#robin d.g. kelley

[dontbestingybaby]

“[Al] Murphy decentralized the organization by establishing captains for each local [...] he kept the locals informed of the situation in other counties. [...] They tended to the day-to-day organizing of the union, the women’s auxiliaries, and the youth sections, and those who could write were responsible for sending articles to the Party’s press detailing conditions in their respective areas. [...] Weekly meetings were supposed to be held, always in absolute secrecy to avoid police raids or vigilante attacks. Minutes were rarely kept because of the potential danger of keeping written records, not to mention the problem of literacy in the black belt. Union locals often cloaked their intentions by holding Bible meetings, and some secretaries recorded the minutes by underlining pertinent words or phrases in the Bible.”

from Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley

[moribondslut]

WHY BLACK MARXISM? WHY NOW?

[Cedric J. Robinson] found in the culture, in the anthem "Nkosi Sikelel' ¡Afrika" sung across the continent, a liberatory vision of "people building, sweating, and toiling for a new world." He met people determined to be free, willing to take on a settler regime backed by Western capitalist nations, by any means necessary. In this brief essay, we can see Cedric coming to terms with the Black Radical Tradition:

The African, unable to operate openly, resorted to the only weapons he has been allowed to keep; his mind and his hands. He burns down missions and farms in the country areas because he is not strong enough yet to face the guns in the cities and townships; where meetings are banned or closely watched, he sings spirituals as the American slaves did a hundred years ago, to tell his people that they will be free again, soon. He has sent delegations repeatedly to the U.N. to plead for his life. He has not been rejected but he has not been effectively helped either, but still he tries.

[Robinson] situates the revolt in Zimbabwe within a global context that links the Third World to the plight of Black America. "Africa understands, Asia understands, you and I and the millions of blacks in the U.S., Brazil, and the West Indies understand, not because we are black or brown but because we have lived it and are living it now." In a letter to his aunt Lillian and uncle Bill Kea, he is even more explicit about how Southern Africa clarified and bolstered his identification with radical nationalism. "Americans are afraid of nationalism," he mused, "so Negroes are admonished not to use terms such as Black folk. But as a recalcitrant nationalist... it was one of my greatest thrills to come to this place, to see my people and, in Nairobi, see them function as complete and responsible human beings. The smallest thing is significant to those who are hungry." — Robin D.G. Kelley's new foreword to the revised and updated third edition of Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism (1983, 2020)

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Yo Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America

By Robin D.G. Kelley.

[inhernature]

Ringgold’s influence spans decades, genres, and mediums. She’s a painter, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, activist, illustrator, and author. Her name graces the covers of over 17 children’s books.

*

Throughout Ringgold’s expansive career, Black children remain at the center of struggle and possibility. In art and in life, Faith Ringgold sees children’s struggles, imaginations, and dreams as sites of revolution.

*

[T]he historian Robin D. G. Kelley ... “poetic knowledge,” or the ability to “enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way.” This knowledge opens the door to what Grace Lee Boggs considered the true nature of revolution: redefining our relationships to one another and the Earth, loving people beyond borders and boundaries, and creating something new in place of the old.

*

 Immersed in Black artistry and genius, Lonnie has an epiphany. “Black people didn’t come to America to be free,” he tells his uncle. “We fought for our freedom by creating art, music, literature, and dance.” His uncle, smiling, responds, “Now everywhere you look you find a piece of our freedom.”

Rest in Power Faith Ringgold

[leonardcohenofficial]

anyways everyone read hammer and hoe: alabama communists during the great depression by robin d.g. kelley

[shay-the-reader]

📖: babel x r.f. kuang (2022)

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

genres: historical fantasy

review in one sentence: i won’t be accepting any critiques of this book -thnx, management

“’I don’t want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live… I want to live,’ she repeated, ‘and live, and thrive, and survive them. I want a future. I don’t think death is a reprieve. I think it’s — it’s just the end. It forecloses everything — a future where I might be happy, and free.’”

