Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine. My guest today is Robin D.G. Kelly, Professor of American

History at UCLA. His many books include Hammer and Ho, Alabama Communists during the Great Depression,

race rebels, culture, politics, and the black working class, and his acclaimed biography of Thelonius Monk, the Life and Times of an American Original, which the New York Times could not heap enough superlatives on, saying it was textured, thorough, knowing that it was extraordinary,

hysterically detailed, passionate, and compassionate.

But we're here to talk today about his classic study,

Freedom Dreams, the Black Radical Imagination,

which has been reissued for its 20th anniversary. Professor Kelly, thank you so much for joining us on

Current Affairs. Thank you, Nathan. It's always great to be with you. So with freedom

dreams, here's where I want to start. This book, you've just reissued this book with a new

preface, new conclusion.

But I want to go back to why the book came about in the first place,

because the book kind of surprised and delighted me.

I hadn't actually read this book before talking to you,

and it kind of surprised and delighted me because one of the persistent things, my frustrations on the left,

is so often, you know, we, we end up sounding

a little negative. We end up being against a lot of things. We end up pointing out the problems

with various systems and, you know, we do a lot of analysis, a lot of diagnosis of social and economic

ills. But you draw attention to the other

side of it, right? You say that, you know, we also have, and we have had, and specifically in the

black radical tradition, there has always been this embrace of marvelous visions of freedom.

And those are important.

And I take it, you know, when you began this book,

...