https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zx0rz88mDcA?si=W
Friday, July 10, 2026
FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Ta-Nehisi Coates One of the Finest and Most Courageous And Thus Truly Profound Public Intellectuals, Journalists, Authors, Historians, and Social and Critics In the United States in the 21st Century On the American Empire And the Tragic Ongoing Cost Of Its Fatally Corrupt And Oppressive Hegemony in the World and Its Direct and Disturbing Political, Moral, and Ethical Impact On Kamala Harris And Her Democratic Party Policy Platform Via Her Mentor and Chief Ideological Sponsor Joe Biden and the Ruling Hierarchy of the Democratic Party's Leaders And Their Elitist Donor Class During the Presidential Election in 2024, Especially with Respect to the Massive Genocide in Gaza and Ruthless and Horrendous Plunder and Exploitation Of Land, Labor, and Resources by the Heinous and Deadly Apartheid System both in Gaza And in The Palestinian West Bank. Among Many Other Crucial Areas Of Investigation Coates Raises the Question of the Value of the Legacy Of Such Extraordinary and essential L:eegacy of Leadership and the Imperatives Of Justice, Freedom, Equality and Self Determination by Such Important Leading Black Women in the Movements of the 1960s and '70s As Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Coretta Scott King And so Many Others in the Major and Essential Civil Rights and Black Power Movements Of the Past Century. What is Its True and Still Powerful Legacy For Our Present Epoch
https://www.vanityfair.com/story/the-next-black-president
COMMENTARY
Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?
Ta-Nehisi Coates reckons with that question, and what it means for the 2028 election.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
June 15, 2026
Vanity Fair
Kamala Harris at a campaign rally on November 04, 2024 in Allentown, PennsylvaniaMichael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Listen • 41 minutes
The patron saint of the 2024 Democratic National Convention was Fannie Lou Hamer—recalcitrant sharecropper turned agitator and, like the Democratic presidential nominee, a black woman. Hamer worked on the plantation of W.D. Marlow near Ruleville, Mississippi—laboring in the fields, cleaning the Marlow manse, and keeping the family’s records. All this, estimates Hamer biographer Kate Clifford Larson, earned her “between $600 and $800 a year, less than half of what white farm families earned in 1948.”
This was by design—the mandate of Mississippi’s ruling class was assured through the reduction of the state’s black residents to near slavery. Hamer took her revenge: She wore the Marlows’ fine clothes while they were away. She stole their perfume. She bathed in their tub. She used the family’s spoons and then watched them eat behind her. It was said that Hamer “didn’t have real good sense,” that she was “uppity,” and filled with “gripes.” But, as Larson recounts, Hamer’s own analysis hinted at something deeper—“I was rebelling in the only way that I could rebel.”
IN THE TRADITION. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers at the funeral of four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963: Emma Bell, Dorie Ladner, Dona Richards, Sam Shirah, and Doris Derby. Photo by Danny Lyon/Magnum
In 1962, the rebellion was joined. That was the summer that a bevy of civil rights workers descended on Hamer’s Sunflower County seeking volunteers to help register blacks to vote. Hamer signed up and, through her courage, charisma, and oratory, quickly drew ardent disciples and ruthless adversaries. In 1963, Hamer was arrested, jailed, and at the behest of her white captors, beaten with a blackjack by two African American inmates. She emerged from captivity grievously injured but recalcitrant as ever.
A year later Hamer cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, aiming to displace the segregated delegation to that year’s Democratic convention. This was a problem. Lyndon B. Johnson feared that Hamer’s protest would cost him Mississippi, or perhaps the entire Deep South. When Hamer testified at the convention, it was televised nationally. A flustered Johnson quickly called an impromptu press conference to knock “that illiterate woman,” as he would reportedly call Hamer, off the air. The evening news broadcast Hamer’s testimony anyway.
“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the convention. “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily.” Hamer died in 1977. But she has become a hero, particularly to black women, who see in her an ancient tradition of politics that extends back to their arrival on these shores. That same political tradition, 60 years later, delivered Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.
In 2020, when many saw in Joe Biden a floundering candidate, a loose coalition of black women activists saw an opportunity. The coalition included, among others, voting rights activist Melanie Campbell, 2024 Democratic National Convention committee chair Minyon Moore, and investor and strategist Jotaka Eaddy. They organized and applied pressure. They demanded a black woman on the ticket. They got it. They demanded a black woman on the Supreme Court. They got it. They demanded a black woman at the Federal Reserve. They got that too. And they got even more. By the end of 2024, Biden had appointed a record number of black women to the federal bench and cut black unemployment and black poverty levels to record lows. He’d passed a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which in its single year of operation reduced black child poverty rates by half. This was an enviable string of political victories. And when Biden withdrew from the campaign and endorsed Harris, the most tantalizing victory of all was at hand. Now the same coalition of black women who could credibly claim the first fulfillment of a black agenda in recent memory pressed their advantage.
During the pandemic, Eaddy created the Google group Win With Black Women, which began convening Sundays via Zoom.
It became a central organizing node, and the night Harris received Biden’s endorsement, Win With Black Women drew some 44,000 attendees. “We didn’t hang up until 1 a.m.,” recalls Eaddy. “It was a reminder of what was possible, it was a reminder of our power, and it was a reminder of the connection to a struggle, a fight, and quite frankly, that baton that our ancestors had handed to us that we were collectively holding.”
No ancestor loomed larger over the convention’s proceedings in Chicago than Hamer. Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison invoked her familiar phrase, “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The 2024 Mississippi Democratic delegation expressed their pride in representing “heroes such as Fannie Lou Hamer.” Maxine Waters praised Hamer and noted she was one of Harris’s “heroes.” In this, fatefully, Harris and the black women who propelled her to the top of the ticket were not alone.
Ten months earlier, on October 7, Hamas and other allied forces crossed out of Gaza and killed approximately 1,200 people, 800 of whom were civilians. In response, Israel launched a total war against the people of Gaza. In the first 30 days of this assault, Israel killed at least 4,100 children—roughly eight times as many children as Russia killed in 21 months during its war of conquest in Ukraine. It was as if each morning the IDF gathered up five classrooms of students and then erased them. “We are fighting human animals,” Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant asserted, “and are acting accordingly.”
The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good
The arsenal for this war against children, against “human animals,” was the United States of America. According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, America supplied 69 percent of Israel’s major conventional arms imports between 2019 and 2023 and approved some $20 billion in arms sales to Israel in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention. And the man who held the keys to that arsenal just happened to be one of the most progressive presidents black America has ever known.
Now another coalition—a group of young Democrats at the fringes of the party—looked for a way to bring Gaza to the center of the convention. They organized the Uncommitted National Movement—urging voters to check or write in “uncommitted” on the primary ballot and thus earn delegates of this selfsame line who would then have a presence at the DNC. “We tried our best to replicate Fannie Lou Hamer and the Bus Freedom movement when they went to the DNC,” says Uncommitted cochair Layla Elabed. “We literally looked at them and said, ‘Okay, how do we apply those lessons and practices to Uncommitted?’ ”
A black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.
The Uncommitted campaign settled on a single demand: a Palestinian American speaker to endorse the nominee at the convention. A symbolic re-embrace of Arab Americans would help Uncommitted delegates assure their community members that Harris was indeed taking their complaints seriously. According to Elabed, the organizers spent that week batting potential names back and forth with the Harris campaign for vetting. The exchange seemed promising. But as name after name was refused—Harris fundraiser Hala Hijazi, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, Georgia representative Ruwa Romman—Elabed’s optimism began to fade. And then on that Wednesday Uncommitted got a call: The call for a Palestinian American speaker was rejected.
It’s tough to identify a singular flaw that cost Harris the election. She ultimately won the Arab American vote, but there was a 12 percent swing away from her candidacy compared to Biden in 2020. Of those Democratic voters who broke away from Harris, nearly as many went to a third party as went to Trump. The effect of Gaza on these particular swing voters lingers painfully in the thoughts of Harris’s most ardent supporters. “I do believe that there were progressive critiques [to be made] of Harris,” says Eaddy. But the sheer fervor of protest from putative allies stunned Eaddy. “I believe that had dire consequences on the result of the election and ultimately where we are as a country right now.”
From this perspective, a sector of the Democratic electorate demanded moral perfection of Harris and in the process allowed a completely immoral Donald Trump to return to power. For African Americans, presidential elections have almost always been exercises in lesser evils and harm reduction. Looking at the damage done to America’s public health system, a secret police force unleashed on its cities, the indiscriminate bombing of an elementary school, the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and the lust for extrajudicial killing, the great disaster of a Trump presidency is all too clear.
