[Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African
American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the
American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to
connect struggles against racism and class oppression.]
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THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION CAN GUIDE OUR STRUGGLES AGAINST
OPPRESSION  
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Robin D. G. Kelley, Daniel Denvir
July 6, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African
American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the
American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to
connect struggles against racism and class oppression. _

Black Panther Party members demonstrating outside the New York County
Criminal Court, April 11, 1969., David Fenton / Getty Images

 

Historian Robin D. G. Kelley recently published a new edition
[[link removed]] of
his book _Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination_. The book
explores a vast terrain of African American radicalism, from the
followers of Marcus Garvey to the Communists who challenged racial
oppression and the neglected stories of the civil rights movement.

Daniel Denvir interviewed Kelley for the Jacobin podcast the _Dig_
[[link removed]] in January of this year. You
can listen to the conversation here
[[link removed]].
The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

DANIEL DENVIR

What was the context in which you first published the book in 2002,
and how did things differ by the time of its republication twenty
years later?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

It was before 9/11 when the idea for _Freedom Dreams_ came into
fruition. A lot of it centered around a couple of things. When there
was police violence, the Amadou Diallo case was important. He had been
killed by police in New York. A lot of us were protesting the fact
that the cops had been exonerated.

In fact, the killing of Amadou Diallo came on the tails of a whole
range of police killings. In other words, there’s not a season where
there’s no police killings or beatings. The case of Abner Louima,
for example, was a big thing in New York. So that’s one of the
contexts.

The other context that was really important for the ’90s is that a
lot of the radical movements that emerged in that decade were arrayed
against the Clinton administration. One of the things that I’m
always reminded of, whether we’re talking about [Barack] Obama or
[Bill] Clinton or the [Lyndon] Johnson administration, is that liberal
administrations are often the worst in terms of creating the
conditions for what becomes a neoliberal agenda.

Liberal administrations are often the worst in terms of creating the
conditions for what becomes a neoliberal agenda.

Think about what it meant for Clinton to ultimately back welfare
reform — stripping poor people of welfare, moving toward workfare,
as well as some of the housing policies and the expansion of mass
incarceration under Clinton. The fact that he ended up signing NAFTA,
even if he doesn’t take responsibility for it, became part of his
whole schtick.

We were coming out of a situation where there was a lot of pessimism,
especially among my students, because they were fighting against a
liberal government, and they didn’t see how they could win, and they
didn’t see social movements in the way that they imagined them to
be. They had a romantic sense of the days of the Black Panther Party,
the Black Liberation Army, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),
and people in the streets fighting the police.

I was working with these students, trying to reveal to them that there
is a long history of struggles that don’t always look like they
succeed because we’re trapped in this idea of what success looks
like. I wrote the book really for undergraduates, who were looking for
models of revolutionary activity. I was saying they don’t always
look like what you think they look like, and more importantly, they
don’t always win, if we think of that very narrow definition of what
winning is — that is, achieving a certain objective.

But the most important thing is that whatever their agenda is, their
vision is not something that’s made ahead of time. It is made in
struggle and movement. If anything, the basic lesson of _Freedom
Dreams_ is not that people need to go to sleep, dream, and wake up in
the morning with a new idea, but that what we think of as future
thinking — dreams of possibility — comes out of struggle. It
doesn’t come out of think tanks or out of taking mushrooms.

Why did I come up with the new edition? Part of it was that I felt
compelled to take stock of where we are today in the wake of the 2020
protests. I had been thinking about a new edition for a while, but
especially after 2020, I was thinking about the long history of
anti-state violence and what we witnessed, because the 2020 protests
were a culmination of lots of things.

That upsurge was a culmination of the Occupy movement. It had its
roots in the anti-police protests erupting after Trayvon Martin and
[Michael] Brown, the 2013-2014-2015 season. The other context, of
course, is that we’re facing a resurgent fascism. I say resurgent
because fascism has a long history in the US.

With 9/11, there was a sense that the radical movements were derailed,
and you really couldn’t say anything critical of the United States.

One thing I didn’t mention, though, is the other context, which is
9/11. Nine-eleven led to a disruption in the writing of the book
because we’d obviously been experiencing a kind of suppression of
movements, not just civil liberties, but actual movements. With the
[George W.] Bush administration, the possibility of creative
repression emerged with the creation of the Homeland Security matrix.

With 9/11, it felt like a sea change. There was a false patriotism
that erupted. There was a sense that the radical movements were
derailed, and you really couldn’t say anything critical of the
United States. At the same time, a vibrant antiwar movement did emerge
after the invasion of Afghanistan and especially after the invasion of
Iraq. That movement was faced with what became an expansion of the
national security state.

I was writing this book about radical movements at a time when radical
movements, in whatever form they took, were under not just greater
suspicion and repression, but a whole apparatus of new technology
geared toward surveillance and attacks on whistleblowers. This was not
necessarily limited to the Bush administration. It continued under
Obama, and it continues as we speak.

