Aimé Césaire

Robin D. G. Kelley

Joan Pinkham

"This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power and antiwar movements."--

Discourse on Colonialism

Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history. The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party's call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence. Kelley's analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party's challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing, interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party's demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.

Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

Hammer and Hoe

". . . [a] bold and provocative celebration of the black radical imagination in the 20th century." —The New York Times Book Review Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From "the preeminent historian of black popular culture" (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society. "Based on Kelley's belief that to make a better world we must first imagine it, this brilliantly conceived and written book recounts the accomplishments of black activists and thinkers over the past century who have been committed to remaking the world." —Library Journal Robin D. G.Kelley is professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, and Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! (Beacon / 0941-5 / $14.00 pb). He lives in New York City.

The Black Radical Imagination

Freedom Dreams

When something goes from bad to worse, we say it "fell out of the frying pan and into the fire." This timeless phrases succinctly captures what has happened to the majority of African Americans since the 1970s. The civil rights movement of the 1960s brought about remarkable gains for most black people, and by 1970 African Americans were beginning to be key figures in national politics and in corporate board rooms. The black middle class was decidedly growing, and thus a handful of African Americans escaped the frying pan altogether. But after 1970, heavy industry began to disappear as American companies looked to foreign lands for cheaper manufacturing. Millions of jobs were lost. The number of black poor began to grow dramatically, city services declined, federal spending on cities dried up, affirmative action programs were dismantled, blatant acts of racism began to rise again, and the United States entered a deep economic recession. But this decline is only part of the story. Since 1970, the black community has resisted oppression, struggled for power, dealt with internal tensions and conflicts, and profoundly shaped American culture. This book explores a range of issues that the African American community faces in the late 20th century: the rebirth of black nationalism, the emergence of a new black conservative movement, the challenge of black feminism, the impact of Caribbean immigration, the rise of rap music and hip-hop culture. It looks at the impact on African American life of such diverse personalities as Roy Innis, Toni Morrison, Anita Hill, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Farrakhan, Angela Davis, Spike Lee, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, and Jesse Jackson, among others. Into the Fire will challenge and be challenged by readers of all ages, and calls on our young people to exercise their power to determine the outcome of chapters yet to be written in the history of African Americans.

African Americans Since 1970

Into the Fire

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Colin Kaepernick

In Defense of Black Studies

Our History Has Always Been Contraband

Peter Cole

The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly

Ben Fletcher

Historia oculta de la rebelión negra

Earl Lewis

Offers a reconstructed history of the United States as seen through the experiences and struggles of African Americans during the Colonial period, slavery, the Civil War, reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era.

A History of African Americans

To Make Our World Anew

"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 Kaepernick Since 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.

Ashley Kahn

Ron Carter

Greg Tate

Clark Terry

Lenny White

Here is the illustrated history of Miles Davis, the worldâ€™s most popular jazz trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and musical visionary. Davis is one of the most innovative, influential, and respected figures in the history of music. Heâ€™s been at the forefront of bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion, and remains the favorite and best-selling jazz artist ever, beloved worldwide. Heâ€™s also a fascinating characterâ€”moody, dangerous, brilliant. His story is phenomenal, including tempestous relationships with movie stars, heroin addictions, police busts, and more; connections with other jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, John McLaughlin, and many others; and later fusion ventures that outraged the worlds of jazz and rock. Written by an all-star team, including Sonny Rollins, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Clark Terry, Lenny White, Greg Tate, Ashley Kahn, Robin D. G. Kelley, Francis Davis, George Wein, Vincent BessiÃ¨res, Gerald Early, Nate Chinen, Nalini Jones, Dave Liebman, Garth Cartwright, and more.

The Complete Illustrated History

Miles Davis

Written by the most prominent of the new generation of historians, this superb volume offers the most up-to-date and authoritative account available of African-American history, ranging from the first Africans brought as slaves into the Americas, to todays black filmmakers and politicians. 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 experienced it. We begin in Africa, with the growth of the slave trade, and follow the forced migration of what is estimated to be between ten and twenty million people, witnessing the terrible human cost of slavery in the colonies of England and Spain. We read of the Haitian Revolution, which ended victoriously in 1804 with the birth of the first independent black nation in the New World, and of slave rebellions and resistance in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. There are vivid accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the backlash of notorious Jim Crow laws and mob lynchings, and the founding of key black educational institutions. The contributors also trace the migration of blacks to the major cities, the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the hardships of the Great Depression and the service of African Americans in World War II, the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1950s and 60s, and the emergence of todays black middle class. From Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Louis Farrakhan, To Make Our World Anew is an unforgettable portrait of a people.

To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans

From Robin D. G. Kelley, a "leading black historian of the age," Black Bodies Swinging is a fierce, distilled history of the pillage and defiance of Black America...

A Historical Autopsy

Black Bodies Swinging

Sidney J. Lemelle

This collection of original essays brilliantly interrogates the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its “New World” descendants. Combining literary analysis, history, biography, cultural studies, critical theory and politics, Imagining Home offers a fresh and creative approach to the history of Pan-Africanism and diasporic movements. A critical part of the book's overall project is an examination of the legal, educational and political institutions and structures of domination over Africa and the African diaspora. Class and gender are placed at center stage alongside race in the exploration of how the discourses and practices of Pan-Africanism have been shaped. Other issues raised include the myriad ways in which grassroots religious and cultural movements informed Pan-Africanist political organizations; the role of African, African-American and Caribbean intellectuals in the formation of Pan-African thought—including W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James and Adelaide Casely Hayford; the historical, ideological and institutional connections between African-Americans and South Africans; and the problems and prospects of Pan-Africanism as an emancipatory strategy for black people throughout the Atlantic.

Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora

Imagining Home

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.

Robin D. G. Kelley

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