Tim Hector: A Caribbean Radical’s Story

Tim Hector (1942-2002) played many roles--political philosopher, educator, literary and music critic, cricket administrator, political leader, and newspaper editor. Best known for his editorship of the newspaper Outlet and his cofounding of the Afro-Caribbean Liberation Movement, Hector struggled for the independence of his native island Antigua. As a disciple of C. L. R. James, he was one of the Pan-African movement’s most vital figures, and his regular column ＂Fan the Flame＂ in Outlet was followed avidly throughout the Caribbean. His insights into regional history, politics, cricket, and literature were eagerly awaited.

Biographer Paul Buhle traces Hector’s intellectual development and explores how the editor-activist’s political philosophy evolved from an early island nationalism and militant Marxism into an embrace of democratic self-determination and of political union in a future Caribbean nation. Hector’s Afro-Caribbean Liberation Movement labored to make Black Nationalism into a generous vision of collective pride and historical destiny, with no one excluded. His trials and travails--loss of a teaching career, arrests, destruction of his printing press, the murder of his wife, betrayal by the political leaders he supported--were frankly revealed in his columns.

Hector’s life and work offer a saga of Caribbean achievement and anxiety, at once racial, political, economic, and ecological. Through the lens of Hector, Buhle gives the reader insight into the radical movements in the British West Indies. Hector’s story unfolds in a region full of turmoil but also full of promise.

Paul Buhle, the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James, is senior lecturer in history and American civilization at Brown University. A prize-winning author-editor and frequent contributor to the Nation, the Village Voice, TIKKUN, and the San Francisco Chronicle, he has published twenty-eight previous volumes including The Life and Work of C. L. R. James, Encyclopedia of the American Left, C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, four other biographies, and five volumes on the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist.