Richard B. Moore: black activist, Marxist, secular humanist

Written 17 January 2009

McClendon, John H. "Richard B. Moore, radical politics, and the Afro-American history movement: the formation of a revolutionary tradition in African American intellectual culture," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 2006.

I discovered this publication just a week ago. It contains a plethora of first-class historical articles, many of them linked to my home area of Western New York. The way to access these articles is via "Access My Library". You can either log on to the system via your public library card if your library is a subscriber, or get a 7-day pass to access all the articles you want, such as this one.

McClendon is the author of numerous serious articles on black philosophy and intellectual history and of C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism?, the only book on James's philosophy worth reading other than Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man: Race, Class and the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer.

This is an extremely rich article. It recreates the central grassroots role of the black left in Harlem, depicts the linkages between Moore and Hubert Harrison and a black atheist and secular humanist intellectual tradition that nobody knows about, highlights Cornel West's distortion of radical history, and more.