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 is Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the co-founder of Hammer & Hope. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book, was recently published in an expanded second edition by Haymarket Books, with a new foreword by Angela Y. Davis. ​Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. In 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. With Colin Kaepernick and Robin D. G. Kelley, she edited Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Her latest book is the expanded and updated edition of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, featuring a new introduction by Taylor and a powerful new interview with Angela Y. Davis.

ISBN: 9798888900574

Publication date: July 4, 2023

Contents

Preface by Colin Kaepernick                                                                         ix

Part One: HOW WE GOT HERE

On Racial Justice, Black History, Critical Race Theory,

and Other Felonious Ideas                                                                     2

Robin D. G. Kelley

Black Studies Is Political, Radical, Indispensable, and Insurgent                        16

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Part Two: THE HISTORY THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW

Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)                                   26

David Walker

“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (July 5, 1852)                                   28

Frederick Douglass

“The New Master and Mistress” from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)       33

Harriet Jacobs

“Our Raison D’être” from A Voice from the South (1892)                                      35

Anna Julia Cooper

“Introduction” from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (1931)              37

Zora Neale Hurston

“Political Education Neglected” from The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)           41

Carter G. Woodson

“The Propaganda of History” from Black Reconstruction in America (1935)            44

W. E. B. Du Bois

“The San Domingo Masses Begin” from The Black Jacobins (1938)                       48

C. L. R. James

“The Origin of Negro Slavery” from Capitalism and Slavery (1944)                      50

Eric Williams

“A Talk to Teachers” (October 16, 1963)                                                              53

James Baldwin