Nineteenth-century Trinidad’s leading Black intellectual came from slave-adjacent rural roots

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. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1165

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes J.J. Thomas as the template figure whose class-rooted ‘outside-middle-class’ stance James’s radical tradition inherits.