BLACK BODIES SWINGING:

A haunting, heartrending combination of impeccable scholarship and visceral storytelling, one that says something new about what is perhaps the defining issue of our time. The book will have an international scope: Kelley will touch on the anti-police rebellions in London and Paris as well as relevant incidents in South Africa, Brazil, Palestine, and Mexico, among other countries.

By the "leading Black historian of the age," this is a fierce, distilled history of the pillage and defiance of Black America.

The police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 triggered a wave of protests like no other in American history. How did we get here? Conducting a historical autopsy, Robin Kelley approaches the lives and deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Breonna Martin, and so many others as a portal to the racist histories that strangled them and their communities. From the slave patrols and lynch law of the Deep South to segregated housing, the war on drugs, slum clearance, predatory lending, and extraction of wealth, Kelley draws a direct line from the "blood at the root" - the racial terror at the heart of the American social and economic order - to the latest casualties of that terror.

This is also the story of Black resistance, of decades of organizing, political education, and movement building. The protesters who came out swinging, calling to defund the police, are part of a long line of combatants fighting to emancipate, democratize, and lay to rest the America as we know it so that a new world may be born.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the author of the definitive biography Thelonious Monk, which received the PEN Open Book Award; Yo Mama's Disfunktional: Africa Speaks; Freedom Dreams; and other acclaimed books on African-American history, music, and radical social movements. Kelley's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Boston Review and many other publications. The recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he resides.