Emancipation Proclamation

Although he does not record CDs, Robin Kelley may well be the hippest intellectual in the land. There is plenty of substance to ground the style. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe and Race Rebels are two of the defining works on American labor struggle, black resistance and the left. His studies of the past resonate in the present; Kelley sifts through archives as he keeps his ear to the ground. As if this alone did not make Kelley an academic rarity, his occasional writings in the New York Times reveal a distinctive flair. Kelley called upon the "pimp aesthetic" to capture the essence of Miles Davis, and unforgettably counseled his readers: "Next time you're on the road digging 'Kind of Blue' or 'Bitches Brew' and feel the urge to lean to the side and tilt your head back just so...check yourself in the rear-view--it's probably the pimp in you." Time and again, Kelley finds profundity where few even thought to look.

In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the protagonist's dying grandfather implores him to overcome with yeses, undermine with grins. Kelley's Race Rebels (1994) probed a facade of yeses and grins and found that "beneath the veil of consent lies a hidden history of unorganized, everyday conflict waged by African-American working people." The rebels included Birmingham bus-riders who resisted racist drivers in the 1940s, a youthful Malcolm X and his cultural forays, and female workers whose hymns echoed through a North Carolina tobacco factory. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe (1990) chronicled Alabama workers and farmers who embraced Communism during the 1920s and '30s, the organizations they formed, the culture of opposition they forged and the legacies they left. Kelley's latest book, Freedom Dreams, navigates an idiosyncratic tour of black radicalism in the twentieth century. Kelley writes unflinchingly of freedom and love, dreams and visions, revolts of the mind. The world can still be won, he believes, and the imagination is the struggle's most potent weapon.

It is the rare child from Harlem who becomes a celebrated NYU professor, and Kelley does not cloak the uptown origins of his intellectual passions. His candor is alternately humorous and moving. In Hammer and Hoe Kelley mused about "black graduate students who must enter the academy through long, dark pipelines or sneak in through windows of opportunity." While he did not quite sneak through a window, his path toward graduate school (which included a stint behind a McDonald's counter) was hardly typical. Freedom Dreams sinks its roots in Kelley's remembrances of his mother, who "simply wanted us to live through our third eyes, to see life as possibility." This concept of the "third eye"--the one that gazes toward the future, that sees better tomorrows whatever the perils of the day--animates Kelley's book.

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