Peter Fryer | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 18 February 1927 Hull, England |
| Died | 31 October 2006 (aged 79) |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation(s) | Writer and journalist |
| Notable work | Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) |
Peter Fryer (18 February 1927 – 31 October 2006) was an English Marxist writer and journalist. Among his most influential works is the 1984 book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain .
Peter Fryer was born near Hull on 18 February 1927. [1] He was the son of a master mariner. He was awarded a scholarship to attend Hymers College in 1938. After joining the Young Communist League in 1942, he left school in 1943 to become a reporter on the Yorkshire Post . [1]
In 1945, Fryer became a member of the Communist Party. In 1947 he was dismissed from his job after refusing to leave the party. [2]
In 1948, Fryer joined the staff of the Daily Worker , becoming its parliamentary correspondent and covering foreign affairs.
In 1949, he reported on the show trial of the Hungarian communist László Rajk, who had falsely confessed to being an agent of Tito and others. After Rajk's execution and eventual "rehabilitation" early in 1956, Fryer felt guilty about having reportd the coerced confession, and gave a letter of resignation to his editor, Johnny Campbell. Campbell persuaded him to continue working for a year's notice period. [1]
In October 1956, Fryer was sent to Hungary to cover the uprising. His dispatches, including a description of the suppression of the uprising by Soviet troops, were either heavily censored or suppressed. [3] He wrote a book about the uprising, Hungarian Tragedy (1956). [4] Fryer was expelled from the Communist Party for criticising Hungarian Tragedy's suppression in the "capitalist" press. Many members left the party during the crisis that followed. [1]
Fryer then became the editor of The Newsletter, [5] the journal of The Club, a Trotskyist organisation led by Gerry Healy, and with Healy was a founder member of the Socialist Labour League. He soon parted company with Healy, however, and worked away from organised politics until 1985, when he wrote a weekly column for the Workers Press. [1]
In 1948, Fryer covered the arrival at Tilbury Docks in Britain of HMT Empire Windrush bringing settlers from the Caribbean. [6] He maintained a long standing interest in black history and music. Peter Fraser wrote of Fryer: "In 1981, he attended a conference on the history of blacks in Britain to deliver a paper on black musicians. He went away convinced that the larger story needed to be told." [7]
His interests eventually led to him writing the substantial and influential book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). [8] [9] This book discussed the long history of black people in Britain as well as the racist structures that were created by white British capitalists for their own economic benefit. [1] It had a substantial section of notes and appendices. [8]
Subsequent publications on the same theme by Fryer include: Black people in the British Empire (1988), Aspects of British Black History (1993), The Politics of Windrush (1999), and Rhythms and Resistance (2000).
Fryer received some criticism for being a white man writing a substantial work on black history. [8] [10] Some critics such as Ziggi Alexander came to feel mutual respect and value Fryer's contributions. [1]
At the time of his death, Fryer was working on a study of life in Mississippi in the 19th and 20th centuries, under the working title Behind the Blues. He intended this book to rework black American history and hoped that it would be as influential as Staying Power had been. He had also just found out that he was to be honoured by the Hungarian government, in recognition of his "continuous support of the Hungarian revolution and freedom fight". [2]
Fryer was posthumously awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary at a reception at the Hungarian Embassy in London. [2]
On 26 June 2023, a blue plaque (organised by the Nubian Jak Community Trust) was unveiled in Fryer's honour outside a former residence of his in Highgate, London. [11]
Highgate Cemetery is a place of burial in north London, England, designed by architect Stephen Geary. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves across the West and East sides. Highgate Cemetery is notable both for some of the people buried there as well as for its de facto status as a nature reserve. The Cemetery is designated Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Soviet Union (USSR). The uprising lasted 12 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on 4 November 1956. Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.
János József Kádár, born János József Czermanik, was a Hungarian Communist leader and the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, a position he held for 32 years. Declining health led to his retirement in 1988, and he died in 1989 after being hospitalized for pneumonia.