That context is important, because when I talk about the resurgence of
fascism, it’s a mistake to think about fascism merely as a group of
military personnel, ex-cops, or active-duty cops trying to overthrow
the Congress or take over the Capitol. They’re not a fringe group.
The state itself is moving in this direction, even if the state has
been targeted by other fascists in the streets.

DANIEL DENVIR

How did you first encounter black nationalism? What role did its
internationalism — particularly its relationship to Africa, present
and past — play in how you experienced it?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

My first encounter with politics was as a child growing up in Harlem.
No one living on 157th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, or
anywhere in Saint Nicholas, would be able to avoid soapbox speakers
and black nationalist organizations. It was everywhere, and that’s
how I understood politics.

By the time I got to college in California, I jumped into black
studies. The authors I read didn’t agree on everything, but what
they all did agree upon fundamentally was that African people, no
matter where they are, are connected somehow and have a right to
self-determination. There were a lot of romantic ideas of what
precolonial Africa was like, with an assumption that communalism was
the default situation and the natural culture of African peoples.

However, I also encountered other thinkers and movements that said
yes, we had certain traditions that colonialism tried to destroy, yet
at the same time, we had class distinctions and forms of power. Some
of these forms of power existed before colonialism, but they really
took off during and after the colonial period.

My first encounter with politics was as a child growing up in Harlem.
No one would be able to avoid soapbox speakers and black nationalist
organizations.

I’m of the generation where we read Frantz Fanon and _The Wretched
the Earth_. Nowadays, no one wants to read that. They want to
read _Black Skin, White Masks_, which is a very important book. But
it was foundational to read in _The Wretched of the Earth_ about the
African national bourgeoisie, or in Walter Rodney’s _How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa_ about the role that African elites played in
the perpetuation of neocolonial domination.

These texts enabled us to hold on to a form of black nationalism
without falling into the trap of seeing the roots of exploitation and
inequality strictly in terms of racial difference. We saw those roots
in terms of class difference, in terms of economic exploitation, in
terms of the way capitalism unfolded. Those are the politics that were
important to me. We were surrounded by a lot of thinkers who believed
that nationalism and Marxism were not antithetical — they could come
together.

DANIEL DENVIR

Why did Ethiopia in particular for so long play such a critical role
in the black American and also black international political
imagination?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Ethiopianism initially had very little to do with Ethiopia itself. The
region we know today as Ethiopia was a mythological place in the minds
of European Christians. They believed that there was a religious
leader named Prester John, who was white or at least nonblack. The
Prester John myth created an exception, even in the minds of European
Christians, because Ethiopia, which wasn’t a nation yet, had adopted
Christianity before any other part of Africa. In fact, Coptic
Christianity in Ethiopia predates the spread of Christianity to much
of Europe.

That alone was proof in the minds of European and Christian
supremacists that Ethiopia was more civilized. That story was shaping
the narrative around Ethiopianism. On the one hand, you had Europeans
claiming Ethiopia as a civilized place. On the other, you had Africans
in North America and throughout the western hemisphere reading the
Bible, saying Ethiopia was a land of redemption and that they were not
trying to build alliances with Europe. They were trying to overthrow
an oppressive system in which the pharaoh was on the other side of the
Mediterranean. That was where Ethiopianism as a religious movement met
Ethiopian history.

The region we know today as Ethiopia was a mythological place in the
minds of European Christians.

The Battle of Adwa in 1896 was a very important symbol in black
American consciousness. This was before the Japanese defeated Russia
in 1904–5. You had an African country defeating Italy. What did this
mean for black Americans? There were musical theater shows, novels,
and other writings and performances that celebrated the victory
against the Italians. It hyped up the importance of Ethiopia as one of
two regions that were, at least in theory, not colonized by Europeans
— the other being Liberia; but of course, Liberia was a colony of
the United States.

It created a myth that Ethiopia somehow resisted colonialism. In fact,
all around it there was a negotiation with colonists — not just the
Italians, but also the British — and it was a nation-state that
continued to practice slavery until the 1930s. That was something
people didn’t want to talk about, although a figure like George
Padmore was criticizing Ethiopia in the 1930s, saying whatever we
think about it, they still have slavery; we have to defend
Ethiopia’s right to self-determination, but we have to fight Haile
Selassie in terms of class forces. That was a realistic approach to
understanding the actual Ethiopia versus the symbolic Ethiopia.

Finally, Ethiopia was invaded again in 1935. World War II began with
the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy and the colonial slaughter that
followed. The black world mobilized to defend both the physical land
and culture of Ethiopia, as well as the sacred and symbolic land of
Ethiopia.

