ABSTRACT
Different scholars have mapped divergent intellectual genealogies for the Black Power movement. Speaking about Black Power as represented by Stokely Carmichael to an audience of London Marxists in 1967, the great Trinidadian revolutionary and political theorist C. L. R. James argued that the banner, Black Power, would become one of the greatest of that time. Although, he qualified, only time itself could tell. Black Power had emerged from a deep-rooted and wellconceived intellectual and political legacy-beginning with the egalitarian claims of the bourgeois revolution as formulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on the one hand and the critique of its contradictions by such diverse black intellectuals as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, George Padmore, and Frantz Fanon on the other. This critical tradition would lead, he claimed, to the kind of activism that would eventually foster an international socialist movement. James sought to "get rid, once and for all, of a vast amount of confusion arising, copiously, both from the right and also from the left."1
