Robin Kelley: 7 books

Many black strategies of daily resistance have been obscured--until now. Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.

The first full biography of legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk, written by a brilliant historian, with full access to the family's archives and with dozens of interviews. Now updated with an afterword for Monk’s 2017 centennial. Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga...

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...

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...

This collective biography of four jazz musicians from Brooklyn, Ghana, and South Africa demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents.

In this powerful new work, Marable, Ness, and Wilson maintain that contrary to the popular hubris about equality, race is entrenched and more divisive than any time since the Civil Rights Movement. Race and Labor in the United States asserts that all advances in American race relations have only evolved...

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,...