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Acknowledgments
The journey toward this book began with Robin D. G. Kelley, who has been instrumental both behind the scenes and in direct ways, in realizing its completion. Robin’s initial work on many of the biographical details of Cedric J. Robinson’s life was both inspiration and guide. His faith was also a steadying force. And his clearing of the way to Elizabeth Peters Robinson was indispensable. Without Elizabeth, this work would have never happened. She opened her home and heart to me in ways that I am still fully understanding. She provided not only access to an archive, she provided access to a way of feeling this life. I offer my unstinting gratitude to her and to the many people she placed before me as necessary witnesses to Cedric’s life: Gerard Pigeon, Joanne Madison, Marisela Marquez, Avery Gordon, Gerardo “Gary” Colmenar, and Matthew Harris, among others. Gerard, Joanne, Marisela, and Avery stopped what they were doing and agreed to talk about their experiences with him. Gerard was Cedric’s best friend and one of the most significant commenters on Cedric’s character. My conversations with Avery proved to be very necessary in shaping aspects of the book. Gary was a remarkable help in securing necessary archives from the University of California, Santa Barbara campus during the coronavirus pandemic. I am grateful to him and Matt Stahl of the library for making a very large cache of materials available to me. I am extremely indebted to Matthew’s work in organizing and processing the Robinson papers, which are still held in private. Without that work, my task of engaging that bounty would have been next to impossible.
Cedric J. Robinson’s students were a source of grace. I do not take their generosity for granted. I thank H. L. T. Quan for not only agreeing to an interview, but for graciously reading the manuscript and taking time to participate alongside Elizabeth, Robin, and me in a 2020 panel on Cedric that greatly impacted the book. My conversations with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard were deeply insightful. Not only did I find out that she was my South Carolina homegirl, but the care in which she outlined her memories of Cedric and what they mean for now, for the present, and the future of Black Studies will stay with me. Darryl C. Thomas gave me a clear picture of the earlier years and the important time the Robinsons spent in Michigan. I was also able to speak with Bruce Cosby, who took classes with Cedric at Binghamton. And Fred Moten who, though never a formal student of Cedric’s, considered himself in this number as a younger colleague. All of these students and/or mentees are now scholars in their own right, a testament to Cedric’s impact. There are many more whom I must thank, though we did not get a chance to speak about this project formally: Damien Sojoyner, Jordan Camp, Christina Heatherton, Greg Burris, Jonathan D. Gomez, Rovan Locke, Erica Edwards, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Tracking down Cedric’s comrades from his early years proved to be daunting. But I was thankful to find Ken Cloke, one of the organizers of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, who put me into contact with Mike Miller, an organizer of SLATE and eventually the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Miller remembered Cedric for, among other things, donating blood to him when he returned to the Bay Area after being injured in a car accident while organizing in Mississippi. He then connected me to Margot Dashiell, who was able to share with me her impressions of Cedric as a young activist who was connected to the UC chapter of the NAACP and to the emerging Afro-American Association. It was Dashiell who clarified so much about Berkeley history, Bay Area Black nationalism and radicalism, and other tidbits during those days, and I hope she is able to tell her story soon. She also graciously showed me letters that Cedric wrote her from Mexico, southern Africa, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma that she held onto for over fifty years. Others from that period in Cedric’s life that I interviewed included Nell Irvin Painter and J. Herman Blake, two scholars whom I consider to be giants in their own right. Their recollections helped me properly paint a picture of his life during those formative moments. The oldest friend that I was able to speak to was Douglas Wachter, whose testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee led to the events of May 1960. I am grateful to Douglas for his memories of Cedric’s junior high years.
Though there were many collections held in private, I did have an opportunity to track Cedric and the larger movement to several formal holdings at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, The Oakland Public Library, The African American Library Museum at Oakland, the Bentley Historical Library, Binghamton University’s Special Collections, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I thank the many librarians and archivists who smoothed the way. I want to offer a brief note of thanks to Pendarvis Hardshaw, a true brother of the Town, who offered his help in connecting to Oakland sources. As far as libraries are concerned, I want to thank my cousin Dr Kayla Lee, who used her library access to help me secure some of Cedric’s earliest articles when I first began to work on this text. Thankfully, some of those articles are now more widely available. Richard E. Lee, Resat Kasaba, and Beverly Silver directed me to several places to help me unpack Cedric’s relationship to Terence Hopkins. Yousouf Al-Bulushi graciously sent over audio files digitized from Cedric’s collection that proved necessary.
There are a number of scholars, activists, and organizers whom I spoke to about this project. Many of them read drafts, offered encouragements, and gave me directions that are reflected in the final project. These include Ava Wilson, Shauna Morgan, Ashon Crawley, Bedour Alagraa, Imani Perry, Alan Minor, Mario Beatty, Valethia Watkins, Greg Carr, Donna Murch, Chris Roberts, Stefan Bradley, Jesse Benjamin, Minkah Makalani, Baba Lumumba, Anyabwile Love, and Ashanté Reese. Shauna and Ashon read early drafts of the first words of this text and kept me encouraged. Bedour sent me periodic texts that betrayed an authentic and welcome excitement that I was writing this book. I began one of the chapters while sitting next to Ashanté, on a day where I felt stuck and did not feel like writing. By the end of that session, the rest of the book came rather easily. Finally, Greg Carr introduced me to Cedric J. Robinson in 2006. Though it would take several more years for me to actually read this work closely, it was his engagement with that work and its relationship to Africana Studies that started all of this so many years ago.
I have been privileged to bring Cedric’s ideas into public spaces on several occasions. Conversations in new media helped propel my thinking a great deal before and while I was developing this text. I am grateful to Jared Ball, Jared Ware, and Joshua Briond for providing space to think in public with Cedric’s work. Special thanks to Sankofa Video and Books’ Haile Gerima and Addisalem Gebrekidan and the rest of the team who put together the “Critical Reading: How to Read Cedric Robinson” series. Sitting with Acklyn Lynch and his tattered copy of Black Marxism months later was a revelation. Finally, thanks to Darrell Johnson, Chad Kehinde Graham, Aliah Hill, Ayanna Jackson, and Danita Florence Warmack who took my seminar on Cedric J. Robinson at Howard University. You, and all my other students, gave me the opportunity to really know and appreciate his work.
Thanks to Polity Press’s George Owers and Julia Davies, who patiently shepherded this project through a very difficult time in human history. Thanks for believing in this project and for developing the Black Lives series.
A few final words for my friends: B. Nicole Triplett, who was with me when this work was at proposal stage and always provided space on my New York research trips. And to Chigozie Onyema whom I did not talk with a great deal about this project but who, when it comes to radicalism, was one of my first real interlocutors. Alexsandra Mitchell is always there, and when I first took this project on she said she cried. I feel her.
Introduction: Cedric’s Time
The Bakongo peoples of West-Central Africa saw Life as a cycle. This was not merely the invocation of the idea that all time is the same, that all experience is constant. Rather, what is meant is that we experience time in ways that allow us to see how all other time was experienced, that our experiences