DANIEL DENVIR

The idea of going back to Africa was one part of a larger
“emigrationist” politics that has been pervasive in a lot of
different ways that you describe throughout the long arc of black
American history. What does that form of politics tell us about how
black people have imagined freedom?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

There are two things that are really important in this. One is land,
because part of emigration is about being able to access land,
wherever that land might be. It’s not like you’re moving from one
ownership of land to another. You’re actually trying to establish
some land for yourself.

The second thing, of course, is freedom from a government that at one
point you might have believed was designed to protect you and your
people, but that actually turns out not to be the case.
Self-determination in terms of land and governmental authority is part
of what made emigration, or at least the dream of emigration,
attractive.

Self-determination in terms of land and governmental authority is part
of what made emigration, or at least the dream of emigration,
attractive.

What I was trying to get at in discussing this wasn’t the question
of whether it was effective or a good strategy. It was about trying to
tap desire and what people thought freedom might look and feel like.
It was never about being able to integrate into mainstream white
liberal society so you could live in suburbs with white people.

When you think about what it means to have land, it opens up a
different set of conversations about what happens once you are able to
establish a free space with autonomy and something like
self-determination. What does it look like in terms of organizing
society?

We have a lot of scholarship now thinking about maroon societies as a
precursor or an example of that kind of freedom. But what we find, of
course, is that sometimes the most revolutionary intentions could turn
into new forms of hierarchy. Maroon societies were often ones that had
their own hierarchy, with rulers that made deals with colonial states
or slave plantation societies to give back runaways.

Once you get the land, once you get self-determination, what does that
mean in terms of social relations within that community? That to me is
really the crucial question.

DANIEL DENVIR

No discussion of black emigration as politics would be complete
without Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA). How did Garvey’s movement emerge and then catch
such incredible fire among black people? And what were the ideological
and theological precepts of the movement that Garvey called black
Zionism?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Garvey himself was an amazing journalist and organizer. He traveled
around Latin America and elsewhere, before ending up in Europe, where
he found himself in conversation with Irish nationalists. The Irish,
of course, took great pride in their culture, language, and right to
land. It was a case of anti-colonialism par excellence as far as
Garvey and others were concerned.

Garvey was also inspired by Zionism. Jamaica had a number of Jewish
entrepreneurs who were themselves Jamaican and helped fund the UNIA.
Garvey even toyed with the idea of Judaism becoming the official
religion of the black nationalist movement. He quickly moved away from
that and developed his own African Orthodox Church. But one of his
main lieutenants was Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford, who converted to
Judaism and eventually ended up taking a congregation to Ethiopia,
settling there, and creating a new movement of Ethiopian Jews from the
US who are all black.

For Marcus Garvey, black Zionism was the black version of the
political movement that we know of as Zionism.

Remember, Zionism wasn’t exactly a religious movement in the way we
might think of it. It was a political, nationalist movement, based on
the idea of the right to land, and the idea that the Jews, as a
dispersed people, had not only a right, but an obligation to find a
homeland. In those days, Zionism wasn’t necessarily always linked to
historical Palestine. Uganda was one of the possible locations being
talked about.

That’s not to say that Palestine wasn’t relevant — it was very
relevant — but the most important thing about Zionism was the idea
that land was necessary for an oppressed people to thrive. For Garvey,
black Zionism was the black version of the political movement that we
know of as Zionism.

Why did it expand so rapidly? There are many different reasons. One
has to do with the power of print culture. As Benedict Anderson says,
print culture is a crucial part of developing nationalism. Whether
that nationalism is tied to a state or not doesn’t matter. If you
have a paper like the _Negro World_, publishing in different
languages, with a circulation around the globe, then you can develop
followers.

The second point was that it tapped into the sense of needing a
homeland, of feeling alienated from citizenship and from basic rights,
of being treated like a second-class citizen and having to face
lynching and violence at every turn. Black intellectuals called that
period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the nadir of
African American history. The Supreme Court was ruling against the
rights of black people, while state governments were supporting white
supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan was resurrected.

In that context, there was something attractive about the idea of a
homeland as well as the idea of power, with the spectacle of Garveyism
in the streets of New York. Marcus Garvey was dressed like a general
and you had black men dressed in military uniforms as if they were
going to redeem Africa through violence. This was the era of
imperialism, and they were saying “we’re going to have our own
imperialism — we’re going to take back Africa.” That was very
attractive to people.

Another reason for its appeal was that the UNIA was so decentralized
that people could write their own rules. The biggest, most active
chapters in North America were not in cities, but in the countryside.
In those rural chapters, people were fighting to receive a decent wage
for chopping and picking cotton, or their fair share of cotton
production, and opposition to lynching was the order of the day.

A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO WERE GARVEYITES HAD NO INTENTION OF LEAVING THE
US. THEY INTENDED TO FIGHT.

