A Black middle-class radical faction in Trinidad launched Pan-Africanism

Evidence

And though the majority of the colored and Black middle classes were pained to lever their lives, their families and their reputations away from association with the Black masses, a few Black men of letters, like Samuel Carter and Joseph Lewis (the editors of New Era), William Herbert (editor of Trinidad Press, and then Trinidad Colonist), H. A. Nurse (George Padmore’s father), and the barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, achieved, respectively, closer approximations to Thomas’s comprehension. Williams, of course, the primary initiator of the Pan-African Conference that convened in London in July 1900, came closest. He chose to realize Thomas’s ideal. He and Thomas, along with other explicitly political figures in the colored and Black middle classes (Henry Alcazar, Edgar Maresse-Smith, and C. Prudhomme David) active in the official affairs of Trinidad, tentatively began the radicalization of the island’s public discourse. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1165

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supplies the colonial-Trinidad genealogy of the Pan-African tradition that later feeds the mass movements of the book’s later chapters; usable support for any of the three published essays.
• XREF: Henry Sylvester Williams and the 1900 Pan-African Conference connect to the broader Pan-Africanist lineage Robinson charts across Black Marxism.