🏛️🕯️🗣️📜

i never fully understood the desire to rate a book 6 stars until this moment. here are some reasons why i LOVED this book…

🕯️ history & portrayal of colonialism • this must be the year of historical fiction for me! my knowledge of the british empire is very minimal but those footnotes gave me so much context. post-read, i really want to find out which parts were truly fiction and which were historically accurate. there were a few characters i had to look up to see if they were real.. there are some really terrible people in history. even though i didn’t know much about the british empire, the characteristics of colonialism were fairly easy to spot based on what i know about it as a whole. i truly love a story that can teach me history and simultaneously keep me invested in the story!

🕯️ character evolution of robin • i was so nervous about the length of this book but it was absolutely necessary to show robin evolve as a person, especially since he was raised and trained to be a tool of british colonialism. it was cathartic to seeing him slowly unlearn the logics that he was taught to believe about himself, his heritage and the english. from beginning to end, robin is a character whose story i may never forget.

🕯️ academic setting • before 💩 really hit the fan, the portrayal of robin and his cohort as students was spot on. it didn’t surprise me to find out that r.f. kuang has both a masters and a phd bc at certain moments, i felt like i was back in grad school while reading this. the cyclical nature of the academic school year. the naiveté of being a first year. the transformation into a shell of a human by second year. the temporary reprieve of the summer months. it all felt too close to home.

🕯️ language & etymology • growing up, i swore i would be a polyglot and this fueled part of those delusions. it’s interesting having read this book right around a lot of tiktok users flocking to xhs/red note and learning mandarin. don’t be surprised if you see me with a mandarin language notebook

⏳🖋️✨🕰️

if you like this, you might also enjoy…

📖 discourse on colonialism (1950)

📖 the wretched of the earth x frantz fanon (1961)

📖 freedom dreams: the black radical imagination x robin d.g. kelley (2002)

📖 third world studies x gary y. okihiro (2016)

📖 decolonization and afro-feminism x sylvia tamale (2020)

[vague-humanoid]

But several UCLA faculty members and students have spoken out against the requests for more weapons, saying they were wrongfully used against peaceful protesters last spring. A video posted on the social media platform X showed a UCLA police officer armed with a launcher as a phalanx of officers in riot gear with batons pushed back a crowd of protesters contained in a narrow walkway on June 10.

“They’re shooting bullets! They’re f—ing shooting people!” one protester yelled on the video.

Robin D.G. Kelley, a UCLA professor of American history, spent the night in the hospital with his student who was shot in the chest with a projectile during the June 10 protest. The student, hospitalized for two days, suffered a contusion to the heart and a bruised lung and remains so traumatized that they have postponed law school studies, Kelley said.

The report set for review by regents said UC weapons were primarily used for training during calendar year 2023, the time frame examined. The use of weapons during the spring protests will be reported next year. But Kelley and others said their experience with police during the demonstrations raised myriad questions.

“The obvious burning question is this: Why does UCLA or any university campus need this kind of weaponry?” Kelley said. “Clearly the weapons are not to keep mobs off campus; they are to be used against our students and us.”

[laurapalmergraduates]

my favorite reads of 2025 so far

- Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G kelley

- ¡Sí, Ella Puede!: The Rhetorical Legacy of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers by Stacey K. Sowards

- Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

- Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong

- Making Face, Making soul/ Haciendo Caras: Creative Perspectives of Feminists of Color edited by Gloria Anzaldúa

- Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

- Betty by Tiffany McDaniel

- The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

- The Communism of Love: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Exchange Value by Richard Gilman-Oplsky

- Private Rites by Julia Armfield

[dontbestingybaby]