A lot of people who were Garveyites had no intention of leaving the
US. They intended to fight, and they were fighting on many different
fronts with the belief that they were part of an international
movement that would support them. It’s no accident that many of the
Garveyites in places like Harlem and Chicago ended up joining the
Communist Party after Garveyism collapsed.

DANIEL DENVIR

In the book, you write: “If the Third International or the Comintern
proved more sympathetic and sensitive to the racial nature of American
class struggle, it is largely because black folk made it so.” A good
place to start is with a group called the African Blood Brotherhood
(ABB), which was founded in 1918. What perspective did they and other
black communists bring to the movement?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The ABB was initially a secret organization made up of socialists. Its
leaders included people like Cyril Briggs and W. A. Domingo. Many of
them were of Caribbean descent, like Garvey, though not all. Unlike
Garvey, they had no intention of going anywhere: they were focused on
the fight against lynching and disenfranchisement in the US.

They had chapters in places like Oklahoma and Virginia. They were a
black communist organization before there was a Communist Party,
because they went back at least a couple of years before the Communist
Party was formed in the US. World War I was a crucial moment for their
formation.

Some of them joined the Communist Party before the ABB folded. They
joined in secret. People like Harry Haywood, for example, were in the
ABB and then the Communist Party. They saw their positions as being
identical. That led to a split in the Brotherhood because there were
those who felt that they should remain independent, even if they were
sympathetic to the Communist Party.

It wasn’t until 1922 or 1923 that the Communist Party was
consolidated into a single party, after a series of splits, when the
Comintern forced some of the different tendencies to come together. It
didn’t make a lot of sense for the ABB, which was itself a coherent
radical organization, to fold into a movement that was divided.
Another point to bear in mind is that there were other black
socialists who were not in the ABB, such as Hubert Harrison and Ben
Fletcher. They represented another independent black radical or
communist presence.

DANIEL DENVIR

The ideological orientation of the Bolsheviks around national
self-determination and colonialism had an obvious appeal to black
American communists like Harry Haywood and Claude McKay, who then in
turn pushed communists to embrace the so-called Black Belt thesis,
which posited that black Americans in the South constituted a
colonized nation with the right to self-determination. What did the
Black Belt thesis concretely mean for black communists and for
American communism more generally?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The party actually did not work very hard to promote the Black Belt
thesis in the streets or in the countryside. When you read the party
newspapers — the _Daily Worker_ or the _Southern Worker _— it
wasn’t a major part of their organizing or propaganda work. If you
read the more theoretical communist publications, there was some
debate around it, but it wasn’t necessarily an organizing slogan.

However, it did help secure the right of black communists to have some
control over communist print culture and some independent autonomous
organizations that could fight for black liberation, such as the
League of Struggle for Negro Rights, the American Negro Labor
Congress, and publications like the_ Liberator_. Self-determination
meant that there was an independent black struggle that was related to
class oppression — in fact, fundamental to class oppression —
while being specific to the conditions and experiences of black
people.

The communists included in the category of “class-war prisoners”
black youth like the Scottsboro Nine, who hadn’t been arrested
because they were leading a union or fighting with the police around
strike activity, but rather because they were falsely accused of
raping two white women while traveling on a train. To redefine them as
class-war prisoners meant rethinking the nature of the class struggle.

That’s what made the Communist Party unique, no matter what people
might say. The CPUSA [the Communist Party of the United States of
America] was the first organization on the American left that wasn’t
all-black that said black people’s struggles mattered in and of
themselves and did not occupy a subordinate or secondary place in
terms of class struggle. That was a huge breakthrough, and it was
black radicals themselves who promoted it, going back to Clyde McKay
when he addressed the Comintern, or Harry Haywood.

Self-determination meant that there was an independent black struggle
that was related to class oppression while being specific to the
conditions and experiences of black people.

At the same time, the South African communists were pushing for what
was called the Native Republic thesis — the right of
self-determination for African people in South Africa. This was very
significant because there had been a miners’ strike known as the
Rand Revolt, in which white miners raised the slogan “Workers of the
World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.” But that strike
was overshadowed by a much larger African miners’ strike.

All of those developments led to a real process of rethinking. It
produced the idea that class struggle must include the independent
struggles of black people, because of the unique position they occupy
within a racialized class hierarchy.

DANIEL DENVIR

After the heyday of the CPUSA, Maoist China became a strong reference
point for black radicals. Closer to home, Cuba also loomed large. One
important figure here was the president of the NAACP [the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People] chapter in Monroe,
North Carolina, Robert Williams, who called for armed self-defense and
then sought political asylum in Cuba in 1961. Who was Williams, and
what sort of politics did he practice and advocate?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Robert Williams was a former veteran who had served in the Marines. He
was familiar with left organizations and would read publications like
the _Daily Worker_. He and his wife, Mabel Williams, settled in
Greenville, North Carolina.