But two weeks before Harris accepted the nomination, Israeli media aired footage of guards appearing to rape a Palestinian prisoner. By then, the Israeli government had wiped out roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population—some 40,000 human beings. A letter published in The Lancet by three public health researchers estimated that 186,000 Gazan deaths could be attributed to the conflict, including indirect deaths—8 percent of the strip’s population. To preserve democracy, Palestinian Americans were being asked to support a member of the administration that repeatedly armed the agents of this carnage.
“I think for a lot of African Americans, we weren’t connecting with how visceral the anger was at Biden and [Harris] because of what they were allowing,” says journalist Joy Reid. “And because of her sort of political inability to speak directly to the genocide, which I still don’t understand, to be honest. I genuinely don’t, because I know she’s an empathetic person. I’ve covered this woman for a really long time.... But people just didn’t see it and she couldn’t voice it. I don’t understand it. To this day I cannot explain it.”
Listen • 41 minutes
The patron saint of the 2024 Democratic National Convention was Fannie Lou Hamer—recalcitrant sharecropper turned agitator and, like the Democratic presidential nominee, a black woman. Hamer worked on the plantation of W.D. Marlow near Ruleville, Mississippi—laboring in the fields, cleaning the Marlow manse, and keeping the family’s records. All this, estimates Hamer biographer Kate Clifford Larson, earned her “between $600 and $800 a year, less than half of what white farm families earned in 1948.”
This was by design—the mandate of Mississippi’s ruling class was assured through the reduction of the state’s black residents to near slavery. Hamer took her revenge: She wore the Marlows’ fine clothes while they were away. She stole their perfume. She bathed in their tub. She used the family’s spoons and then watched them eat behind her. It was said that Hamer “didn’t have real good sense,” that she was “uppity,” and filled with “gripes.” But, as Larson recounts, Hamer’s own analysis hinted at something deeper—“I was rebelling in the only way that I could rebel.”
IN THE TRADITION. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers at the funeral of four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963: Emma Bell, Dorie Ladner, Dona Richards, Sam Shirah, and Doris Derby. Photo by Danny Lyon/Magnum
In 1962, the rebellion was joined. That was the summer that a bevy of civil rights workers descended on Hamer’s Sunflower County seeking volunteers to help register blacks to vote. Hamer signed up and, through her courage, charisma, and oratory, quickly drew ardent disciples and ruthless adversaries. In 1963, Hamer was arrested, jailed, and at the behest of her white captors, beaten with a blackjack by two African American inmates. She emerged from captivity grievously injured but recalcitrant as ever.
A year later Hamer cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, aiming to displace the segregated delegation to that year’s Democratic convention. This was a problem. Lyndon B. Johnson feared that Hamer’s protest would cost him Mississippi, or perhaps the entire Deep South. When Hamer testified at the convention, it was televised nationally. A flustered Johnson quickly called an impromptu press conference to knock “that illiterate woman,” as he would reportedly call Hamer, off the air. The evening news broadcast Hamer’s testimony anyway.
“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the convention. “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily.” Hamer died in 1977. But she has become a hero, particularly to black women, who see in her an ancient tradition of politics that extends back to their arrival on these shores. That same political tradition, 60 years later, delivered Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.
In 2020, when many saw in Joe Biden a floundering candidate, a loose coalition of black women activists saw an opportunity. The coalition included, among others, voting rights activist Melanie Campbell, 2024 Democratic National Convention committee chair Minyon Moore, and investor and strategist Jotaka Eaddy. They organized and applied pressure. They demanded a black woman on the ticket. They got it. They demanded a black woman on the Supreme Court. They got it. They demanded a black woman at the Federal Reserve. They got that too. And they got even more. By the end of 2024, Biden had appointed a record number of black women to the federal bench and cut black unemployment and black poverty levels to record lows. He’d passed a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which in its single year of operation reduced black child poverty rates by half. This was an enviable string of political victories. And when Biden withdrew from the campaign and endorsed Harris, the most tantalizing victory of all was at hand. Now the same coalition of black women who could credibly claim the first fulfillment of a black agenda in recent memory pressed their advantage.
During the pandemic, Eaddy created the Google group Win With Black Women, which began convening Sundays via Zoom.
It became a central organizing node, and the night Harris received Biden’s endorsement, Win With Black Women drew some 44,000 attendees. “We didn’t hang up until 1 a.m.,” recalls Eaddy. “It was a reminder of what was possible, it was a reminder of our power, and it was a reminder of the connection to a struggle, a fight, and quite frankly, that baton that our ancestors had handed to us that we were collectively holding.”
No ancestor loomed larger over the convention’s proceedings in Chicago than Hamer. Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison invoked her familiar phrase, “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The 2024 Mississippi Democratic delegation expressed their pride in representing “heroes such as Fannie Lou Hamer.” Maxine Waters praised Hamer and noted she was one of Harris’s “heroes.” In this, fatefully, Harris and the black women who propelled her to the top of the ticket were not alone.
Ten months earlier, on October 7, Hamas and other allied forces crossed out of Gaza and killed approximately 1,200 people, 800 of whom were civilians. In response, Israel launched a total war against the people of Gaza. In the first 30 days of this assault, Israel killed at least 4,100 children—roughly eight times as many children as Russia killed in 21 months during its war of conquest in Ukraine. It was as if each morning the IDF gathered up five classrooms of students and then erased them. “We are fighting human animals,” Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant asserted, “and are acting accordingly.”
The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good
The arsenal for this war against children, against “human animals,” was the United States of America. According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, America supplied 69 percent of Israel’s major conventional arms imports between 2019 and 2023 and approved some $20 billion in arms sales to Israel in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention. And the man who held the keys to that arsenal just happened to be one of the most progressive presidents black America has ever known.
Now another coalition—a group of young Democrats at the fringes of the party—looked for a way to bring Gaza to the center of the convention. They organized the Uncommitted National Movement—urging voters to check or write in “uncommitted” on the primary ballot and thus earn delegates of this selfsame line who would then have a presence at the DNC. “We tried our best to replicate Fannie Lou Hamer and the Bus Freedom movement when they went to the DNC,” says Uncommitted cochair Layla Elabed. “We literally looked at them and said, ‘Okay, how do we apply those lessons and practices to Uncommitted?’ ”
A black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.
The Uncommitted campaign settled on a single demand: a Palestinian American speaker to endorse the nominee at the convention. A symbolic re-embrace of Arab Americans would help Uncommitted delegates assure their community members that Harris was indeed taking their complaints seriously. According to Elabed, the organizers spent that week batting potential names back and forth with the Harris campaign for vetting. The exchange seemed promising. But as name after name was refused—Harris fundraiser Hala Hijazi, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, Georgia representative Ruwa Romman—Elabed’s optimism began to fade. And then on that Wednesday Uncommitted got a call: The call for a Palestinian American speaker was rejected.
It’s tough to identify a singular flaw that cost Harris the election. She ultimately won the Arab American vote, but there was a 12 percent swing away from her candidacy compared to Biden in 2020. Of those Democratic voters who broke away from Harris, nearly as many went to a third party as went to Trump. The effect of Gaza on these particular swing voters lingers painfully in the thoughts of Harris’s most ardent supporters. “I do believe that there were progressive critiques [to be made] of Harris,” says Eaddy. But the sheer fervor of protest from putative allies stunned Eaddy. “I believe that had dire consequences on the result of the election and ultimately where we are as a country right now.”
From this perspective, a sector of the Democratic electorate demanded moral perfection of Harris and in the process allowed a completely immoral Donald Trump to return to power. For African Americans, presidential elections have almost always been exercises in lesser evils and harm reduction. Looking at the damage done to America’s public health system, a secret police force unleashed on its cities, the indiscriminate bombing of an elementary school, the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and the lust for extrajudicial killing, the great disaster of a Trump presidency is all too clear.
But two weeks before Harris accepted the nomination, Israeli media aired footage of guards appearing to rape a Palestinian prisoner. By then, the Israeli government had wiped out roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population—some 40,000 human beings. A letter published in The Lancet by three public health researchers estimated that 186,000 Gazan deaths could be attributed to the conflict, including indirect deaths—8 percent of the strip’s population. To preserve democracy, Palestinian Americans were being asked to support a member of the administration that repeatedly armed the agents of this carnage.
“I think for a lot of African Americans, we weren’t connecting with how visceral the anger was at Biden and [Harris] because of what they were allowing,” says journalist Joy Reid. “And because of her sort of political inability to speak directly to the genocide, which I still don’t understand, to be honest. I genuinely don’t, because I know she’s an empathetic person. I’ve covered this woman for a really long time.... But people just didn’t see it and she couldn’t voice it. I don’t understand it. To this day I cannot explain it.”