“Because the movement was built from scratch by people without a Euro-American left-wing tradition, Alabama’s black cadre interpreted Communism through the lenses of their own cultural world and the international movement of which they were now a part. Far from being a slumbering mass waiting for Communist direction, black working people entered the movement with a rich culture of opposition that sometimes contradicted, sometimes reinforced the Left’s vision of class struggle. The Party offered more than a vehicle for social contestation; it offered a framework for understanding the roots of poverty and racism, linked local struggles to world politics, challenged not only the hegemonic ideology of white supremacy but the petit bourgeois racial politics of the black middle class, and created an atmosphere in which ordinary people could analyze, discuss, and criticize the society in which they lived.”

from Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley

[jpbjazz]

LÉGENDES DU JAZZ

ELMO HOPE, UN GÉNIE MÉCONNU

"He is one of the great composers. We have a lot of good composers in jazz music, but there aren't dozens of great ones. There's one Monk, there's one Duke Ellington, there's one Billy Strayhorn. And there's one Elmo."

- Eric Reed

Né le 27 juin 1923 à New York, St. Elmo Sylvester Hope était le fils de  Simon et Gertrude Hope, deux immigrants originaires des Caraïbes. Hope, qui avait commencé à jouer du piano à l’âge de sept ans, avait bénéficié d’une formation classique. Hope, qui avait plusireurs frères et soeurs, avait aussi remporté plusieurs concours de piano à partir de 1938. Ami d’enfance du futur pianiste Bud Powell, Hope écoutait souvent de  la musique classique et du jazz avec lui. Hope avait fréquenté le Benjamin Franklin High School, un établissement réputé pour son programme de musique. Au cours de ses études, Hope avait développé une excellence de l’harmonie. Il avait même composé du jazz et de la musique classique à l’école.

Issu d’un milieu pauvre, Hope avait eu une jeunesse plutôt mouvementée. Impliqué dans une tentative de vol à l’âge de dix-sept ans, Hope avait été intercepté par un policier de New York qui avait tiré sur lui. Après qu’il ait été conduit au Sydenham Hospital, les médecins avaient examiné Hope et avaient révélé que la balle avait raté de peu sa moelle épinière.

Libéré de l’hôpital six semaines plus tard, Hope était passé en justice et avait été accusé d’assaut, de tentative de vol et de violation de la loi Sullivan. Les policiers qui avaient été impliqués dans l’altercation avaient déclaré lors du procès que Hope faisait partie de groupe de cinq jeunes garçons qui avaient participé à l’agression. Aucun des supposés complices de Hope ni aucune des trois victimes blanches de l’agression n’ayant été identifiés par la police, le juge avait rejeté les charges retenues contre lui. Qualifiant la fusillade de ‘’scandale’’, l’avocat de Hope avait décrit les accusations de ‘’tentative de coup monté.’’ Quant à Hope, il avait déclaré qu’il s’enfuyait avec d’autres passants après que les policiers aient commencé à tirer et qu’il avait été touché en tentant de pénétrer dans un couloir.

Il avait fallu plusieurs semaines à Hope pour se remettre de l’agression. Selon le biographe de Thelonious Monk, Robin D.G. Kelley, Hope ne s’était jamais vraiment remis  de l’altercation et n’aurait plus jamais été le même.

Plutôt que de reprendre ses études, Hope avait commencé à jouer du piano dans différentes salles de danse. Avec son ami Bud Powell qui était de seulement un an son cadet, Hope avait rencontré le pianiste Thelonious Monk en 1942, avec qui il avait passé un certain temps jusqu’à ce qu’il soit mobilisé par l’armée en mars 1943. Dans les dossiers de l’armée, Hope avait été décrit comme célibataire avec des personnes à charge, même s’il était marié et avait eu un fils qui était malheureusement décédé. Les conditions d’enrôlement de Hope prévoyaient qu’il devait demeurer dans l’armée  "for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months".