As an advocate of armed self-defense, he was not exceptional. Armed
self-defense was, generally speaking, the default position of black
organizers, not just in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth
century as well. Don’t forget that Martin Luther King kept a pistol
in his house until Bayard Rustin, I think, convinced him not to.

In fact, it was the idea of nonviolent passive resistance that was a
rupture in the history of black radical movements or civil rights
movements. What Williams was doing wasn’t unique and in fact was
replicated throughout the South, especially in places like
Mississippi. I don’t want to exceptionalize Rob Williams, except to
say that what made him and Mabel Williams exceptional was their
internationalism.

Armed self-defense was, generally speaking, the default position of
black organizers, not just in the nineteenth century, but the
twentieth century as well.

He was organizing armed self-defense groups against the Klan composed
of men and women, and he was expelled from the NAACP as a result of
doing that work. Rob and Mabel Williams saved the lives of a white
couple who supported the Klan and had come to the black district of
Monroe to cause trouble, but they were charged with kidnapping the
pair and fled the country, ending up in Cuba.

Rob already had a relationship with Cuba because he was a supporter of
the Cuban Revolution. He became close to Che Guevara but later left
Cuba and went first to Vietnam, then to China, where he and Mabel
encountered another amazing black radical, Vicki Garvin. There had
already been many black visitors to China in support of its
revolution, including W. E. B. Du Bois.

DANIEL DENVIR

Let’s talk about the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a black
nationalist organization which declared its support for
Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of Max Stanford. What kind of
arguments was Stanford making?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

His arguments were specific to the social formation of RAM itself and
the fact that it initially emerged as a student-based organization.
This group was reading _The Wretched of the Earth_ in French before
it was translated into English and had a critique of Fanon, partly to
do with the fact that they felt Fanon wasn’t really aware of the
situation in North America.

Stanford embraced what Amilcar Cabral later called the idea of
“class suicide.” He said there was no guarantee that students
would adopt the path of revolution, or that the intelligentsia was
even capable of leading a true revolution. Stanford himself came out
of the black intelligentsia. He was making what was actually quite a
popular argument at the time, saying that only the working class is
the revolutionary class, but for black people, the working class
isn’t always in the factories or in the mines — sometimes its
members are unemployed.

The very structural conditions that led to the expansion of white
suburbia also led to the organized abandonment of cities that left a
lot of black people unemployed.

Why was this significant? This was the period of the Great Society,
when there was a mythology that all boats had risen, everyone was
employed, and life was good. But the very structural conditions that
led to the expansion of white suburbia, enabling a segment of
working-class whites to make the leap into middle-class homeownership,
also led to the organized abandonment of cities that left a lot of
black people (and black youth in particular) unemployed.

The focus of the Black Panther Party was on organizing the so-called
lumpenproletariat — those people who are often outside of the formal
market, who don’t have jobs, who hustle for a living. There was a
romanticization of that class or at least certainly an interest in it.
Social scientists called it the “underclass.”

Again, it’s open to debate whether or not it was actually a
revolutionary class. But this was the discourse at the time. It was
one of the reasons why a lot of American radicals, and not just black
ones, decided by the early 1970s that there was no future for them in
the university as a knowledge worker. They ended up going into the
factories, doing industrial work, organizing unions, and saying
that’s where the working class is, that’s where the revolution
will happen.

DANIEL DENVIR

One really important influence on this generation was Harold Cruse.
Who was Cruse, and where does he fit into black radical intellectual
history?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Harold Cruse was a member of the CPUSA in the 1950s, before he left
the party. He was the theater critic for the _Daily Worker_. This was
significant, because he took the position that the Left had failed at
the level of culture, especially black liberals and black leftists. He
eventually went on to write an essay called “The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual,” which was published in 1967. RAM really dug what he
was saying.

RAM was arguing that revolution in the US would be led by black
people, often the lumpenproletariat.

There were two strands to his argument. The first strand echoed
Fanon’s point that Marxism has to be stretched to be relevant to the
conditions of black people. Cruse said that we could not just accept
an inherited Marxism rooted in European class relations. The second
strand argued that the revolutionary initiative now lay with the Third
World (or the Global South, as we would call it today). That was the
force that would bring about world revolution, while the US was trying
to suppress this revolution against materialism and racism.

You can see why Cruse’s argument would be so appealing, especially
to RAM, which made the argument that we were not just talking about
international colonialism, but also domestic colonialism — that is
to say, black people had more in common with colonized peoples around
the world as they were a colonized people within the United States.
RAM was arguing that revolution in the US would be led by black
people, often the lumpenproletariat.