Perhaps the answer lay in what Harris did say. At the convention, the vice president pledged to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” This language is fairly boilerplate for most people seeking the presidency. But it is also at odds with the very tradition that brought Harris to the brink. Hamer was a student of nonviolence—and not just for protesters in Mississippi. As early as 1964 she opposed the Vietnam War, horrified at the prospect of American bombs being dropped on a much weaker people half a world away.“I am sick of the racist war in Vietnam,” Hamer said at an antiwar rally in the 1960s, “when we don’t have justice in the United States.”
Perhaps it is naive to expect Harris, a candidate for the American presidency, to speak in the same register as Hamer, who was its antagonist. But it was that very antagonist whom Harris and her party claimed as a champion. The dynamic is familiar—Barack Obama’s claim of Martin Luther King Jr. was similarly incongruent. That is because a black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.
But what was known in 1964 was largely abandoned in 2024, and what was offered instead was a questionable survivalist theory of democracy—one that proposed to erect a shield over one group while providing weaponry to destroy another. For reasons moral, pragmatic, and perhaps mostly ancestral, the next black presidency will have to think bigger. To its list of adversaries—which include a renewed white supremacy, a rapacious billionaire class, an energetic Christian nationalism—it must add another, perhaps more formidable than them all: empire.
The portrait of America as an imperial power cuts against its self-image as a righteous cradle of democracy. But from its inception, the country has been aggressive and expansionist, seizing land from its Indigenous population, paying off some European powers while menacing others.
“I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1809. Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty,” as he dubbed it, steadily expanded across the continent throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, then it turned to the oceans, annexing Hawaii, seizing the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, then drawing Cuba and the Dominican Republic into its sphere of influence.
Even as the United States expanded its rule, there always remained a dim sense that an Empire of Liberty was a contradiction. The inveterate white supremacist Woodrow Wilson mouthed anti-colonial rhetoric before reverting to form at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. “Wilson spoke eloquently on behalf of smaller nations and their right to self-determination,” writes Daniel Immerwahr in his book How to Hide an Empire. “Yet he had southeastern European nations in mind.”
A Year of Conflict in the Middle East, From a War Reporter’s Perspective
After World War II, with colonialism considered passé, President Dwight Eisenhower embraced more clandestine means to preserve the United States’ imperial reach. President Harry Truman “drew the line at plotting against foreign leaders,” writes Stephen Kinzer in his book The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War. “That line evaporated when he left office. Eisenhower wished to wage a new kind of war.” Eisenhower’s national security team subsequently plotted to overthrow no fewer than three different democracies on three different continents over the course of his eight years. For oil, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh was toppled in 1953. For fruit plantations, Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was deposed in 1954. And in 1960, fearing Congo and its vast resources moving out of the West’s sphere of influence, Eisenhower ordered Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba murdered. The Belgians beat him to it.
Touring the world, a young John F. Kennedy was disturbed to find that America “was definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Europe.” Like Wilson, he paid lip service to the anti-colonial spirit and, at his inauguration, pledged support for the Third World “not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” The Bay of Pigs was three months later.
Kennedy agonized over the failed operation to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro, but he quickly made peace with cloak-and-dagger imperialism. His CIA engaged the Mafia to kill Castro (1960); urged a military coup in Brazil (1962), which would bear fruit two years later; helped apartheid-era South Africa locate and arrest Nelson Mandela (1962); and supported the Ba’ath Party in overthrowing the Iraqi government (1963) and crushing its communist opposition. In Vietnam the once anti-colonialist Kennedy first supported Eisenhower’s handpicked dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, then facilitated a coup against him in which he was subsequently killed. When Kennedy was himself killed, a few weeks after Diem, so profligate were his shadow wars that some close to him believed, as Malcolm X said, that the chickens had indeed come home to roost. “Bobby Kennedy himself suspected the killings might be the work of the CIA, the Mob or Castro,” writes journalist Vincent Bevins in his book The Jakarta Method. “Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s first suspicion was that it was retaliation for Diem’s murder.
Fears of imperial boomerang did little to restrain Johnson or any other American president. Indeed, what stands out about the horrifying death toll in Gaza is how easily it slots into a history of American global power. In the same year Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights Act, his CIA helped dispatch the Indonesian president, Sukarno. Up to a million Indonesians were subsequently killed by the military regime, which the United States favored. Four years later, in a bid to crush the Viet Cong, President Richard Nixon secretly carpet-bombed Cambodia, which in turn led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Then in 1973, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, plotted the overthrow of yet another democracy in Chile, propping up the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. This history poses a discomfiting truth: Gaza is not a betrayal of American democratic tradition but an expression of an American imperial tradition.
Much as broadcast news in the ’60s made it hard for Southern white supremacists to hide their brutality, social media has made it impossible for Israel, and thus the American empire, to hide its ownThe tradition is literally generational. In 1893, John Watson Foster helped overthrow the queen of Hawaii. Sixty years later, Foster’s grandsons, Allen and John Dulles, took up the trade. As heads of the CIA and the State Department, respectively, they engaged Kermit Roosevelt Jr. to overthrow Mossadegh. Roosevelt was himself a scion of the imperial spirit—his grandfather was Theodore Roosevelt, who championed the annexation of the Philippines. The subsequent events are a dizzying whirlwind of horse trading and violence: In 1963 the CIA backs a coup d’etat by the Iraqi Ba’ath Party, which Saddam Hussein would eventually lead. In 1979 the American-allied shah of Iran is driven from power. In 1980 a frustrated United States backs Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War. In 2003 the United States topples Hussein and delivers him to his executioners. In 2026 the United States collaborates with Israel to kill Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. The tally? Four different regimes, with four different ideologies, of two opposing countries dispatched at the behest of one imperial power.The focus on the regime changes inflicted on the Arab world and the Middle East at large obscures the routine violence inflicted on its people. For Americans, the Iraq War is remembered as a case of bad intelligence, and George W. Bush’s image has largely been rehabilitated. The estimated 200,000 civilians directly killed on “bad intelligence” less so. In November 2008 an errant air strike, conducted under auspices of a lame-duck Bush administration, killed 37 civilians who were at a wedding party in Wech Baghtu, Afghanistan. “We cannot win the fight against terrorism with air strikes,” pleaded Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai. Five years later, under President Obama, another air strike hit another wedding party, this time in Yemen, killing 12 more people.
With a bipartisan acceptance of innocent death as the cost of doing business in the Muslim and Arab world, it is not a surprise that a kind of casual contempt for its leaders and peoples oozes from the orifices of both Republican and Democratic administrations. In his 2008 presidential campaign, conservatives pushed Obama to repeatedly deny he was a Muslim in roughly the same register as one would deny beating his wife. When the dictator Muammar Qaddafi was dragged out of a drainpipe, sodomized with a bayonet, and killed, Obama’s secretary of state Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a CBS reporter: “We came. We saw. He died!” In 2023, as the casualty reports out of Gaza mounted, Biden’s response was, essentially, to call bullshit—“I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said. Gaza’s health ministry responded by releasing the names of every single one of the identified dead.
When Biden dropped out and Harris became the nominee, there was reason for hope among the Uncommitted delegates. Off the record, Harris conveyed her deep despair at the scale of atrocity in Gaza. Less than a week into her campaign, she emerged from a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledging “not to be silent.” Moreover, among the coalition of black women who’d backed Harris, there were many who took a dim view of the Israeli state project. Eaddy, whose Win With Black Women call inspired a series (Win With Black Men, White Dudes for Harris, Swifties 4 Kamala), had visited the region in 2014. “What I walked away with was a parallel to the struggle for black Americans,” says Eaddy. “I saw things that were very similar.”
A call to vote uncommitted at the Michigan Democratic primary. Emily Elconin/The New York Times.
During a visit to Bethlehem, LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, recalls watching as an Israeli soldier pretended to shoot at a bunch of kids who were playing nearby. “Like they were ducks,” she remembers. “Even to this day, I can’t take it.”
Journalist Tiffany Cross, author of Love, Me: A Letter to Black Women in a Toxic Country, Career, and Relationship, visited the region under the auspices of AIPAC. It did not go as her sponsor planned. “Oh, I know exactly what this is,” Cross recalls thinking. “The Palestinians here are treated like black people.”
There was a consensus among many of the black women supporting Harris that a Palestinian speaker should have been allowed at the convention. But there also was a deep sense that the 2024 election presented a binary—Trump or Harris—and many in the Arab American community had made the wrong choice. This perspective originates in the basic truth that black people are a minority in a country that, at best, tolerates their existence.