DÉBUTS DE CARRIÈRE

Après sa démobilisation, Hope avait joué principalement avec des groupes de rhythm & blues durant quelques années. À la fin de 1947, Hope avait fait partie d’un octet dirigé par le trompettiste Eddie Robinson. Il avait aussi joué brièvement avec le tromboniste Lawrence Leo ‘’Snub'' Mosley à la même époque. De 1948 à 1951, Hope avait eu le premier contrat à long terme de sa carrière comme membre du groupe de Joe Morris, avec qui il avait participé à quelques enregistrements. Le groupe avait aussi fait des tournées d’un bout à l’autre des États-Unis. Certains des membres du groupe de Morris s’intéressaient également au jazz, dont le saxophoniste Johnny Griffin, qui s’était rappelé plus tard que certains musiciens, dont Hope, avaient commencé à pratiquer à New York lors de l’émergence du bebop à la fin des années 1940. Griffin expliquait: "We'd go to Monk's house in Harlem or to Elmo's house in the Bronx, we just did a lot of playing. I played piano a bit, too, so I could hear what they were all doing harmonically. But if something stumped me, I'd ask and Elmo would spell out harmonies. We'd play Dizzy [Gillespie]'s tunes or Charlie Parker's."

En juin 1953, Hope avait participé à une session à New York avec un quintet dirigé par le trompettiste Clifford Brown et le saxophoniste alto Lou Donaldson. Le critique Marc Myers croit d’ailleurs que six des pièces enregistrées dans le cadre de la session faisaient partie d’une nouvelle forme de jazz appelée hard bop, qui avait commencé à exercer une grande influence à l’époque. Remarqué par le co-propriétaire des disques Blue Note Alfred Lion, Hope avait fait ses débuts comme leader pour la firme environ une semaine plus tard. La session avait éventuellement donné lieu à la publication de l’album dix pouces Elmo Hope Trio, qui avait été enregistré avec une formation comprenant Percy Heath à la contrebasse et Philly Joe Jones à la batterie. Selon le critique Kenny Mathieson, la session témoignait de l’intérêt de Hope pour l’architecture de la musique de préférence à la virtuosité technique. Une autre session tenue onze mois plus tard avait permis la publication d’un autre album intitulé Elmo Hope Quintet, Volume 2.

En août 1954, Hope avait également participé à une session dirigée par le saxophoniste Sonny Rollins pour les disques Prestige. La session avait éventuellement été publiée sous le titre de Moving Out. Durant la même période, Hope avait également enregistré avec Lou Donaldson. Après avoir signé un contrat avec Prestige en 1955, Hope avait enregistré un album en trio intitulé Meditations la même année. L’année suivante, Hope avait participé à une session en sextet intitulée Informal Jazz, qui mettait en vedette le trompettiste Donald Byrd, les saxophonistes ténor John Coltrane et Hank Mobley, le contrebassiste Paul Chambers et le batteur Philly Joe Jones. Certains commentateurs avaient déploré plus tard que ce genre de sessions réalisées avec des étoiles montantes comme Rollins et Clifford Brown avaient contribué à reléguer Hope dans l’ombre. "He too often recorded with young, rising overshadowing talents", avait écrit un journaliste du Buffalo Jazz Report en 1976.

En janvier 1956, Hope avait enregistré avec un autre jeune loup, le saxophoniste alto Jackie McLean, dans le cadre de l’album  Lights Out!, également publié par les disques Prestige. En avril de la même année, Hope devait participer à l’enregistrement de l’album The Happy Blues du saxophoniste Gene Ammons lorsqu’il avait quitté les studios avant le début de la session pour ne plus jamais retourner sur les lieux. Il faut dire qu’à l’époque, le comportement de Hope était devenu de plus en plus erratique. Pour justifier son absence, Hope avait expliqué qu’il était alllé visiter une tante à l’hôpital. En réalité, Hope était devenu un adepte de l’héroïne depuis plusieurs années, ce qui lui avait valu au moins un séjour en prison. Les problèmes de consommation et le dossier criminel de Hope avaient éventuellement provoqué la suspension de sa carte de cabaret, ce qui l’avait empêché de se produire dans les clubs de New York durant  plusieurs mois.