DANIEL DENVIR

You write that urban rebellions in organizations like RAM laid the
foundation for the Black Panther Party’s emergence in Oakland, and
that the Panthers diverged not only from cultural nationalists but
also from other revolutionary nationalists on the left. What made the
revolutionary vision of the Panthers so distinct?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Bobby Seale and others were members of RAM. In some ways, the Black
Panther Party adopted almost all the elements of RAM’s thinking as a
ten-point program. What made them distinctive was their embrace of
Cruse’s idea of internal colonialism, recognizing black people as a
colonized people. They were anti-capitalist and socialist. Not only
did they support self-determination, but they also turned to the
United Nations as a greater authority than the US state and talked
about having a plebiscite for the right of black people to secede.

The Black Panther Party was also formed against the ongoing state
violence that black people were experiencing. One way that they argued
for to reduce police violence was to replace the police with elected
groups for public safety that would help and protect people in the
neighborhoods, as opposed to just reforming the police. From the very
beginning, the Panthers believed in building alliances across racial
lines. The rainbow coalition that emerged in Chicago under the
leadership of Fred Hampton was an example of Panther politics moving
in that direction.

DANIEL DENVIR

Medgar Evers only joined the NAACP after abandoning plans to wage a
guerrilla insurgency inspired by national liberation movements in the
Mississippi River Delta, and he named his first child after the Kenyan
anti-colonial leader Jomo Kenyatta.

With examples like that to think about, where do we get the idea that
is often put forward that there was a “good” civil rights movement
that later tipped over into the more extremist and counterproductive
Black Power phase? Where does that distorted picture come from and
what function does it serve?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Where it comes from, I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I do know the
work it does. It creates a sharp break between what’s considered to
be the good, liberal movement and the bad, nationalist movement. The
break usually begins with the Watts Rebellion in 1965. That’s
ironic, because it’s not as if the Watts Rebellion was a nationalist
insurgency.

In many ways, it’s a narrative produced by liberals who felt that
the movement had become too militant, that they weren’t grateful
enough to white liberals for the work they did and their support.
There was a decision on the part of the new SNCC [Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee] leadership, when Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap
Brown came to power, to tell the white folks: “Okay, we’re still
going to build with you, but you need to work in your own
communities.” That is also considered to have been a significant
break and a source of pain for white liberals.

Black nationalism had been a consistent presence within the United
States since the early nineteenth century.

Part of the myth is that there was one thing called the civil rights
movement, rather than multiple movements at multiple levels and scales
all at the same time. Black nationalism had been a consistent presence
within the United States since the early nineteenth century. There was
never a moment when it didn’t exist. This divide obscures much more
than it reveals. It makes a bit more sense if we think about all these
movements together as the black freedom movement, because they
didn’t all agree on what “black freedom” means.

Watts wasn’t the first major rebellion, although it might have been
the biggest. Look at a place such as Cambridge, Maryland, for example,
where Gloria Richardson led what was essentially a rebellion in 1960.
That was an amazing movement where you had the federal government step
in and try to maintain peace in a city that was essentially
overturning basic civil rights laws.

Richardson and the members of the Cambridge [Nonviolent Action
Committee] were fighting for basic rights — they were not fighting
for integration. They were fighting for better schools and for the
right to move and live wherever they wanted to live. They were
fighting for the repeal of discriminatory laws. Many members of the
movement carried guns to protect them, including Richardson.

DANIEL DENVIR

You argue that black radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s were
obviously impacted severely by state repression, but you also say that
they fell into a fetishization of revolutionary violence that was
sometimes dangerous. That’s not just a retrospective assessment:
many militants at the time made similar arguments, like Ken Cockrell
of the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers, for example.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

There is definitely a distinction between armed self-defense and
revolutionary violence. That’s not to say that revolutionary
violence was limited to the North. In fact, Mississippi, the very
place where armed self-defense was probably the most pervasive, also
had bombings of courthouses and things like that — retaliatory
violence. But I think the distinction is important for a couple of
reasons.

Firstly, Ken Cockrell and others were not rejecting the right of armed
self-defense. That’s a different matter. When people are coming for
you, including the police, for reasons that are basically illegal or
extralegal, then you have the right to defend yourself. But they were
criticizing the adventurism of some organizations that were engaged in
what they perceived to be guerrilla warfare or kidnappings or
robberies. That didn’t help if movements had to spend all their time
bailing people out.

Doing these defense campaigns was tricky because most of the people
they were trying to bail out or defend in court were not the people
who had actually committed the crimes. When you think about some of
the most high-profile defense cases, there were people who didn’t
really do what they were said to have done. Nevertheless, I understand
the concern, because it was getting to be very costly to have these
defense campaigns.

Secondly, the whole history of black people in North America involves
assessing the strategic and tactical choices that are going to be most
effective. That’s why you didn’t have a lot of massive slave
insurrections during the nineteenth century in the US. You saw revolts
like that in the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century,
because it was more feasible in terms of security, surveillance, and
policing.

The whole history of black people in North America involves assessing
the strategic and tactical choices that are going to be most
effective.

