Nearly every leading Black radical thinker came from the Black middle strata

Evidence

From Trinidad came George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and Oliver C. Cox. Padmore (born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse) and James were the sons of school headmasters. Eric Williams, one of their most illustrious if prodigal students, was a product of the same Black petit bourgeoisie—at a somewhat lesser rank. Oliver Cromwell Cox, as his name suggests, was the son of middle strata parents who it appears had taken the authority of their colonial “betters” at its word. In North America, W. E. B. Du Bois was reared by the “black Burghardts” amidst the more affluent white children of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. As he recalled his childhood in one of his autobiographies, Darkwater, it was some time before he discovered that he was “colored,” and by then he had already absorbed the rather disdainful attitudes of his peers toward the few southern European immigrant families that made their appearance in Great Barrington. Only Richard Wright, among the radical Black thinkers upon whom we shall lay emphasis, came from the Black substratum. But even here, the son of a sometime itinerant Mississippi farmer and general laborer was also, on his mother’s side, the heir of a family with middle strata pretensions. Again, with the exception of Wright, they had all begun their adult lives destined for professional careers. Their childhoods had born the marks peculiar to the Black middle strata—the presumption that being Black was incidental to their expected social stations. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 864

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s need for origin data on the tradition; whose class background shaped the radical intellectual vanguard.