Incapable de se produire dans le Big Apple en raison de la perte de sa carte de cabaret, Hope était parti en tournée avec le trompettiste Chet Baker (un autre adepte de l’héroïne) et avait décidé de s’installer à Los Angeles. En Californie, Hope avait retrouvé d’autres passionnés du bebop comme le saxophoniste ténor Harold Land et le contrebassiste Curtis Counce. Après avoir de nouveau joué avec Rollins, Hope avait participé à une session avec Land. Intitulée The Elmo Hope Quintet Featuring Harold Land, la session produite par les disques Pacific Jazz avait seulement été publiéeen 1962 sur un album des Jazz Messengers d’Art Blakey. En mars 1958, Hope était devenu officiellement membre du groupe de Counce (en remplacement du pianiste Carl Perkins qui venait de mourir), avec qui il avait enregistré deux albums. La même année, Hope avait également écrit des arrangements pour d’autres artistes, dont le saxophoniste Harold Land, avec qui il avait collaboré dans le cadre de l’album Harold in the Land of Jazz. Durant cette période, Hope avait également dirigé son propre groupe, même si le personnel  de la formation avait souvent varié. En 1959, Hope avait aussi accompagné le vibraphoniste Lionel Hampton à Hollywood. Plus tard la même année, après s’être produit à Los Angeles avec deux quartets comprenant Sonny Rollins, Harold Land, Scott LaFaro et Lenny McBrowne, Hope avait accompagné Land dans le cadre d’un concert à Vancouver.

De retour à Los Angeles en août 1959, Hope avait accompagné le quintet de Land dans le cadre de l’album The Fox, sur lequel figuraient quatre de ses compositions. Selon l’historien du jazz David Rosenthal, cet album, à l’instar de l’album du  Elmo Hope Trio publié la même année, était représentatif du développement musical de Hope sur la Côte ouest. Rosenthal écrivait:

"Elmo's compositions are dominated by a sense of urgent musical questing as well as by a feeling of self-exposure far beyond standard jazz postures… (his) solos do everything possible to convey these tonalities… Ideas and fragments of ideas abruptly spill over and intersect each other, as if the pianist's hands could barely keep pace with his emotions. Bars densely packed with runs and baroque filigrees alternate with stark, dissonant figures or Monkish seconds, wide intervallic leaps, and octaves…all these elements, taken together, create an effect of conventional forms being pushed to their limits under the pressure of Hope's turbulent sensibility."

Commentant à son tour l’album le magazine DownBeat, le critique John Tynan l’avait qualifié de ‘’revealing portrait of the pianist… Elmo Hope's inner story is in this album for anybody who will listen. And a moving story it is". L’album en trio de Hope s’était finalement mérité cinq étoiles du même magazine, une note rarement attribuée qui témoignait de la grande qualité de l’enregistrement.

DERNIÈRES ANNÉES

En 1960, Hope s’était remarié avec la pianiste Bertha Rosemond, qu’il avait rencontrée lors de son séjour en Californie. Bertha était la fille d’un acteur et d’une danseuse qui avait fait partie des spectacles de Nat King Cole et Art Tatum. C’est en écoutant Cole et Tatum que Bertha avait décidé de devenir pianiste. Très entreprenante, Bertha n’avait pas froid aux yeux et avait fait les premiers pas avec Hope. Un jour, Bertha avait approché Hope lors d’une performance à Los Angeles et l’avait invité à venir chez elle pour l’entendre jouer. Le couple s’était marié peu après. Hope avait écrit par la suite une chanson en l’honneur de Bertha intitulée  "A Kiss For My Love."

Comme musicien de jazz sur la Côte ouest, Hope trouvait sa vie de plus en plus frustrante. Au cours d’une entrevue accordée au magazine Down Beat en janvier 1961, Hope avait déploré le manque de créativité du milieu du soul jazz, s’était plaint du manque de bons musiciens à Los Angeles et de l’insuffisance des contrats dans les clubs de la région. Dans le cadre d’une entrevue accordée la même année, Hope avait même suggéré aux aspirants musiciens à se rendre à New York plutôt qu’à Los Angeles,  "both for inspiration and brotherly love. They'll hear more things happening, and they'll find young musicians there, 14 and 15 years old, who make the musicians here look like clowns."