And that vulnerability has landed with particular weight on black women.
The very American imperialism that so endangered Muslim life had its roots in genocide and enslavement, the latter of which always took particular interest in black women. At its root, it was a system of rape, industrial in both scale and effect. Enslavement or freedom was passed down to the child through the mother, meaning white men could augment a workforce trafficked from Africa by raping with impunity and enslaving their offspring. “She alone could give birth to a slave,” the historian Paula Giddings writes in her book When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. “Blacks constituted a permanent labor force and metaphor that were perpetuated through the Black woman’s womb.”
Typical of rape survivors, black women were freighted with a particular kind of animus. “Mistresses and masters (and overseers) described slave women as lazier, filthier; more shiftless, slatternly, ignorant and impudent than slave men,” writes Thavolia Glymph in her book Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. The stereotypes mirrored a real-world disregard for the suffering of black women. Antebellum physician J. Marion Sims is known as the father of modern gynecology. He did this “fathering” by operating on the unanesthetized bodies of enslaved black women and girls.
But if America made black women a uniquely acted-upon class, black women too made themselves a unique class of political actors. Their particular oppression became a particular bond, evidenced in the pressure they were able to bring upon the Biden presidency. And that particular oppression also made the promise of a black woman president something more than another item on a checklist of firsts or the humoring of a particular interest group. “We would bring others along, which has always been the case,” says Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. “Even when our full freedoms were not actualized, we made it possible for others’ freedoms to be realized.”
“The average thought of my constituent is, Why the hell are we always bombing some other country?” says Pennsylvania congresswoman Summer Lee.
In 2020, Cross was part of that early coalition that demanded Biden name a black woman vice presidential nominee. In her mind, the demand was always about something larger. “I think I would hope anyway that this black woman is someone who is going to say the uncomfortable thing,” says Cross. “I have to trust that a black woman could not see tens of thousands of children being murdered and not be struck by that, not be moved by that. Whether you’re a mother or not, I trust because we experienced that. We saw firsthand the violence of America, and we’ve always had to tap into our humanity in a certain way, just for our own very survival.”
In 2024 this broad ethic of democracy came into conflict with a more prosaic politic. Harris and her party settled into a somewhat conservative pitch as the party of America before Trump. Perhaps the radical thought of a black woman as president made this approach seem prudent. But for many Arab and Muslim Americans, “America before Trump” meant returning to a time when FBI informants sought to entrap them, when police agencies spied on their mosques, and calling a presidential candidate a Muslim was a slur. Seemingly blind to this trauma, the Harris campaign followed up the Democratic National Convention snub by deploying Bill Clinton to Michigan. There, in the state with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, Clinton told an audience that Israel had been forced “to kill civilians” by Hamas, and that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belonged to the Jewish people because “they were there first.” Meanwhile, Harris welcomed her endorsement by Dick Cheney, who was not a very popular vice president but was a zealous defender of torturing Muslims. The cumulative message was not “We don’t need your vote.” It was
“We don’t value your life.”Elabed recalls a Harris supporter pleading for Elabed to help protect Harris now, on the implicit promise that Harris would protect Palestinian life later. This was not an abstract request—for the Palestinian American Elabed, it meant telling other Palestinian Americans that they must support a politician who’d pledged to continue to arm the state that was presently annihilating their families.
“Who’s protecting them?” Elabed recalls wondering. “Who’s protecting their families?” When I was 23 years old, Clinton bombed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. American intelligence indicated that Al-Shifa was controlled by Sudan’s fundamentalist government and was providing al-Qaida with chemical weapons. The claim quickly collapsed. Like how the 2003 claims of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs collapsed. Like how the 1964 claims of a North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin collapsed. I hadn’t been a fan of Clinton. Still, given a choice between the party of Jesse Helms and the presidency of Bill Clinton, calculating the “lesser evil” seemed easy. It was a calculation made through the exclusion of the Sudanese people.
In March, I flew to Dublin with my wife, intent on seeing the math with clearer, if older, eyes. I had coffee with 20-year-old Dima Shamaly, an electrical engineering student at University College Dublin. Shamaly is among a cohort of young Gazans admitted to universities in Ireland and granted visas. There is no guarantee that they will ever return to Gaza or anywhere in Palestine. They have no idea when, or whether, they will see their families again.
Shamaly has light brown skin, an irreverent sense of humor, and a loner’s mien. Her mother was a social worker. Before he died from wounds sustained in an Israeli air strike, her father worked as an emergency doctor for UNICEF. Shamaly herself had survived such a bombing.
In Dublin, she walked into the small café where we’d arranged to meet, hugged my wife, hugged me, and then she told me, over the course of a conversation:
I was born in Gaza City. I have two older brothers and a younger sister and a younger brother as well. One is 25. One is 23. I’m 20. My sister is 15 and my younger brother is 11. The best memory I have is going to the sea to talk to all the sailors by the beach. Everyone there knew me. So we would eat some bread, have some tea, and talk. Sometimes they would take me on the boat and go around. But you can’t go far, because the Israelis will shoot you.
There was like a gifted school in Gaza. It’s called Arafat for Gifted Students School in Gaza. It’s a mixed school with girls and boys. Before you get in, you have to pass an exam which covers chemistry, biology, math, Arabic, and English. If you pass this exam, you’ll go to the interview. Then after the interview, you’ll be able to be in the school. So, yeah, that was my school. I finished at the top of my class. I applied to some schools in the US before the war. I got full admission to Vassar College. So I picked Vassar, and I was going to go there. But then the war came and then I wasn’t able to get a visa or anything. Then Trump banned Palestinians from going to the US.
HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER Dima Shamaly, shown here in 2024, is a 20-year-old electrical engineering student at University College Dublin, one of a number of young Gazans studying in Ireland. They have no idea whether or when they will see their families again. Courtesy Dima Shamaly
Dima Shamaly with her father in 2014.Courtesy
Dima Shamaly.
To be honest, we all thought that it’s just going to be like any other war. It’s not going to last that long or it’s not going to do anything. But we got displaced like 10 times or something. We were displaced in a house in Nuseirat. We were on the second floor, me and the woman, her name’s Kifaya, and her baby. There was no warning and no nothing. They just bombed the house. The last thing I remember is just that everything was red. The sky, the window, all that was red. There was no voice, no sound. I remember when I was under the rubble, I thought I’m actually okay. I thought nothing was wrong. But the moment they got me out, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
When I was in the hospital, they told me, “Thank God you’re alive” and all that. Then I said, “Okay. What happened?” They said, “Farah is alive,” like the baby. Her name is Farah. “And Kifaya is dead.” I was just...I don’t know. I don’t know.... There’s guilt. I know it’s just not good to feel this way, but it’s just the survivor’s guilt, this kind of thing. It’s like, “Okay, why specifically her? Why did she die and I live? Maybe she’s better than me. Well, she’s definitely better than me because she’s a mother. She has kids and she has a lot of responsibility.” These kinds of thoughts. And not just me. I think everyone who experienced this also has these kinds of thoughts.
I didn’t start school in September, because I was here to do a foundation year, but then I went to the engineering office and I was like, “I don’t need a foundation year.” I know math and I know English. A foundation year is basically for international students who don’t speak the language or who will find it hard to study in a different language. So they give them a year where they have to study basic things. So if you’re doing engineering, you’ll have basic maths or precalculus and English. So I went to the engineering office and I was like, “You can do whatever. You can test me or interview me.” And so I made an interview with them and they asked me a lot of scientific questions, and I passed it. Then they said, “Okay, but you have to wait a month until we approve your application to go straight into engineering.”
I found out that my father was killed on Facebook. Some of his friends posted that he was a great doctor and all that. He always said, “I’m here for a mission. I’m in this life for a mission. If my mission is over, then my life is not worth anything.” I never really understood what he meant, then he was killed and I understood. It’s just crazy because he had the chance to leave. When the war started he had offers from the Hungarian government and other places to go out of Gaza and he was like, “No.” He even wrote articles about doctors leaving Gaza and how shameful it is. As a daughter, of course I wish we’d left. But as a Palestinian, no.
When you live as black Americans do, in a constant state of emergency, it can be hard to look across an ocean and see what the long arm of your country is doing to people like Dima. What is already blurry is rendered almost imperceptible by the spectacles of American racism. Because when those whom America kills come to this country, the one sure way for them to advance is to become white, and the one sure way to become white is to put as much distance between oneself and black people as possible. Knowing this, the temptation to adopt a more siloed strategy, one that eschews coalitions with allies who have disappointed us, is strong. This is a very bad idea.
