From notable historian and author of Freedom Dreams, the untold history of the Black working class resistances throughout the 20th century.

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.

Robin D. G. Kelley teaches History at UCLA and is the author of several books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

Contents

Foreword by George Lipsitz

Introduction: Writing Black Working-Class History from Way, Way Below

PART I. "WE WEAR THE MASK": HIDDEN HISTORIES OF RESISTANCE

1. Shiftless of the World Unite!

2. "We Are Not What We Seem": The Politics and Pleasures of Community

3. Congested Terrain: Resistance on Public Transportation

4. Birmingham's Untouchables: The Black Poor in the Age of Civil Rights

PART II. TO BE RED AND BLACK

5. "Afric's Sons With Banner Red": African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934

6. "This Ain't Ethiopia, But It'll Do": African Americans and the Spanish Civil War

PART III. REBELS WITHOUT A CAUSE?

7. The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II

8. Kickin' Reality, Kickin' Ballistics: "Gangsta Rap" and Postindustrial Los Angeles

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index