Hope avait quitté Los Angeles un peu plus tard la même année, car il avait reçu des offres pour enregistrer sur la Côte est. Hope était donc déménagé à New York avec son épouse et son jeune enfant, ce qui lui avait permis d’enregistrer l’album Homecoming avec Blue Mitchell, Jimmy Heath, Frank Foster, Percy Heath et Philly Joe Jones. Un des premiers gestes de  Hope au moment de son retour à New York avait été de rétablir les liens avec Monk, qu’il visitait régulièrement à son appartement. Un jour, le balcon de  Monk s’était même effondré, entraînant dans sa chute Hope et le saxohoniste Tina Brooks !

En juin 1961, Hope s’était joint au quintet du batteur Philly Joe Jones, dont faisait également partie le trompettiste Freddie Hubbard. C’est le vieil ami de Hope, le pianiste Thelonious Monk, qui avait obtenu le premier contrat du groupe. Monk avait aussi organisé une session d’enregistrement pour le groupe avec les disques Riverside. C’est Hope qui dirigeait la session. Hope avait d’ailleurs enregistré quatre albums à New York aux environs de l’année 1961. L’un de ces albums était Hope-Full, qui comprenait ses seuls enregistrements en solo et quelques duos avec son épouse qui était pianiste. Malheureusement, les compagnies avec lesquelles Hope avait enregistré durant cette phase de sa carrière l’avaient souvent humilié, selon le musicien et critique  Robert Palmer. Un des albums que Hope avait enregistrés au cours de cette période était intitulé Sounds from Rikers Island (1963), une référence au complexe pénitentiaire du même nom. Pour tourner le fer dand la plaie, l’album mettait exclusivement  en vedette des musiciens qui avaient été emprisonnés pour des infractions aux lois sur les stupéfiants. Entre l’enregistrement des deux albums, Hope était d’ailleurs retourné brièvement en prison pour possession de drogues.

À la fin de 1962, Hope avait de nouveau joué avec le saxophoniste Jackie McLean. Il avait aussi dirigé un trio qui avait compris selon les années Ray Kenney et John Ore à la contrebasse et Lex Humphries et Billy Higgins à la batterie. En 1965, Hope avait continué de diriger un trio et un quartet dans la région de New York. En raison de ses problèmes de consommation et de sa santé précaire, Hope avait cependant commencé à jouer de moins en moins souvent à la fin de sa carrière. Hope avait enregistré pour la dernière fois en 1966, mais les sessions n’avaient été publiées que onze ans plus tard. Hope avait présenté son dernier concert à Judson Hall à New York en 1966, mais à l’époque il avait perdu une grande partie de sa dextérité. Le pianiste Horace Tapscott avait déclaré plus tard que les mains de Hope ‘’were all shot up and he couldn't play".

Un jour, Hope s’était rendu dans un hôpital spécialisé dans les problèmes de  toxicomanie, mais son séjour n’avait pas été concluant, car il avait un peu eu l’impression d’être traité comme un cobaye. Hope s’était alors tourné vers l’Hôpital St. Clare, mais son traitement à la méthadone était mal adapté, ce qui avait aggravé ses problèmes cardiaques. Hospitalisé pour une pneumonie en 1967, Hope est mort d’insuffisance cardiaque le 19 mai. Il savait seulement  quarante-trois ans. Bertha avait eu trois enfants avec Hope. Une des filles du couple, Monica, était devenue chanteuse. Faisant état de la mort de Hope, le critique Ira Gitler avait commenté: "Elmo died on May 19th, but hope {sic} had been deceased for some time."