László Rajk was a Hungarian Communist politician, who served as Minister of Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was an important organizer of the Hungarian Communists' power, but he eventually fell victim to Mátyás Rákosi's show trials.
The Hungarian People's Republic was a one-party socialist state from 20 August 1949 to 23 October 1989. It was governed by the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, which was under the influence of the Soviet Union. Pursuant to the 1944 Moscow Conference, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had agreed that after the war Hungary was to be included in the Soviet sphere of influence. The HPR remained in existence until 1989, when opposition forces brought the end of communism in Hungary.
Goulash Communism, also known as refrigerator communism, Kádárism or the Hungarian Thaw, is the variety of state socialism in the Hungarian People's Republic following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. During János Kádár's period of leadership, the Hungarian People's Republic implemented policies with the goal to create a high standard of living for the people of Hungary coupled with economic reforms. These reforms fostered a sense of well-being and relative cultural freedom in Hungary, giving it the reputation of being "the happiest barracks" of the Eastern Bloc during the 1960s to the 1970s. With elements of regulated market economics as well as an improved human rights record, it represented a quiet reform and deviation from the Stalinist principles applied to Hungary in the previous decade.
Cliff Slaughter was a British socialist activist, sociologist and author. His best-known works are Coal is Our Life and Marxism, Ideology and Literature. In 2006, Slaughter published the book Not Without a Storm: Towards a Communist Manifesto for the Age of Globalisation, followed by the book Bonfire of the Certainties: The Second Human Revolution in 2013.
István Mészáros was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by Monthly Review, Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism. His magnum opus, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995), was concerned not only with this theme but provided a conceptual distinction between capitalism and capital, and an analysis of the current capitalist society and its "structural crisis". He was interested in the critique of the "bourgeois ideology", including the idea of "there is no alternative", and he also elaborated analysis on the failures of "real socialism".
John Gollan was a British political leader who was general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from 1956 to 1975.
André Stil was a French novelist, short story writer, occasional poet, and political activist. A lifelong militant, he became a member of the French Communist Party in 1940, and remained loyal to the party.
Ilona Duczynska was a Polish-Hungarian-Canadian revolutionary, journalist, translator, engineer, and historian. Her husband was Karl Polanyi and her daughter is Kari Polanyi Levitt.
Tom Kemp (1921–1993) was a prominent Marxist economic historian and political theorist. He was influential in socialist and Trotskyist parties in the UK, and published several influential books on Marxist theory and economic development, in particular Theories of Imperialism which made an important contribution to assimilating globalisation into Marxist theory.
Thomas Gerard Healy was an Irish-born British political activist, a co-founder of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the leader of the Socialist Labour League and later the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" and the "short 20th century", and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.
The Communist Party Historians' Group (CPHG) was a subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) that formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians. The Historians' Group developed social history, which was popularised in the 1960s with "history from below" approach described by E. P. Thompson. During the heyday of the Historians' Group, from 1946 until 1956, notable members included Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel, as well as non-academics like A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce. The Historians' Group arose at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s under the encouragement of the economist Maurice Dobb.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB founded the Daily Worker. In 1936, members of the party were present at the Battle of Cable Street, helping organise resistance against the British Union of Fascists. In the Spanish Civil War, the CPGB worked with the USSR to create the British Battalion of the International Brigades, which party activist Bill Alexander commanded.
The Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) is a Trotskyist group in Britain once led by Gerry Healy. In the mid-1980s, it split into several smaller groups, one of which retains possession of the name.
Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.
Shadow of Heroes, a play in five acts from the Hungarian Passion is a 1958 documentary drama by Robert Ardrey. It concerns the lead-up to the Hungarian Uprising and its aftermath. Its premiere resulted in the release from Soviet custody of two political prisoners, Julia Rajk and her son.
World Revolution, 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International was written by Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James and published in 1937 by Secker and Warburg. It was a pioneering Marxist analysis from a Trotskyist perspective of the history of revolutions during the interwar period and of the fundamental conflict between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin after the Russian Revolution.
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