Cynthia Hamilton

Chair Director: African and African American Studies

University of Rhode Island
E-Mail: cha6734u@uri.edu

Hamilton / A WAY OF SEEING 431

This is the starting point in the works of C.L.R. James. There is no attempt to romanticize, but rather he points to ordinary people as the force in history, the tiny levers of change that normally go unnoticed. He thereby gives us new planes of analyses. We are not to bear witness to a great chain of triumphs, but by focusing on mass action generated at the bottom of the society, we see history in a new light.

W.E.B. DuBois pioneered the application of the recognition of the role of the masses in history, which began with the realization of the shortcomings of early sociological and historical analyses of Blacks in America. He expressed his concern in a chapter in The Souls ofBlack Folk (1905/1965). He wrote:

We seldom study the condition of the Negro today honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. And yet how little we really know of these millions and of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real short- comings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only leam by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale argu- ments covering millions separated in time and space and differing widely in training and culture. (Dubois, 1905/1965, p. 302)

DuBois developed for us this alternative approach that placed the action of ordinary people at the center stage of history. James concurred and wrote in recognition: "All thinking about Black struggles today and some years past originates from him [DuBois]" (1965, p. i). In particular, James was referring to Black Reconstruc- tion in America, 1860-1888, which DuBois wrote in 1935. It was here that DuBois employed the recognition of the role of the masses as creators of history; in particular, he set out to document the role of slaves as central to the outcome of the Civil War. His chapter, "The General Strike," has never been surpassed in this regard.

This is also the starting point for C.L.R. James. In his short stories and his novel, as well as in his historical work, the "yard" (the residential environment of the working poor) is the locus of activity of ordinary men and women who rise to extraordinary triumphs as well as defeat: Toussaint, Boulunan, and Matthew