John La Rose (1927–2006)

John La Rose was a political and cultural activist, poet, writer, publisher and Chairman of the George Padmore Institute and Archive. His life and work had impacts on several continents, but it is arguably in Britain that he had his greatest influence. La Rose was born in 1927 into a middle-class family in Arima, one of colonial Trinidad's small but long-established towns. He was educated, like most from his background, at Roman Catholic schools. On completion of his secondary education at Trinidad's St Mary's College, one of a handful of prestigious secondary schools modelled on the English grammar school, La Rose became a teacher there, before moving on to work for Colonial Life Insurance Company, the first black-owned insurance company in Trinidad.

La Rose early developed an interest in culture, both the 'high' arts of classical music, painting and poetry, and the 'popular' cultural forms of Trinidad: the carnival and calypso. Notwithstanding its location in a tiny colonial territory, Port of Spain in the 1940s was home to several literary, musical and other artistic societies, and La Rose was active in these. Despite his secure upbringing he was early aware of the racialized class distinctions in colonial Trinidad, but his transformation into an insurgent intellectual and activist would be spurred by study of Marxist and anticolonial literature, much of which was banned in Trinidad at that time. Trinidad saw ferment against the colonial order in the 1930s and again in the 1940s, as the colony was affected by international capitalist restructuring. This period saw the development of an organized and articulate movement for independence from Britain, one that cut across class and ethnic lines. It was this movement that provided La Rose with a space in which he could develop radical ideas and put them into practice. In 1948 the Marxist study group of which he was a member joined with the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association to form the Workers Freedom Movement – an organization dedicated to struggle for an improved standard of living for the working class. La Rose further deepened his involvement in anticolonial politics when he became an activist in the West Indian Independence Party, formed in 1952, which agitated for a federal, self-governing Anglo-Caribbean, and for a democratic socialist society. He would pay a heavy price for his socialist politics. After a 1953 trip to Eastern Europe, as a delegate to the World Federation of Trade Unions congress, he found himself blacklisted as a dangerous subversive back home: the cold war affected even the tiny English colony of Trinidad. That 1953 trip was to prove another important turning point in La Rose's life. After travelling throughout Eastern Europe with his friend Lennox Pierre, a left-wing lawyer, he came to realize that what they saw there was not the socialism that had shaped their political vision. This realization motivated him to rethink the socialist project and to develop an 'autonomous socialism', a conception of which stayed with him throughout his life.

After 1953 La Rose found himself unemployable. He was dismissed from his management job at Colonial Life Insurance Company, on account of his involvement in radical politics. In order to earn a living he gave private English lessons to Venezuelan students in Trinidad. His political work continued, in association with his then partner, Irma. The two married after having been involved in overlapping circles of friendship and political work. He moved to Venezuela in 1958, where he had family and other connections, and there he worked as a schoolteacher while continuing his political, cultural, and trade union activities. His relationships with Venezuelan radicals would endure throughout his life.

La Rose moved to Britain in 1961, intent on studying law with a view to later being able to pursue an independent profession in Trinidad and thus not be subject to the power of conservative employers. He settled in London, maintaining close links with the Caribbean. Not long after his arrival, La Rose met Edward Brathwaite, a poet and student of West Indian history from Barbados, and Andrew Salkey, a...