Our History Has Always Been Contraband

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 the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.

• ContentsPreface by Colin Kaepernick                                                                         ixPart One: HOW WE GOT HEREOn Racial Justice, Black History, Critical Race Theory,and Other Felonious Ideas                                                                     2Robin D. G. KelleyBlack Studies Is Political, Radical, Indispensable, and Insurgent                        16Keeanga-Yamahtta TaylorPart Two: THE HISTORY THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOWWalker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)                                   26David Walker“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (July 5, 1852)                                   28Frederick Douglass“The New Master and Mistress” from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)       33Harriet Jacobs“Our Raison D’être” from A Voice from the South (1892)                                      35Anna Julia Cooper“Introduction” from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (1931)              37Zora Neale Hurston“Political Education Neglected” from The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)           41Carter G. Woodson“The Propaganda of History” from Black Reconstruction in America (1935)            44W. E. B. Du Bois“The San Domingo Masses Begin” from The Black Jacobins (1938)                       48C. L. R. James“The Origin of Negro Slavery” from Capitalism and Slavery (1944)                      50Eric Williams“A Talk to Teachers” (October 16, 1963)                                                              53James Baldwin