Found 3 collections related to United States -- Politics and government

Herbert L. Bruce was the district leader of the 12th and 21st Assembly Districts, and the first black Tammany Hall leader in New York City, 1935-1945. This collection consists of personal papers, letters, texts of speeches, news clippings, and subjects files. less

C. L. R. James was a West Indian scholar, political activist, and writer. Born in Trinidad in 1901, James began his career as a writer and sports journalist. He migrated to Great Britain in 1932, where he published his first major work, The Black Jacobins, in 1938. He became acquainted with Marxism and Trotskyism in 1934, meeting with Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1938. In New York during the 1940s, he led a small faction of left-wing Communists opposed to the policies of the Communist Party-USA, as well as to some of the main tenets of Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism. Following his expulsion from the United States in 1953, during the Cold War, James relocated to London, residing at times in Trinidad, where he launched an opposition party against the government of Eric Williams, and in the United States, where he lectured periodically. James died in 1989. The C. L. R. James letters consist mainly of letters written by James to his former wife and political associate, Constance Webb. James's letters discuss a wide variety of subjects including love, politics (especially Marxism), art, history, sports, literature, and popular culture. Also included are miscellaneous letters and organizational materials documenting James's political activities in the United States, 1938-1953; and letters written to Webb, regarding her writings on Richard Wright, from Arna Bontemps, Lawrence Reddick, and Ellen Wright. Numerous letters also discuss the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a faction led by C. L. R. James, under the pseudonym of J. R. Johnson, and Raya Dunayevskaya (also known as Freddie Forest) within the Socialist Workers Party, which later evolved into the group Facing Reality. The letters are voluminous, averaging 20 pages on loose leaf paper; handwritten; undated; and either signed with a majuscule N (first letter of his nickname and political pseudonym Nello) or unsigned. They were transcribed and annotated by Webb. less

Papers include letters written to Bruce from black politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and activists including John Wesley Cromwell, Alexander Crummell, Richard T. Greener, T. Thomas Fortune, and Arthur A. Schomburg, as well as manuscript and printed copies of Bruce's articles, editorials, short stories, poems, addresses, and other writings concerning national and local politics, race relations, historical black figures, Haiti, Prince Hall Masons, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, among other topics. less