Robin D. G. Kelley – författare

Preface by Jesse Benjamin and the Walter Rodney FoundationIntroduction by Robin D.G. KelleyAfterword by Vijay PrashadIn his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading revolutionary thinkers of the Black Sixties. He became a leading force of dissent throughout the Caribbean and a lightning rod of controversy. The 1968 Rodney Riots erupted in Jamaica when he was prevented from returning to his teaching post at the University of the West Indies. In 1980, Rodney was assassinated in Guyana, reportedly at the behest of the government. In the mid-'70s, Rodney taught a course on the Russian Revolution at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. A Pan-Africanist and Marxist, Rodney sought to make sense of the reverberations of the October Revolution in a decolonising world marked by Third World revolutionary movements. He intended to publish a book based on his research and teaching. Now historians Jesse Benjamin, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Vijay Prashad have edited Rodney's polished chapters and unfinished lecture notes, presenting the book that Rodney had hoped to publish in his lifetime.1917 is a signal event in radical publishing, and will inaugurate Verso's standard edition of Walter Rodney's works.

this book is the only comprehensive illustrated history of African Americans. Written by the most prominent of the new generation of historians, the book describes how African Americans have shaped and changed the history of this country. It traces the history of Africans in the Americas from Reconstruction to the present. The book looks at American history from the unique perspective of African Americans, paying special attention to the forging of African-American communities, the changing status of African Americans over time, and the transformation that has been wrought social protest. Primary sources are used extensively, and the authors will contribute a ne foreword.

The two volumes of Kelley and Lewis's To Make Our World Anew integrate the work of eleven leading historians into the most up-to-date and comprehensive account available of African American history, from the first Africans brought as slaves into the Americas, right up to today's black filmmakers and politicians. This second volume covers the crucial post-Reconstruction years and traces the migration of blacks to the major cities. It describes the remarkablebirth of the Harlem Renaissance, the hardships of the Great Depression, and the service of African Americans in World War II. Readers witness the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and '60s and finally,the emergence of today's black middle class. Here is a panoramic view of African-American life, rich in gripping first-person accounts and short character sketches that invite readers to relive history as African Americans have experienced it.

The police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 triggered a wave of protests like no other in history. Millions took to the streets in over forty US cities and across the globe in a multiracial, militant, and mobile uprising, calling not only for justice for all Black victims but for vast and visionary changes to police and social structures. How did we get here? Conducting a historical autopsy, Robin Kelley approaches the lives and deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and so many others as a portal to the racist histories that strangled them and their communities. From the slave patrols and lynch law of the Deep South to segregated housing, the war on drugs, slum clearance, predatory lending, and extraction of wealth, Kelley draws a direct line from the "blood at the root"-the racial terror at the heart of the American social and economic order-to the latest casualties of that terror.This is also the story of Black resistance, of decades of organizing, political education, and movement building. The protesters who came out swinging, calling to defund the police, are part of a long line of combatants fighting to emancipate, democratize, and lay to rest the America as we know it so that a new world may be born.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and ’60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents.In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the ""long Civil Rights movement,"" Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious, semi-literate black laborers, sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

"The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." —Colin KaepernickSince its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum.Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others.Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back.To read Our History Has Always Been Contraband is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all—through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.

"The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." —Colin KaepernickSince its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum.Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others.Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back.To read Our History Has Always Been Contraband is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all—through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond.