Colonial soldiers’ war contact created a shared consciousness of mutual oppression

Evidence

A very different experience for Blacks in the various theaters of war was their own interaction: the discovery of their mutual oppression. Claude McKay recalled his own experience in London during the war: “One club was for colored soldiers. It was situated in a basement in Drury Lane. There was a host of colored soldiers in London, from the West Indies and Africa, with a few colored Americans, East Indians, and Egyptians among them … I went often and listened to the soldiers telling tales of their war experiences in France, Egypt and Arabia. Many were interested in what American Negroes were thinking and writing.” McKay, A Long Way From Home, op. cit., p. 67. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2351

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s study of the Black radical tradition’s origins — this is a mechanism for how diaspora-wide radical consciousness formed.
• QUESTION: What specific ideological exchanges happened in such clubs — did they circulate newspapers, pamphlets, nascent organizing plans?