The 1960s Black intelligentsia rediscovered James as a link to their radical past

Evidence

It was the Black diaspora, particularly the militant Black petit bourgeoisie that had grown impatient with American apartheid, which would rediscover Jacobins. First the book and then the author would help them to confirm their ideological struggle with bourgeois culture. The mass Black movement provided the compulsion. James astounded this new Black intelligentsia with his brilliant thought, his provocative analyses, and his grasp of Black history. He became once again “Nello” to intimates two generations younger than his contemporaries, he became the teacher they could honor, a living, absorbing link between themselves and a past of which most had only a vague notion (or, just as frequently, a profound expectation). But he also sometimes saddened them, pitching divisive battles in fields peopled only with Marxian phantoms. When they had recovered him, he had again become accustomed to presenting himself as a “Black European.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1323