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As a historian, as a writer, I’ve got to try to be as critical as possible. I’m always trying to be truthful. As I write and produce this work, I learn things that we didn’t see before, but then, the work also reveals things that I failed to understand. And so to me, it’s always a process.
VC: Speaking of that kind of deep involvement, I would love to hear you talk about what California and maybe Los Angeles, specifically has meant for you in terms of your life but also in terms of your imagination of struggle.
Dr. Kelley is the author of “
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” and Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at U.C.L.A. He will join us to discuss the history and significance of the BAmazon Union struggle and its connections to the period analyzed in his book.
Alabama particularly the Birmingham-Bessemer area has a centuries-old tradition of Black-led organizing against enslavement, racist land seizures, Jim Crow racism, prison-convict labor, segregation laws and Ku Klux Klan violence. Within living memory of the Amazon workers and their families is their starkly dedicated struggle against white-supremacist assassinations and bombings of Black churches and homes during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.