For Elabed, a Palestinian American, backing Harris meant telling others that they must support a politician who’d pledged to continue to arm the state that was annihilating their families.
If only because we are a minority, we need the numbers that come from alliances. And then there are certain moments, when a particular issue multiplies the power of certain allies. The Arab American vote is relatively tiny and constrained to a few states. But much as the advance of broadcast news made it hard for
Southern white supremacists to hide their brutality, the sweep of social media has made it impossible for Israel, and thus the American empire, to hide its own. And just as the image of black people beaten for trying to cross a bridge resonated beyond our community, the image of a Palestinian hooked up to an IV, writhing in agony and burning alive, resonates far beyond theirs.
This resonance was not appreciated in 2024. A party that was deeply identified with destroying apartheid within its borders attempted to win by ignoring apartheid abroad. It did not work. “There was an underestimation of what was really afoot and how much it meant to so many people from many different walks of life,” says Pressley. “And I would say especially the younger generation. And I do believe it is why so many young people just did not participate and stayed home.”
There is another way.
In late 2023, as Shamaly and her family fled Gaza City, opinion polls showed African Americans, relative to the rest of the country, believed Israel should stop its military assault on Gaza. The earliest congressional call for a ceasefire, on October 16, was cosponsored by a black woman—then Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush. Half of her cosigners were black and none were white. In January 2024, a coalition of more than a thousand black pastors called for Biden to press for a ceasefire. The next month, the African Methodist Episcopal Church called for an end to aid to Israel, claiming the United States was supporting “mass genocide.”
“The average thought of my constituent is, Why the hell are we always bombing some other country?” says Pennsylvania congresswoman Summer Lee. And there is wisdom in this instinct. “We can’t afford health care, we can’t afford housing, we can’t afford grocery bills, right? All of those things, we’re told, are luxuries that if you work hard enough or if you’re special enough, you’ll get. Well, we spend a billion dollars a day dropping bombs in Iran. So those things are not disconnected.”
Lee is pointing to a different tradition of activism, one that does not accept a survivalist democracy in which the lives of one suffering people are balanced against another. We intimately know the perils of this balancing. Indeed, the history of American politics is littered with ostensible golden ages—the Era of Good Feelings, the Roaring Twenties, the postwar ’50s—that can only be deemed such by our total exclusion. Out of that knowledge comes a tradition of broader democracy extolled by some of black America’s most celebrated heroes.In 1965, the year of the Voting Rights Act’s passage, Coretta Scott King stood before an anti-war rally in Madison Square Garden and rejected survivalist democracy:
"Have you often wondered as I have, why it is that the same president Johnson who speaks so eloquently for civil rights, and who has been so moved by the struggle for the right to vote and the anguish of the poor, can be so callous about the Vietnamese and so apparently thoughtless on foreign policy. I think it is because we permit him to be."King’s criticism of the Vietnam War preceded her husband’s. It was neither popular with the FBI, which, as political scientist Jeanne Theoharis notes, subsequently labeled her a subversive, nor with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Johnson had already passed two civil rights bills and in 1968 passed another. He was the best president black America had seen in nearly a century. And here was King attacking that very president in the name of a people half a world away. But King’s mandate came out of the empathy of having seen her people, and herself, excluded from democracy.
“I have to trust that a black woman could not see tens of thousands of children being murdered and not be struck by that, not be moved by that,” says journalist Tiffany Cross.
It is broadly assumed that Harris is planning to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. There are those who would write her off, and perhaps her timidity before America’s facilitation of Gaza’s destruction has earned that dismissal. But if Harris were interested in a second act, one rooted not in a failed pragmatism but the courage of the heroes she claims, Fannie Lou Hamer and Coretta Scott King, she would not have to look far for inspiration. Harris’s maternal grandmother was an activist in India, sheltering women from abuse and leading education initiatives for them about contraceptives. Her maternal grandfather was active in the fight for Indian independence. Harris herself was born in Oakland in 1964—the same year Hamer made her stand. The Harrises were intellectual activists, with a keen interest in black struggle and its broader implications. They organized study groups focused on black writers such as Ralph Ellison, Carter G. Woodson, and W.E.B. Du Bois. They debated apartheid and decolonization. They hosted black writers like Amiri Baraka and even Hamer herself. Harris’s parents saw Martin Luther King speak together, protested the Vietnam War, and marched for civil rights pushing their firstborn in a stroller.
“These were my mother’s people,” Harris writes in her memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. “From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community. It was the foundation of her new American life.”
Harris recalls the walls of her day care center as decorated with posters of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. The nursery’s matriarch made pound cake and flaky biscuits, and played Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” She recalls being sent on Sundays to the 23rd Avenue Church of God, where Harris and her sister, Maya, sang in the children’s choir. They were reared in a social justice Christianity, which called upon them, according to Harris, to “defend the rights of the poor and needy.” This does not strike me as the biography of someone who needs lectures on the nexus between the black freedom struggle and its import to the broader world. To the contrary, it reads like the story of someone steeped in that knowledge.
And that story forces a very basic question: What was the point of all this? Why the invocations of Tubman, the readings of Du Bois, the visits from Hamer? And did the advocates of this collective pedagogy imagine their children rising to heights of power, only to view the darker nations of the world through the same violent lens as their oppressors? And if they did not, if they believed that the “poor and needy” meant those within the empire as well as those without, then what moral mandate does that place upon their children?
And if their children have come only to praise, not check, empire, then why have they come at all?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, The Message, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University. See more from V.F.’s THE GREAT FIRE project here, which Coates guest-edited for the September 2020 issue.
Monday, July 6, 2026
IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:
Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley
by Walter Riley
by Walter Riley
Edited by Jesse Strauss
Foreword by Boots Riley
Legacy Left Books, 2026
Foreword by Boots Riley
Legacy Left Books, 2026
[Publication date: June 23, 2026]
Eighty years of lessons from the Black freedom struggle, labor movements, and internationalism.
Raised among the entrails of chattel slavery in Durham, North Carolina, Walter shares political reflections and lessons from decades of movement experience. This includes 1950s and early 1960s mobilizations against Jim Crow apartheid laws and welcoming Freedom Riders to Durham, followed by later 1960s student and labor organizing with the Progressive Labor Party, early Black Panther Party formations, anti-war activities, and co-leading the Peace and Freedom Party’s Black Caucus.
In the 1970s, Walter became a leader in the national Progressive Labor Party and led labor and welfare organizing in Chicago and Detroit. In the 1980s he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer and organized against South Africa’s apartheid system. His more recent work supporting infrastructure for Haitian movement-building and confronting police violence in Oakland allowed him to draw parallels between the dangers of international structural adjustment programs abroad, and the pitfalls of the nonprofit industrial complex at home.
This text is a multi-generational conversation between legendary Civil Rights organizer Walter Riley and longtime friend and Oakland organizer, Jesse Strauss. Together, they reflect on the importance of political action as the primary venue for learning and reflection. Walter Riley has a never-ending commitment to building a better world and he’ll challenge readers to avoid the paralysis of analysis that slows movements down and to avoid getting caught in the missives of ego. Includes a foreword by Walter Riley's son, Boots Riley.
