History and Hope: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley

Robin D. G. Kelley with Jeffrey J. Williams History and Hope: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley has been hailed as a leading African American historian of the modern era, investigating black working-class history, notably in his precocious Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, and the history of black radicalism from Aimé Cernire to Cedric Robinson. More recently, he has also turned to comment on contemporary black culture and politics in extra-academic venues such as The New York Times. Kelley uncoveredthe largely invisiblehistoryofthe CommunistParty in Alabama and the workofAfrican Americans in it during the 1930s in hisfirst book Hammer and Hoe (Li ofNorth Carolina P, 1990). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, 1994) marked a turn to crossover writing and extended the span ofhis historical research, rangingfrom African Americans in the Spanish Civil War to contemporary hip-hop culture. Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon, 1997) disabuses the construction of "ghetto culture" in academic and political discourse andforegrounds the hope of working class social movements to redeem urban America. Freedom Dreams (Beacon, 2002), drawing on black, feminist, and socialist radical traditions , stakes out the terms ofhopeforfuture politics. Kelley is currentlyfinishing a biography Misteriosos: The Art of Thelonius Monk. 77zzs interview took place on 7 February 2003 in Robin Kelley's office at NYU. It was conducted by Jeffrey Williams and transcribed by Laura Rotunno, managing editor ofthe minnesota review while a PhD student at University ofMissouri. Jeffrey J. Williams: Your discipline is history, but people who come upon your work now would probably know you through Freedom Dreams or Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!, and stuff in the Village Voice and the New York Times. Your first book, of course, is Hammer and Hoe, which looks at the fact, unexpectedly , that there were a good many Communists in Alabama in the 1920s or 30s, and many of them were African Americans. How did you come to do this project? How did you start out? Robin D. G. Kelley: It's funny because I didn't study history to be a historian . I studied history to attempt to solve a series of political problems. When I was an undergraduate, I chose history as a discipline that would allow me to look at sodai movements in the most holistic way. I studied political science and was a political science major, I was a philosophy major, but I was interested in social movements. So I went to graduate school to study history not to be a history professor, but to be a professional Communist. That was my thing, and I was a member of the Communist Workers' Party. I chose to go back to the period of Stalinism to figure out what happened when you build a movement around the notion of the self-determination of African Americans. What happens 94 the minnesota review when you say thatAfrican Americans in the Black Belt counties of the South constitute a nation, and your politics are built around that? Did they actually try to achieve self-determination? Were they struggling for land? The original conception of the projectwas notjust to look at the South but to look at South Africa. I went to graduate school to study African history. Actually my MA is in African history and my PhD would have been, but I had to switch fields. The only reason that South Africa didn't come into the equation was strictly political—with the state of emergency in 1986, I couldn't get into the country. So Alabama became the focal point ... Williams: Why couldn't you get into the country? Kelley: Because with the state of emergency in 86, no one was getting in, and I was foolish enough (I say foolish in quotes) to have protested, along with my comrades, at the South African consulate the day before I turned in my paperwork for my visa. Williams: They knew who you were? Kelley: Oh yeah, they remembered me. I was hassled by a police officer up there—the South African consulate was in Beverly Hills, in a building that was unmarked, but...