The central ideas of this opus however, appeared in much earlier works such as his seminal Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, published as a pamphlet in 1975, and in expanded form the following year.
"[2] Allen did research for the next quarter century to expand and document his ideas, particularly on the alleged relation of white supremacy to the working class.
The family moved when he was a child to Paintsville, Kentucky, and then to Huntington, West Virginia, where he lived and, in his words, "was proletarianized" during the Great Depression.
When Allen started working soon after high school (deciding that college did not do enough for independent thought), he quickly joined labor unions.
At age 17, he joined the American Federation of Musicians Local 362 and the Communist Party,[3][4] and soon was elected as a delegate to the Huntington Central Labor Union, AFL.
Allen also taught math at the Crown Heights Yeshiva in Brooklyn, where he lived, and the Grace Church School in New York.
[2] Allen published outside the academic press and his work was highly influential, at a time of the civil rights movement, when issues of race, ethnicity and culture were being studied and overturned.