REVIEWS:
"At a time when a lot of people are disconnected from actual movements, I hope my father’s legacy reminds you that it is each of our responsibility to participate in changing the world." —Boots Riley, from the foreword
“Walter Riley is one of the great revolutionary thinkers and strategists of our time–often compared with Amilcar Cabral or Walter Rodney. If you didn’t know this before, thanks to Jesse Strauss, now you know. You will find in these pages the critical insight, wisdom, and direction organizers need to meet the moment. And because Riley shares his own story of a life in struggle, you know why he is a beacon of light and brilliance for our movements.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Walter Riley is my political mentor and hero. Like Ella Baker, his lifelong commitment to the fight for freedom and justice has been powerful, persistent, and unassuming. As a union organizer, radical movement intellectual, people’s lawyer, and courageous freedom fighter, Walter’s contributions to a wide range of liberation movements over many decades is unmatched. An unflinching opponent of capitalism, colonialism, and racism from Haiti to Oakland, Walter is an exemplary champion of oppressed people the world over. No exaggeration. My only critique of this short bio-narrative is that it should be longer. There are so many important stories Walter could tell us, and lessons he could convey. Read, learn, and be inspired and fortified for the struggles ahead.” —Barbara Ransby, activist, historian, and author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
“Walter Riley is a Movement Man—the kind of essential organizer/activist/thinker/doer who keeps the Movement moving. Here is an urgent intergenerational dialogue, the ideal vehicle for unlocking the wisdom of a veteran freedom fighter whose organizing work centers on principled unity and whose vast experience is wholly relevant to the demands of radical movement building today. Riley knows that eighty years is a long time in the life of a man but the blink of an eye in the life of a struggle, and so he’s neither nostalgic for a ship that’s already left the shore nor interested in burnishing a legacy. Rather, he’s still leaning forward, still on the move and in the mix, still asking the most insistent and burning questions: How do we name this political moment? Where do we go from here? What does the known demand of us now? Read Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley as a challenge as well as an invitation to join Walter Riley on today’s barricades—we have a world to win.” —Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground and author of When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer
“The haymaker punch is named after the wide swinging motion of the scythe—the 14th Century agricultural tool used to reap edible grains and chop down undesirables. Name linked to the Latin scindere (to cut), the scythe’s broad arcing swing reaps abundance. Walter Riley’s deft dialectic introduces openness, risk, willingness to struggle, and revolutionary contingency to the scythe’s movement. In Walter’s words: ‘A haymaker in boxing is when you don’t know where the punch is going to land but you know it has power in it and you hope it’ll work. At the same time, you leave yourself open. People tend not to do that in actual boxing, but in this concept of being out in struggle, do some haymakers! Go after folks that are oppressive! Go after institutions! Go after ideas and thought processes that inhibit folks! Be intentional about it! Think about it but don’t hold back!’ This forcefully urgent volume is full of revolutionary insight, a ledger of radical praxis from my friend Walter Riley enriching our understanding of organizations and masses in motion: NAACP, CORE, The Black Panther Party, Progressive Labor Party, Fanmi Lavalas, and so much more. The geographical expanse is vast—NorthCarolina, Chicago, Detroit, Port-au-Prince, and of course, Oakland, California. Walter and Jesse Strauss’s text models through praxis its title formulation of ‘Quiet Leadership’—which like Assata Shakur’s notion of the ‘reluctant warrior’ opens up a treasure trove of insight informing their respective texts and archive of revolutionary praxis. This includes: the centrality of planning, the problem of leadership, the temptations of individuation, lessons of cadre building, mass base building, active listening, the nuance in Walter’s sense of ‘ante-revolutionary’ and anti-revolutionary. Thank you—Walter and Jesse—for this record of struggle—for feeding us, sustaining radical memory and current praxis, and cutting our enemies down to size. The pen is mightier than the scythe, but keep a scythe around just in case. Unite the many to defeat the few and while doing the damn thing—study this book and commence the throwing.” —Jeremy Matthew Glick, author of The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution
"Every city, every town, every village on this planet has iconic figures who spend their entire life being on the side of justice and clarity, being decent and warm hearted. Walter Riley is that person for northern California—a link to earlier struggles with his eyes firmly positioned on a future that is beyond the ugliness of the present. These conversations offer the education a new generation requires in how to be in the struggle for a lifetime and more." —Vijay Prashad, director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
"Throughout his lifetime on the front lines of struggle, Walter Riley’s dialectical clarity has energized and sharpened people’s movements from Durham to Oakland to Haiti to Palestine. Civil Rights and Structural Attacks is not just a memoir but a practical roadmap for the next generation of activists: a profound, personal, and necessary manifesto on revolutionary change guided by core political principles, deep love, and a few well-timed haymakers against the centers of power." —Nora Barrows-Friedman, journalist, author and editor of The Electronic Intifada
Raised among the entrails of chattel slavery in Durham, North Carolina, Walter shares political reflections and lessons from decades of movement experience. This includes 1950s and early 1960s mobilizations against Jim Crow apartheid laws and welcoming Freedom Riders to Durham, followed by later 1960s student and labor organizing with the Progressive Labor Party, early Black Panther Party formations, anti-war activities, and co-leading the Peace and Freedom Party’s Black Caucus.
In the 1970s, Walter became a leader in the national Progressive Labor Party and led labor and welfare organizing in Chicago and Detroit. In the 1980s he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer and organized against South Africa’s apartheid system. His more recent work supporting infrastructure for Haitian movement-building and confronting police violence in Oakland allowed him to draw parallels between the dangers of international structural adjustment programs abroad, and the pitfalls of the nonprofit industrial complex at home.
This text is a multi-generational conversation between legendary Civil Rights organizer Walter Riley and longtime friend and Oakland organizer, Jesse Strauss. Together, they reflect on the importance of political action as the primary venue for learning and reflection. Walter Riley has a never-ending commitment to building a better world and he’ll challenge readers to avoid the paralysis of analysis that slows movements down and to avoid getting caught in the missives of ego. Includes a foreword by Walter Riley's son, Boots Riley.
REVIEWS:
"At a time when a lot of people are disconnected from actual movements, I hope my father’s legacy reminds you that it is each of our responsibility to participate in changing the world." —Boots Riley, from the foreword
“Walter Riley is one of the great revolutionary thinkers and strategists of our time–often compared with Amilcar Cabral or Walter Rodney. If you didn’t know this before, thanks to Jesse Strauss, now you know. You will find in these pages the critical insight, wisdom, and direction organizers need to meet the moment. And because Riley shares his own story of a life in struggle, you know why he is a beacon of light and brilliance for our movements.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Walter Riley is my political mentor and hero. Like Ella Baker, his lifelong commitment to the fight for freedom and justice has been powerful, persistent, and unassuming. As a union organizer, radical movement intellectual, people’s lawyer, and courageous freedom fighter, Walter’s contributions to a wide range of liberation movements over many decades is unmatched. An unflinching opponent of capitalism, colonialism, and racism from Haiti to Oakland, Walter is an exemplary champion of oppressed people the world over. No exaggeration. My only critique of this short bio-narrative is that it should be longer. There are so many important stories Walter could tell us, and lessons he could convey. Read, learn, and be inspired and fortified for the struggles ahead.” —Barbara Ransby, activist, historian, and author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
“Walter Riley is a Movement Man—the kind of essential organizer/activist/thinker/doer who keeps the Movement moving. Here is an urgent intergenerational dialogue, the ideal vehicle for unlocking the wisdom of a veteran freedom fighter whose organizing work centers on principled unity and whose vast experience is wholly relevant to the demands of radical movement building today. Riley knows that eighty years is a long time in the life of a man but the blink of an eye in the life of a struggle, and so he’s neither nostalgic for a ship that’s already left the shore nor interested in burnishing a legacy. Rather, he’s still leaning forward, still on the move and in the mix, still asking the most insistent and burning questions: How do we name this political moment? Where do we go from here? What does the known demand of us now? Read Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley as a challenge as well as an invitation to join Walter Riley on today’s barricades—we have a world to win.” —Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground and author of When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer
“The haymaker punch is named after the wide swinging motion of the scythe—the 14th Century agricultural tool used to reap edible grains and chop down undesirables. Name linked to the Latin scindere (to cut), the scythe’s broad arcing swing reaps abundance. Walter Riley’s deft dialectic introduces openness, risk, willingness to struggle, and revolutionary contingency to the scythe’s movement. In Walter’s words: ‘A haymaker in boxing is when you don’t know where the punch is going to land but you know it has power in it and you hope it’ll work. At the same time, you leave yourself open. People tend not to do that in actual boxing, but in this concept of being out in struggle, do some haymakers! Go after folks that are oppressive! Go after institutions! Go after ideas and thought processes that inhibit folks! Be intentional about it! Think about it but don’t hold back!’ This forcefully urgent volume is full of revolutionary insight, a ledger of radical praxis from my friend Walter Riley enriching our understanding of organizations and masses in motion: NAACP, CORE, The Black Panther Party, Progressive Labor Party, Fanmi Lavalas, and so much more. The geographical expanse is vast—NorthCarolina, Chicago, Detroit, Port-au-Prince, and of course, Oakland, California. Walter and Jesse Strauss’s text models through praxis its title formulation of ‘Quiet Leadership’—which like Assata Shakur’s notion of the ‘reluctant warrior’ opens up a treasure trove of insight informing their respective texts and archive of revolutionary praxis. This includes: the centrality of planning, the problem of leadership, the temptations of individuation, lessons of cadre building, mass base building, active listening, the nuance in Walter’s sense of ‘ante-revolutionary’ and anti-revolutionary. Thank you—Walter and Jesse—for this record of struggle—for feeding us, sustaining radical memory and current praxis, and cutting our enemies down to size. The pen is mightier than the scythe, but keep a scythe around just in case. Unite the many to defeat the few and while doing the damn thing—study this book and commence the throwing.” —Jeremy Matthew Glick, author of The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution
"Every city, every town, every village on this planet has iconic figures who spend their entire life being on the side of justice and clarity, being decent and warm hearted. Walter Riley is that person for northern California—a link to earlier struggles with his eyes firmly positioned on a future that is beyond the ugliness of the present. These conversations offer the education a new generation requires in how to be in the struggle for a lifetime and more." —Vijay Prashad, director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
"Throughout his lifetime on the front lines of struggle, Walter Riley’s dialectical clarity has energized and sharpened people’s movements from Durham to Oakland to Haiti to Palestine. Civil Rights and Structural Attacks is not just a memoir but a practical roadmap for the next generation of activists: a profound, personal, and necessary manifesto on revolutionary change guided by core political principles, deep love, and a few well-timed haymakers against the centers of power." —Nora Barrows-Friedman, journalist, author and editor of The Electronic Intifada
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Walter Riley grew up as a civil rights activist in the Jim Crow South, chaired Durham, North Carolina’s Young Adult NAACP, organized voter registration, sit-ins, job campaigns, and was a Field Secretary for CORE in the Southeast Region. He became a San Francisco State University activist for ethnic studies, and was a member of the Black Student Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Riley has worked as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer since the 1980s. He is a loving father and grandfather.
