Jacob Thomas spoke for the masses, not the middle class he outshone

Evidence

Thomas, whose parents had been slaves only a few years before his birth, who had himself grown up and taught in the pathetically inadequate little country schools that had been distributed by the government among the rural Black masses, and whose command of the patois had resulted in his writing Creole Grammar in 1869, spoke not for the middle class. He rejected their ambition and the master from which it was copied. The middle classes, however, could not reject him. He was the most important Black intellectual in Trinidad during his lifetime. His “efforts were important to the coloured and black middle class, for they seemed to show that this group was more cultured than the dominant whites, who were dismissed as being crassly materialistic. Thomas’ literary activities indicated that non-whites were the cultural leaders.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1165

Categorization

• XREF: Thomas resembles earlier Black intellectuals who grounded radical politics in the masses rather than middle-class ambition, e.g. the trajectory Robinson traces through the whole volume.