Race Rebels : Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class [Paperback]

Robin D. G. Kelley (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 1, 1996

Robin D. G. Kelley is professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kelley (Hammer and Hoe), who teaches Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, here adapts several of his previously published articles into a loosely linked study describing black working-class resistance outside traditional organizations and political movements. Studying complaints and protests by blacks on Birmingham streetcars and buses during WWII, Kelley discerns a collective effort to gain power over an institution on which they depended. Blacks who joined the Communist Party during the 1920s and '30s, he shows, helped infuse their culture into American communism. Though Malcolm X dismissed his youthful years as self-degrading, Kelley argues that part of Malcolm X's enduring appeal depended on the style he picked up from the 1940s hipster, zoot suit culture. And in an analysis of present-day "gangsta rap," Kelley describes how the music has become cartoonish and critics more sweeping in their dismissal, while the underlying conditions that spawned rap remain unchanged. Kelley's close analyses appropriately reject "formulaic interpretations," as he states, but this book is mainly for students and scholars.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Kelley is a professor of Afro-American and African studies and author of Hammer and Hoe (1990), a look at African Americans and the Communist Party in Alabama during the Great Depression. Here he offers a bold premise that is bound to provoke controversy and comment. Kelley suggests that foot dragging, sabotage, workplace theft, absenteeism, cursing, graffiti, joking, playing "unauthorized" music, and dress-code violations are subtle and not-so-subtle but conscious acts of rebellion and resistance among a black working class that does not feel a part of "mainstream" civil rights and labor movements. His "history from below" attempts to show "how fundamental race is for understanding American culture and politics" as he analyzes cultural, social, and political phenomena as diverse as the African American volunteer role in the Spanish civil war and "gangsta" rap. This book is a must for African American history, social science, and labor collections. David Rouse --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Edition edition (June 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684826399
• ISBN-13: 978-0684826394
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #117,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Business & Investing > Economics > Unemployment

More About the Author

Robin D. G. Kelley never met Thelonious Monk, but he grew up with his music. Born in 1962, he spent his formative years in Harlem in a household and a city saturated with modern jazz. As a child he took a few trumpet lessons with the legendary Jimmy Owens, played French horn in junior high school, and picked up piano during his teen years in California. In 1987, Kelley earned his PhD in History from UCLA and focused his work on social movements, politics and culture--although music remained his passion.

During his tenure on the faculties of Emory University, the University of Michigan, New York University, and Columbia University, Kelley's scholarly interests shifted increasingly toward music. He has written widely on jazz, hip hop, electronic music, musicians' unions and technological displacement, and social and political movements more broadly.

Before becoming Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, Robin D. G. Kelley served on the faculty at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, where he held the first Louis Armstrong Chair in Jazz Studies. Besides Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Kelley has authored several prize-winning books, including Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994); Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice. He is currently completing Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011), and a general survey of African American history co-authored with Tera Hunter and Earl Lewis to be published by Norton.

Kelley's essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including The Nation, Monthly Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, New York Times (Arts and Leisure), New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Color Lines, Code Magazine, Utne Reader, Lenox Avenue, African Studies Review, Black Music Research Journal, Callaloo, New Politics, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, One World, Social Text, Metropolis, American Visions, Boston Review, Fashion Theory, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, Souls, Metropolis, and frieze: contemporary art and culture, to name a few.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars talks about little known portions of US history February 4, 2006

By W Boudville HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Kelley highlights an underappreciated portion of twentieth century American history - the intersection of the Negro working class with the simultaneous aspects of race and class. His book delves into the interwar period, and brings back almost forgotten archives and memories.

The influence of Marxist thought on some Negro activists is shown. To the extent that the American Communist Party received significant membership from Negroes. At the time, it was one of the few relatively colour-blind organisations. Of course, this very fact was used against the Communists and Negro activists by segregationists.

The book has numerous nuggets of history that might have often been omitted from other texts. Thus, you may well have heard of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which fought for the Spanish Republic during its civil war. But did you know that in that brigade were over 70 Negroes? Who saw the war as an extension of a war on racism and poverty, in Africa and the US. Kelley shows gives us their motivations and how they fared.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Cutting edge history at its best. March 14, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Race Rebels forces readers to re-think their definitions of politics, resistance, and the relationship between social movements and everyday life. It is certainly the most sophisticated history book I've ever read. The author does a great job dissecting the struggles of African Americans in the 20th century and helps us understand why these struggles are so fundamental to american history.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The underbelly of the civil rights movement March 16, 2011

By Paul A. Mastin

Format:Paperback

Have you ever, when reading something, seen a reference to another book that makes you want to read it? Then when you get around to reading it, you realize that, with the first reference, you learned everything you wanted to know about the book? That was my experience with this book. I don't even remember where I read a reference to Robin D.G. Kelley's Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, but I know my life would not be less rich had I not read it.

This is not to say it's a bad book. It's a book that serves a function, fills a niche. Kelley writes as an academic (professor of history and Africana studies at NYU at the time of publication, now professor of American studies and ethnicity and history at USC), so the book is heavy on documentation and light on readability. (For 227 pages of text, there are 65 pages of end notes, a 37 page bibliography, and a 15 page index. But who's counting.) With that tone and purpose in mind, the reader can still glean an interesting take on civil rights and black history in the U.S.

In a relatively small space, Kelley covers a lot of ground. I enjoyed his recounting of, in a sense, the underbelly of the civil rights movement. We all know about Martin Luther King, the march on Washington, and the high-profile civil rights leaders. Kelley reveals the under-the-radar civil rights movement. Many workers, whether domestics, dock workers, field workers, etc., performed their own small acts of workplace rebellion, including industrial sabotage, workplace theft, and simple loafing. By doing so, they claimed ownership of their own time and persons, rejecting the role of slave.

I particularly liked the description of domestic workers taking, with the implied consent of their employers, food ("pan-toting"), clothing and utensils for their own use. One worker said, "We don't steal; we just 'take' things--they are part of the oral contract, exprest [sic] or implied. We understand it, and most of the white folks understand it." I was reminded of the biblical practice of gleaning, which required farmers to leave the corners of the field unharvested, or leave some grapes or olives ungathered, so that the poor can gather some for their own use.

Another favorite part was the description of the ongoing, decentralized bus protests, specifically in Birmingham. Give Rosa Parks her due, of course, but she was by no means the first, and certainly not the only one to thwart the bus segregation policy. Many did, on a daily basis. Particularly troubling was the treatment of black servicemen, who fought against racist policies overseas, only to come home and be told to move to the back of the bus.

Later on, as the civil rights movement became tied to the Communist Party, I began to lose a sense of solidarity. I can appreciate the point, that many African Americans do not share a commitment to American values, given the way they have been treated historically and in the present day, but it seems like African Americans should look at the alternatives: Communism, which oppresses all people as a matter of course, or American democracy, which has unfairly oppressed a minority but has taken great strides towards true equality. I have little patience for those who side with Communism, black or white.

I also did not enjoy Kelley's laudatory analysis of "gansta rap." I understand, as best a white man can, that blacks suffer from unfair treatment, and that there are discriminatory practices in law enforcement (see my review of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow), and that places like South Central L.A. have become occupied territories under police rule. But gangsta rap, when it celebrates cop killers, lauds illegal activity, and then demeans women, should be condemned, not praised, even if it is a heart-felt expression of the experiences of poor, inner-city blacks.

As a country, we are a long way from being free of contentious race discussions in our public discourse. Race Rebels reminds us that, even though church leaders and middle class and wealthy blacks may dominate discussions of race, the working class and poor blacks in our nation are the ones who really move the culture toward racial equality.