Colin Kaepernick is a Super Bowl quarterback and New York Times bestselling author who fights oppression globally. He founded the Know Your Rights Camp, which advances the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown people through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization, and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.
She is author Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018.
Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.
In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians.
Taylor is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Publication date: July 4, 2023
Contents
Preface by Colin Kaepernick ix
Part One: HOW WE GOT HERE
On Racial Justice, Black History, Critical Race Theory,
and Other Felonious Ideas 2
Robin D. G. Kelley
Black Studies Is Political, Radical, Indispensable, and Insurgent 16
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Part Two: THE HISTORY THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) 26
David Walker
“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (July 5, 1852) 28
Frederick Douglass
“The New Master and Mistress” from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) 33
Harriet Jacobs
“Our Raison D’être” from A Voice from the South (1892) 35
Anna Julia Cooper
“Introduction” from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (1931) 37
Zora Neale Hurston
“Political Education Neglected” from The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) 41
Carter G. Woodson
“The Propaganda of History” from Black Reconstruction in America (1935) 44
W. E. B. Du Bois
“The San Domingo Masses Begin” from The Black Jacobins (1938) 48
C. L. R. James
“The Origin of Negro Slavery” from Capitalism and Slavery (1944) 50
Eric Williams
“A Talk to Teachers” (October 16, 1963) 53
James Baldwin
by Rana Aziz, Vivian Gornick, et al.
by Noura Erakat, Robin D. G. Kelley, et al.
Edited by Colin Kaepernick
Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, et al.
Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
by Anand Gopal, Owen Jones, et al.
