Description:
This workshop will analyze the history of movements against police violence and repression in Chicago, from about the 1970s but with emphasis on the 21st century, surrounding the killing of Rekia Boyd. Organizers used multiple strategies, from legal, direct action, international appeals (We Charge Genocide), to creating alternative spaces for abolitionist practice. It will also share how they extended the definition of state violence to include things like school closures.
Facilitator Bio:
Robin D. G. Kelley is a Professor of History UCLA. His books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; and (forthcoming) Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. He also co-edited (with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor), Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies; (with Jesse Benjamin), Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World; (with Stephen Tuck) The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States; (with Franklin Rosemont) Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora. His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, New York Review of Books, Hammer & Hope, Black Scholar, Social Text; New Labor Forum; Radical History Review; Rethinking Marxism; and The Boston Review, for which he is a contributing editor.