Freedom Dreams

"Few books have had a more profound impact on me as a thinker and as a human being than Freedom Dreams. It is a guidebook to a radically just new world." — Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of How to Be an Antiracist
 
 
"A powerful book. . . . Robin D. G. Kelley produces histories of black radicalism and visions of the future that defy convention and expectation." — Angela Y. Davis

 
"Freedom Dreams was a blast of fresh air in the dark days of 2002, and its reissue will have the same effect today when it’s even more needed. Kelly’s powerful narrative of social movements is a handbook of dynamic hope." — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
 
 
"From one of the most important thinkers of our time, Freedom Dreams is a tour de force that opens up fresh modes of knowledge and radical possibilities. Robin D. G. Kelley's indispensable history of the Black radical imagination inspired generations of intellectuals and activists to struggle for liberation. Now, this twentieth-anniversary edition invites still others to continue freedom dreaming—a practice that allows us to imagine the kind of world we want to create and that has only grown more urgent over the past two decades." — Elizabeth Hinton, author of  America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s
 
"These days it is so easy to know what to be against, but the crushing weight of a world on fire makes it hard to see what we are for through the ashes. This makes the reissue of Freedom Dreams all the more necessary, as Kelley and the Black freedom struggle he chronicles show us once again how to rebuild a politics of desire, of a freedom worthy of the name." — Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back
 
 
"Robin Kelley describes the Black radical imagination like the champ—floating like a butterfly (the expression of Beauty) and stinging like a bee (the struggle for Truth). Kelley pollinates too, among the Red, the Black, the reparationist, the feminist, the Third World, the marvelous, and it’s all wide-awake." — Peter Linebaugh, author of Red Round Globe Hot Burning
 
 
"Robin D. G. Kelley teaches us that dreams of freedom are all we need and not enough. He excavates and shares the history of how we do what can’t be done. It’s time to read Freedom Dreams again, and again." — Fred Moten, author of consent not to be a single being
 
 
"The preeminent historian of Black popular culture." — Cornel West

"A bold and provocative celebration of the black radical imagination in the 20th century." — Laura Ciolkowski, The New York Times Book Review
 
"Although he does not record CDs, Robin Kelley may well be the hippest intellectual in the land . . . . [He] writes unflinchingly of freedom and love, dreams and visions, revolts of the mind." — The Nation, Jason Sokol

"Based on Kelley’s belief that to make a better world we must first imagine it, this brilliantly conceived and written book recounts the accomplishments of black activists and thinkers over the past century who have been committed to remaking the world." — Library Journal