When those barriers are weak, you can engage in revolt, but when
they’re strong, you have to come up with something different. It’s
not about fear, it’s not about cowardice. It’s not about trying to
support liberalism. It’s about what’s tactically smart and
effective. That was a sharp line of division in some of the movements
that ended up attempting robberies or other tactics based on direct
revolutionary violence. They were the ones that got derailed.

DANIEL DENVIR

How did anti-imperialist solidarity serve both to stitch together
these various black visions for freedom, but also ultimately to tear
them apart?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Class was always a factor in black freedom movements, but especially
during the period of the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC)
in the 1970s. They were supporting the armed movements against
Portuguese rule in Africa as well as against white-settler rule in
Zimbabwe and in South Africa. In the Portuguese colonies, the big
divide was around class and Marxism.

This was a period of protracted armed struggle going back to the late
1950s. In the process, those armed struggles led to the creation of
liberated zones. There were debates within those organizations about
how to build a new society and what it should be based on. The PAIGC
[African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde] in
Guinea-Bissau, the MPLA [People’s Movement for the Liberation of
Angola] in Angola, and FRELIMO [Liberation Front of Mozambique] in
Mozambique were organizations that had adopted Marxism by the time the
ALSC began to meet with some of these revolutionaries after 1971.

At the same time, black radicals in the US were saying “we need a
class analysis.” There was a major split between those who said
“black liberation means all of us, and we need to do that first
before we attend to class,” and those who said “we need to embrace
Marxism and class analysis.” Some would say that the split along
those lines led to the demise of the ALSC.

Amiri Baraka is an interesting figure here because he eventually came
to embrace Marxism during this time. His poetry and the arguments he
was making changed as he moved away from the cultural nationalism that
had shaped his politics up to that point. Baraka broke with Kenneth
Gibson, who was the first black mayor of Newark. Overall, it was a
significant split in the movement that is still with us to this day.

Remember the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that King was
supporting when he was assassinated. The sanitation workers were
trying to get better wages and working conditions for mostly black
poor workers against the mayor, Henry Loeb, who opposed them. Fast
forward to 1977, and you had Maynard Jackson, the black mayor of
Atlanta and a civil rights supporter, also facing a sanitation
workers’ strike.

The radical vision of a working-class insurgency that could change the
nation was replaced by a black leadership class promoting neoliberal
policies.

It was the same situation as in Memphis. They were living with poverty
wages, and some of them had to go on welfare to survive, so they went
on strike. Jackson broke the strike and refused to negotiate with the
union. When the sanitation workers came back and said, “look,
let’s just get our jobs back, we won’t even ask for anything in
return,” he refused.

Who did he get support from? The NAACP, the Urban League, the SCLC
[Southern Christian Leadership Conference] — that’s King’s own
organization. King’s father, Daddy King, supported Maynard Jackson.
In the space of eleven years, the radical vision of a working-class
insurgency that could change the nation was replaced by a black
leadership class promoting neoliberal policies and embodying the very
danger that Fanon, Cabral, and others had warned against — in other
words, a black petty bourgeoisie in power who would be junior partners
in the maintenance of racial capitalism.

DANIEL DENVIR

What sort of relationships were there between black radical visions
and more mainstream black political visions as the power and influence
of various forms of black politics shifted over time?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

I think it is easy to identify those relationships, such as what
Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X might have had in common. However,
I also think that the differences are starker than we might think. For
example, the Malcolm X of 1955 is not the Malcolm X of 1963 or the
Malcolm X of January 1965. Having spoken in terms of black economic
power through business, he began to question it, as did King.

There’s a sharp distinction between a figure like Wilson Goode, say,
on the other hand, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, on the other — two people
out of Philadelphia, as it were. Now, there are moments in electoral
politics where those radical possibilities do emerge and erupt. Here
are a couple of examples.

In Jackson, Mississippi, there has been a movement around Chokwe
Lumumba and his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, trying to implement some
form of black economic self-determination based on horizontalism and
redistribution. Father and son have both served as mayor of Jackson,
and they’re still trying to achieve that goal, but it’s very hard.

Even if you are a committed revolutionary, you have to make strategic
decisions based on an assessment of the forces behind you.

When you have outside organizations that are saying “we don’t
accept compromise” and making demands, that helps keep political
leaders honest in government; or if not honest, it certainly keeps
them under pressure. It’s a constant tension.

Amiri Baraka’s son, Ras Baraka, has served for a long time as mayor
of Newark, trying to implement some radical ideas, but again, he’s
been constrained by the limits of government. He has had to make
choices that progressive and radical people in Newark don’t agree
with.

No matter what your ideology is, governing is always going to be a
challenge. It’s also a challenge when you run an institution versus
just running a small organization, where you can pretty much say and
do anything you want.

