which garnered "enthusiastic praise for his oratorical ability and capacity for analysis of world events," James kicked off his national speaking tour on 6 January 1939 in Philadelphia.

[34] Constance Webb, who later became James' second wife, attended one of his 1939 lectures in Los Angeles and reflected on it in her memoir, writing: "I had already heard speeches by two great orators, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

"[35] James's relationship with Louise Cripps Samoiloff had broken up after her second abortion, so that intimate tie no longer bound him to England.

As "J. R. Johnson", James wrote the column "The Negro Question" for Socialist Appeal (later renamed The Militant), and was also a columnist for Labor Action.

Unlike Cliff, the Johnson–Forest Tendency was focusing increasingly on the liberation movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James's thought in his 1939 discussions with Trotsky.

After a few short months as an independent group, during which they published a great deal of material, in 1947, the Johnson–Forest Tendency joined the SWP, which it regarded as more proletarian than the WP.

In an impassioned letter to his old friend George Padmore, James said that in Mariners he was using Moby-Dick as a parable for the anti-communism sweeping the United States, a consequence, he thought, of Americans' uncritical faith in capitalism.

After James started reporting on cricket for the Manchester Guardian, Padmore wrote to American novelist Richard Wright: "That will take him out of his ivory tower and making his paper revolution...."[44] Grace Lee Boggs, a colleague from the Detroit group, came to London in 1954 to work with James, but she too, saw him "at loose ends, trying to find his way after fifteen years out of the country.

He resigned as editor of The Nation in 1960,[48] and returned to Great Britain, where he joined Calvin C. Hernton, Obi Egbuna and others on the faculty of the Antiuniversity of London,[50][51] which had been set up by a group of left-wing thinkers led by American academic Joseph Berke.

[1] Ultimately returning in 1981 to Britain,[1] where Allison & Busby had in the mid-1970s begun a programme of reissuing his work, starting with a volume of selected writings,[53] James spent his last years in Brixton, London.

He met his second wife, Constance Webb (1918–2005), an American model, actress and author, after he moved to the US in 1938; she wrote of having first heard him speak in the spring of 1939 at a meeting in California.

James to Constance Webb, 1939–1948, edited and introduced by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

[62] In 1956, James married Selma Weinstein (née Deitch), who had been a young member of the Johnson–Forest Tendency;[63] they remained close political colleagues for more than 25 years, but divorced in 1980.

[citation needed] While editor of The Nation, he led the successful campaign in 1960 to have Frank Worrell appointed the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team.