Richard Fraser

IN HIS 1932 NOVEL BANJO, the radical black intellectual Claude McKay portrays the vibrancy of black cosmopolitanism in the French port city of Marseilles in the decade following the end of World War I. McKay’s characters – boys of the docks, mendicants, and drifters – grapple with the racism of the wider society, while in their relations to one another live beyond race’s narrowness. One in particular, the novel’s protagonist, an itinerant intellectual named Ray, is driven by French police brutality to reflect on the reality of his race. [Read More]

1960s paths not taken (1): Civil Rights - Black Power Platypus Marxist readings for Sunday January 11, 2009 Richard Fraser, [Two Lectures on the Black Question in America and Revolutionary Integrationism](http://www.bolshevik.org/history/Fraser/Fraser01.html)(1953) James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For Black Trotskyism” (1963) Spartacist League, “Black and Red “ Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (1966) Bayard Rustin, “The Failure of Black Separatism” (1970)** At two locations in Chicago: University of Chicago Reynolds Club 5706 S. [Read More]