If you’re dependent on funding and being reelected, relying on
support from a constituency that may not share your politics, then you
have to compromise. There’s no easy answer, because even if you are
a committed revolutionary, you have to make strategic decisions based
on an assessment of the forces behind you.

DANIEL DENVIR

The black feminist movement has become extremely consequential in
recent years. What, in the broad sweep of these histories you tell,
does this signify?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

It is very significant. This is not the first time we’ve had queer
trans leadership — it’s just the first time it’s been quite open
and acknowledged as a key part of the political vision that people are
fighting for. The Movement for Black Lives, which of course is a
coalition of a hundred or more different organizations, has made black
feminism, LGBTQ politics, and disability justice a critical part of
black freedom or black liberation. That’s new.

This was what Barbara Smith always meant by identity politics. To the
Combahee River Collective, identity politics never meant that your
individual identity was going to define your interests, needs, and
wants. It was about the way that the structures of oppression
intersected.

When we talk about “class first,” for example, you can’t have
“class first” unless you can define who the class is. If the class
is seen as including those who are female or femme, queer or trans,
immigrants as well as native-born workers, indigenous and racialized
people, then the analysis of oppression and what liberation looks like
is going to include all of those connections and identities, not just
your individual interests. That’s what the Combahee River Collective
and other organizations brought to the table.

Black feminists have always adopted the position that capitalism is
not helping anyone, patriarchy is not helping anyone, and racism is
not helping anyone.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re out of the woods, because
these are people who took a huge leap of faith and courage and are now
facing a backlash, precisely because we have greater visibility. The
test for us is whether or not we’re going to choose a form of
identity politics that recognizes the way that people who are not us
are oppressed and exploited.

That’s also the power of black feminism. Black feminists have always
adopted the position that capitalism is not helping anyone, patriarchy
is not helping anyone, and racism is not helping anyone. They’re
imagining and fighting for a new world without patriarchy and gendered
violence, without state violence and class oppression. That is the
world they’re trying to build, not a private, exclusive world in
which black women and black men alone would benefit.

You can have identity politics as a revolutionary phenomenon, and then
you can have identity movements that sometimes impose a litmus test on
political participation. We’re dealing with situations where people
in movements may make mistakes. They may not be as educated on using
gender pronouns or on how to interact with others in a way that allows
them the opportunity to speak freely. Those are things that people
have to learn. We have to build movements that allow people who make
mistakes to learn, advance, and participate.

You build movements in struggle. This goes back to the original theme
of the book. Solidarity is not a market exchange. What we’re seeing
in these new movements is a principle of solidarity without the
expectation that you’re going to get something in return. You show
up at Standing Rock, you show up at the border, or you show up in
front of a Los Angeles Police Department station. You show up wherever
you need to show up for others because you know your liberation is
tied not just to your needs, but to the needs of others with whom you
may not have any necessary identification.

As the old-fashioned slogan goes, an injury to one is an injury to
all. You don’t need to be empathetic — you need to be in
solidarity. You don’t need to understand what people feel, but you
do need to stand there for them, because you know that oppression is
oppression no matter what.

DANIEL DENVIR

How does utopian imagining relate to the work of evaluating our
successes and failures and developing plans for our movements to win?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

It all works together. Let me just say a couple of things. I’m not
against the language of winning. But so many organizations now depend
on the nonprofit-industrial complex. Sometimes the work involves the
ability to establish a base, a culture, a sense of community in which
people stick together for the long term. Yet if you cannot prove
within a short period of time that you are winning a campaign, then
you lose your funding. It’s that simple. If funders put their money
behind winnable campaigns, then some of the more long-term work
doesn’t get funded.

If you’re building a movement around housing, there are several
things you could do. One thing, of course, is to make sure that people
are not evicted immediately. That’s a win. But if all you’re doing
is running around to make sure people don’t get evicted, then you
don’t really have the time or the luxury to think about social
housing and how to win that.

Du Bois said at one point that socialist states have a right to fail.
To fail is not the end, because failure is part of the process of
creating the new world. Often, we only want to write about the
movements that we think won, because who cares about the ones that
didn’t? Part of my argument in the book is that there were all kinds
of different movements that laid some foundations and built visions of
a new society that we need to pay attention to. We just don’t know
about them because they didn’t win.

That’s not the same thing as saying we should not build campaigns
that have a tangible outcome, because if you don’t have campaigns
like that, you won’t hold people. That’s obvious. But there are
multiple ways to solve people’s problems and build movements. Along
each one of those paths, you are bound to fail at some point, so
don’t turn failure into an end. You should turn failure into part of
the dialectic of producing new forms of social knowledge, which is the
whole point of being in a social movement in the first place.

_ROBIN D. G. KELLEY is the the Gary B. Nash Professor of American
History at UCLA, and the author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists
during the Great Depression
[[link removed]]._

_DANIEL DENVIR is the author of All-American Nativism
[[link removed]] and the
host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio._

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