Jesse Strauss is an anti-imperialist and abolitionist cultural worker, community organizer, musician, and journalist born and raised in Oakland and Berkeley (unceded Ohlone/Chochenyo land). He is an anti-zionist descendent of Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide and was raised by parents engaged in radical queer healthcare and immigration asylum access work in the Bay Area. As a journalist, Jesse has a long working relationship with KPFA Radio, where he co-created the first-ever daily abolitionist radio show, Law & Disorder. He was a producer for Al Jazeera during the so-called “Arab Spring” and “Occupy” movements.
Boots Riley is a writer, director of the film Sorry to Bother You, musician, rapper with The Coup, and producer from Oakland, CA.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Simon and Schuster, 2026
[Publication date: June 23, 2026]
A riveting, intimate, and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time.
From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency—a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him “no” are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone.
Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President’s enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history.
This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds—and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America—a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.
REVIEWS:
From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency—a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him “no” are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone.
Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President’s enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history.
This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds—and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America—a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.
REVIEWS:
“Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre...the book is packed with news that will stay news...This is reporting of consequence.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker
“A flabbergasting feat of political reporting.”
—Tina Brown
“Riveting and richly textured...What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. A New York City native, Haberman worked at the New York Post, New York Daily News, and Politico, before joining the Times in 2015. She has covered six US presidential elections and several gubernatorial and New York City mayoral races. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. In 2021, she was part of a team that was a Pulitzer finalist for coverage of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. She has received the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award, as well as the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year. She is the author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. She lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.
Jonathan Swan is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Originally from Sydney, Australia, he has reported on Donald Trump since 2015, covering all three of his campaigns and his first term in office. Previously at Axios and The Hill,he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Trump and received the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award. He began his career as a teenage copy boy at a Sydney newspaper and later covered federal politics in Australia’s capital for The Sydney Morning Herald. He became a US citizen in 2024 and lives in Virginia with his wife and two children, with a third on the way.
The Conviction Machine: Prosecutors, Politicians, and Police Violence in Chicago
by Flint Taylor
Haymarket Books, 2026
[Publication date: May 19, 2026]
“Riveting and richly textured...What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. A New York City native, Haberman worked at the New York Post, New York Daily News, and Politico, before joining the Times in 2015. She has covered six US presidential elections and several gubernatorial and New York City mayoral races. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. In 2021, she was part of a team that was a Pulitzer finalist for coverage of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. She has received the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award, as well as the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year. She is the author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. She lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.
Jonathan Swan is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Originally from Sydney, Australia, he has reported on Donald Trump since 2015, covering all three of his campaigns and his first term in office. Previously at Axios and The Hill,he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Trump and received the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award. He began his career as a teenage copy boy at a Sydney newspaper and later covered federal politics in Australia’s capital for The Sydney Morning Herald. He became a US citizen in 2024 and lives in Virginia with his wife and two children, with a third on the way.
The Conviction Machine: Prosecutors, Politicians, and Police Violence in Chicago
by Flint Taylor
Haymarket Books, 2026
[Publication date: May 19, 2026]
A captivating account of the most corrupt and blood-soaked chapters in Chicago law enforcement history
In December 1969, the FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the office of States Attorney, led by rising political star Edward V. Hanrahan, conspired to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, and then flagrantly covered up their misconduct. Thirteen years later, Jackie Wilson was tortured by the same police department and wrongfully incarcerated for thirty-six years.
Drawing on unique insights from his role as a leading opposition lawyer in both cases, award-winning author Flint Taylor details the vast political corruption uncovered in the Hampton case and the twists and turns of Wilson's forty-year effort to win his freedom.
With blistering clarity and righteous indignation, The Conviction Machine shines a penetrating light on the sordid world of prosecutorial misconduct and police violence.
REVIEWS:
"In this alarming exposé, civil rights attorney Taylor (The Torture Machine) reveals decades of government collusion to hide evidence of racist police violence in Chicago....The result is a painstaking, vital record of institutionalized corruption." ―Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
"At last, Flint Taylor has given us an intimate, accurate, behind the scenes, forceful portrayal of the murderous machinations of the underbelly of American justice. I’ve been anxiously awaiting Flint’s exemplary work. Taylor vividly expresses the politically motivated, taxpayer-financed, and treacherous shenanigans of our nation’s political establishment and its enforcement apparatus; the American police departments, who area all too frequently in cahoots with the FBI, ICE, CIA, etc. Racism is its idealized engine, its raison d^etre.
The assassination of a young brilliant, gifted and courageous Black leader, Fred Hampton, was in a real sense its ultimate achievement. Fred’s assignation was not just a localized Chicago travesty of justice. It was the only officially sanctioned taxpayer-financed assassination of an American citizen for political reasons and political objectives by the U.S. Government in American history. And I was to be included in its deadly, deliberate undertaking! Fred’s assassination is the framework, the backdrop, the murderous modus operandi that still permeates our American law enforcement policy. Minneapolis and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by America’s police operatives are our most recent reminders that much more remains to be done, and it must be done by the power of the people, common ordinary people.
Thank you, Flint Taylor, for "connecting the deadly dots". The "Conviction Machine" is a must-read for all freedom-loving, justice-seeking, and people-loving people.
In December 1969, the FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the office of States Attorney, led by rising political star Edward V. Hanrahan, conspired to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, and then flagrantly covered up their misconduct. Thirteen years later, Jackie Wilson was tortured by the same police department and wrongfully incarcerated for thirty-six years.
Drawing on unique insights from his role as a leading opposition lawyer in both cases, award-winning author Flint Taylor details the vast political corruption uncovered in the Hampton case and the twists and turns of Wilson's forty-year effort to win his freedom.
With blistering clarity and righteous indignation, The Conviction Machine shines a penetrating light on the sordid world of prosecutorial misconduct and police violence.
REVIEWS:
"In this alarming exposé, civil rights attorney Taylor (The Torture Machine) reveals decades of government collusion to hide evidence of racist police violence in Chicago....The result is a painstaking, vital record of institutionalized corruption." ―Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
"At last, Flint Taylor has given us an intimate, accurate, behind the scenes, forceful portrayal of the murderous machinations of the underbelly of American justice. I’ve been anxiously awaiting Flint’s exemplary work. Taylor vividly expresses the politically motivated, taxpayer-financed, and treacherous shenanigans of our nation’s political establishment and its enforcement apparatus; the American police departments, who area all too frequently in cahoots with the FBI, ICE, CIA, etc. Racism is its idealized engine, its raison d^etre.
The assassination of a young brilliant, gifted and courageous Black leader, Fred Hampton, was in a real sense its ultimate achievement. Fred’s assignation was not just a localized Chicago travesty of justice. It was the only officially sanctioned taxpayer-financed assassination of an American citizen for political reasons and political objectives by the U.S. Government in American history. And I was to be included in its deadly, deliberate undertaking! Fred’s assassination is the framework, the backdrop, the murderous modus operandi that still permeates our American law enforcement policy. Minneapolis and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by America’s police operatives are our most recent reminders that much more remains to be done, and it must be done by the power of the people, common ordinary people.
Thank you, Flint Taylor, for "connecting the deadly dots". The "Conviction Machine" is a must-read for all freedom-loving, justice-seeking, and people-loving people.
―Bobby Rush, former U.S. Congressman and former Deputy Minister of defense of the Black Panther Party
"Most often, popular history tells the story of the predator and not the prey. This is not that story.My Brother, Beloved Atty. Flint Taylor is the David who slew the Goliathan: the CHICAGO POLITICAL/POLICE MACHINE. If you keep hope alive and stay in the fight, you will win; even in the face of the most daunting odds and intimidating foes, you will win. This book is your blueprint."
