| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. By Robin D. G. Kelley. (Boston: Beacon, 2002. xiv, 248 pp. $24.00, ISBN 0-8070-0976-8.)

This is not an intellectual history of black radical thought; nor is it a history of radical movements of specific times and places. Freedom Dreams is Robin D. G. Kelley's effort to resurrect important, radical ideas of the past, "to reopen a very old conversation about what kind of world we want to struggle for." Toward that end, Kelley offers "a brief, idiosyncratic outline of a history of black radical imagination in the twentieth century" (p. 7). Chapters offer mediations on the significance of ideas expressed by emigrationists such as Henry McNeal Turner and Marcus Garvey, Communists such as Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, and Claudia Jones, revolutionary nationalists such as Max Stanford and Amiri Baraka, proponents of reparations such as Queen Mother Moore, feminists such as Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis, and surrealist artist/thinkers such as Thelonious Monk and Aimé Césaire. Kelley insists from the start that our assessment of these radical agendas should not pivot around success or failure in terms of an individual's or group's stated goals. For reasons Kelley does not fully elaborate, there is value in simply considering the black utopias that these activists imagined.

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