Today’s conversation is with Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA.  His books include, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009) Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990, 2nd ed. 2015); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002, New Ed. 2020);  Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (Free Press 1994); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); and forthcoming Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life (Henry Holt, 2026).  He also co-edited (with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor), Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies (2023); (with Jesse Benjamin), Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World  (2018); (with Stephen Tuck) The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (2015);  (with Franklin Rosemont) Black, Brown, and Beige:  Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (2009); (with Earl Lewis) To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (2000); and (with Sidney J. Lemelle), Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1995).  Kelley’s articles and essays have appeared in dozens of several anthologies, journals, and magazines, including Hammer and Hope;  American Quarterly; African Studies Review;  Journal of American History; New Labor Forum; The Nation; New York Times; New York Review of Books;   Radical History Review; Transition; Black Scholar; Dissent; Rethinking Marxism; Black Music Research Journal; Callaloo; Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir; and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.