"Most often, popular history tells the story of the predator and not the prey. This is not that story.My Brother, Beloved Atty. Flint Taylor is the David who slew the Goliathan: the CHICAGO POLITICAL/POLICE MACHINE. If you keep hope alive and stay in the fight, you will win; even in the face of the most daunting odds and intimidating foes, you will win. This book is your blueprint."
―The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, and his daughter, Santita Jackson, Producer/Host of the "KEEP HOPE ALIVE with REV. JESSE JACKSON and the SANTITA JACKSON Radio Shows.
“A masterful chronicle of Fred Hampton's murder and its aftermath, Taylor's insider account reveals the shocking depth of official conspiracy and cover-up while celebrating the tireless advocates who refused to let the truth die with Hampton.”
“A masterful chronicle of Fred Hampton's murder and its aftermath, Taylor's insider account reveals the shocking depth of official conspiracy and cover-up while celebrating the tireless advocates who refused to let the truth die with Hampton.”
―Chesa Boudin
“Flint Taylor is a gift to Chicago and the nation. This rigorous, unsparing and brilliant dissection of decades-long racism, corruption, and lies by Chicago law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges should be required reading in law schools nationwide. We can only hope it triggers a long overdue reckoning with the true character of our criminal legal system.”
―Dr. Martha Biondi, author of The Black Revolution on Campus and We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation
“Flint Taylor exposes the absurd, cowardly and racist machinations of Chicago officials, who permitted police to get away with torture rather than take a stand to stop them. The book reads like a novel by Kafka―except it’s true.”
―Ben Joravsky, journalist and host of The Ben Joravsky Show podcast
"The Conviction Machine is a scathing, jaw-dropping indictment of our criminal justice system and the conspiratorial ways prosecutors are complicit in police murder. Flint Taylor, a true legal legend, exposes the truth that we must acknowledge: the Chicago police tortured and murdered in cold blood, prosecutors were complicit, and this history must be retold to understand the battles we face today." ―Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, PhD Author of Crook County and Crime Fictions
"Only a legal practitioner of Flint Taylor's skill and vast experience could have written this diagnosis of the routine cruelties and frequent absurdities produced by a criminal justice system built on a bedrock of unacknowledged racism. Drawing on two epic cases, he provides a devastating account of the interactions between police abuse, prosecutorial misconduct, and political machinations. A brilliant and necessary book." ―Jamie Kalven, Founder of the Invisible Institute, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist
Praise for The Torture Machine:
"If it was not for Flint Taylor I would still be languishing in prison. He brought hope to a hopeless place."
―Darrell Cannon, torture survivor
"It is impossible to fully understand the continuing challenges created by unjustifiable police violence against black and brown people without appreciating the historical backdrop that sustains this national crisis. Flint Taylor's powerful new book, informed by his decades as one of the most effective advocates addressing these issues, is a must-read."
―Bryan Stevenson, best-selling author of Just Mercy
"Taylor is a walking passcode to CPD misconduct. It was Taylor and his colleagues who unearthed the crimes committed by the “Midnight Crew,” a squad of racist cops who tortured blacks to extract their false confessions."
―Rolling Stone
"[A] searing memoir... essential reading for all who care about this country―past and future."
―Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Blood in the Water
"Incredible and devastating."
―Jeremy Scahill
"[A]n unsparing dissection of foundational racism in the criminal justice system ... It could not be more timely."
―Jamie Kalven, Investigative Reporter and Founder, Invisible Institute
"Each victim's case is a fascinating story in itself while the totality of the lawyers' efforts fighting a resistant establishment is staggering."
―The Observer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
As a law student, Flint Taylor was a founding member of the People’s Law Office and has been a partner of the PLO since 1972. As a student and lawyer, he has been dedicated to litigating against police violence and racism for more than fifty-four years. Among the landmark cases that Taylor has litigated are the Fred Hampton Black Panther case; the Greensboro, North Carolina case against the KKK, Nazis and Greensboro police; and a series of cases arising from a pattern and practice of police torture and cover-up by Chicago police Commander Jon Burge, former Cook County State’s Attorney and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and numerous other law enforcement officials. He has represented, and continues to represent, many wrongfully convicted persons, including police torture victims who have spent decades in prison and on death row. He has chronicled his work and that of the People’s Law Office in an award-winning historical memoir titled The Torture Machine.
Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism
by Brian Kwoba
The University of North Carolina Press, 2026
The significance of Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927)—as a journalist, activist, and educator—lies in his innovation of radical solutions to radical injustices. He witnessed staggering luxury for the few alongside crushing poverty for the many. White mob violence continually haunted Black communities, while imperial conquest and world wars wrought wanton destruction upon entire nations of people. These conditions sparked a global political awakening to which Harrison gave voice as a leading figure in cutting-edge struggles for socialism, internationalism, free love, freethinking, and free speech. He did far more than cultivate the rich, dark soil in which the so-called “Harlem Renaissance” would take root. Harrison also played a pivotal role in the rise of Marcus Garvey and the emergence of the largest international organization of African people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, he has been erased from popular memory.
Hubert Harrison presents a historical restoration of Harrison’s numerous intellectual and political breakthroughs. Offering a fresh interpretation of his contributions to social movements for economic, racial, and sexual liberation, Brian Kwoba’s richly textured narrative highlights the startling and continued relevance of Harrison’s visionary thinking across generations.
[Publication date: July 17, 2025]
by Brian Kwoba
The University of North Carolina Press, 2026
The significance of Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927)—as a journalist, activist, and educator—lies in his innovation of radical solutions to radical injustices. He witnessed staggering luxury for the few alongside crushing poverty for the many. White mob violence continually haunted Black communities, while imperial conquest and world wars wrought wanton destruction upon entire nations of people. These conditions sparked a global political awakening to which Harrison gave voice as a leading figure in cutting-edge struggles for socialism, internationalism, free love, freethinking, and free speech. He did far more than cultivate the rich, dark soil in which the so-called “Harlem Renaissance” would take root. Harrison also played a pivotal role in the rise of Marcus Garvey and the emergence of the largest international organization of African people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, he has been erased from popular memory.
Hubert Harrison presents a historical restoration of Harrison’s numerous intellectual and political breakthroughs. Offering a fresh interpretation of his contributions to social movements for economic, racial, and sexual liberation, Brian Kwoba’s richly textured narrative highlights the startling and continued relevance of Harrison’s visionary thinking across generations.
[Publication date: July 17, 2025]
REVIEWS:
“Brian Kwoba has written a beautiful, intellectual biography as radical and original as its subject. He excavates Hubert H. Harrison—brilliant Marxist, Black nationalist, internationalist, and gender rebel—revealing dimensions even his most scrupulous chroniclers missed.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Hubert Harrison shaped movements from the Harlem Renaissance to Black studies. Brian Kwoba admirably highlights this formidable Caribbean American intellectual, who deserves a more central place in African American and African diaspora history.”—Carole Boyce Davies, author of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones and Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power
“Through an engagement with Hubert Harrison and his expansive ideas, this compelling book provides a theoretically nuanced account of the connections and ruptures within Black intellectual and social thought. ”—Claudrena Harold, University of Virginia
“Captivating and compelling. Many are praised for novel interventions, but few achieve what Kwoba has. Hubert Harrison shifts the ground and sets the standard for twenty-first-century research on Harrison. We owe Kwoba a great debt.”—Tommy J. Curry, University of Edinburgh.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brian Kwoba is associate professor of history at the University of Memphis.
“Brian Kwoba has written a beautiful, intellectual biography as radical and original as its subject. He excavates Hubert H. Harrison—brilliant Marxist, Black nationalist, internationalist, and gender rebel—revealing dimensions even his most scrupulous chroniclers missed.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Hubert Harrison shaped movements from the Harlem Renaissance to Black studies. Brian Kwoba admirably highlights this formidable Caribbean American intellectual, who deserves a more central place in African American and African diaspora history.”—Carole Boyce Davies, author of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones and Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power
“Through an engagement with Hubert Harrison and his expansive ideas, this compelling book provides a theoretically nuanced account of the connections and ruptures within Black intellectual and social thought. ”—Claudrena Harold, University of Virginia
“Captivating and compelling. Many are praised for novel interventions, but few achieve what Kwoba has. Hubert Harrison shifts the ground and sets the standard for twenty-first-century research on Harrison. We owe Kwoba a great debt.”—Tommy J. Curry, University of Edinburgh.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brian Kwoba is associate professor of history at the University of Memphis.
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