À l’instar de Thelonious Monk, Hope employait de nombreuses dissonances dans sa musique. Analysant le jeu de Hope dans un enregistrement du pianiste avec Dave Donaldson et Clifford Brown en 1953, l’historien David Rosenthal avait fait remarquer que la session comprenait "many elements of the pianist's emerging style: somber, internally shifting chords in the introduction; punchy, twisting phrases in the solo; and the smoldering intensity that always characterized his best work." Le sens du rythme de Hope était également imprévisible. Commentant la réédition des derniers enregistrements de Hope en 1996, un journaliste du magazine Billboard avait écrit que son style était "he's dynamically smoother than Monk, with a spidery, spacy touch. His harmonic and compositional approach is intricate in design and almost eerie in execution." Décrivant le doigté de Hope, le critique Stuart Broomer du magazine Coda l’avait qualifié de léger et inhabituel et avait défini son jeu comme une combinaison unique de délicatesse et d’audace. Comparant le jeu de Hope à celui de Bud Powell, les historiens Leonard Feather et Ira Gitler l’avaient décrit comme ‘’a pianist and composer of rare harmonic acuity and very personal interpretation." Lorsque l’album en trio de  Hope avait été réédité en 1970, le critique Larry Kart du magazine Down Beat avait écrit: "Elmo Hope's conceptions were, for once, given their just expression. Music of such honesty and depth will always be rare, and its oblique, vulnerable beauty gives it a special place in the history of jazz."

Selon le New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Hope  aurait eu à son actif environ soixante-quinze compositions qui alternaient entre ‘’a tortuous nervousness to an introspective, semi-lyrical romanticism." Quant au  Penguin Jazz Guide, il avait décrit les compositions de Hope comme très mélodiques, tout en précisant qu’elles comprenaient souvent des éléments de blues et de musique classique.

Véritable sainte Trinité du piano jazz, Hope, Bud Powell et Thelonious Monk se seraient influencés mutuellement au début de leurs carrières respectives. Le saxophoniste Johnny Griffin, qui avait souvent accompagné les trois pianistes, les considérait comme tellement inséparables qu’il les avait qualifiés de ‘’triplets.’’ Comme l’avait déclaré le batteur Philly Joe Jones: ‘’Elmo était l’influence de Bud, et Monk.’’ Jones avait ajouté: ‘’Monk et Bud aimaient tellement Elmo. C’était un vrai génie.’’  

Hope avait  toujours un peu joué dans l’ombre de Monk et Powell, car sa personnalité était beaucoup plus introvertie. Mais Monk  admirait énormément Hope, qu’il avait un jour qualifié de ‘’world's greatest pianist.’’ Cette admiration était d’ailleurs réciproque: lorsque Bud Powell était mort à l’été 1966 à l’âge de seulement quarante et un ans, Hope avait été très ébranlé et n’avait pas trouvé la force d’assister à ses funérailles.  

Plusieurs pianistes avaient reconnu Hope comme une influence majeure sur leur jeu, dont Lafayette Gilchrist, Alexander Hawkins, Vijay Iyer, Eric Reed, Frank Hewitt et Hasaan Ibn Ali. Saluant les talents de compositeur de Hope, Reed avait précisé: "He is one of the great composers. We have a lot of good composers in jazz music, but there aren't dozens of great ones. There's one Monk, there's one Duke Ellington, there's one Billy Strayhorn. And there's one Elmo."

Selon Hawkins, Hope était un pianiste d’autant plus important parce qu’il avait développé un style très personnel, même s’il n’était pas devenu une véritable icône comme Monk et Powell. Le guitariste Kurt Rosenwinkel avait également mentionné Hope comme une influence majeure, en particulier au niveau du rythme, du phrasé et du style de composition. Rendant hommage à Hope, le pianiste Hasaan Ibn Ali avait déclaré: "He was one of the foremost great ones to offer such a large dose for the sickness of music. And upon his ideals, and knowing help was needed, he gave to companions Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell and many others.... [D]uring this time, so much being produced, so much being brought forth by the musicians, still he being the actual cause." Quant au saxophoniste Johnny Griffin, il avait qualifié Hope de "real genius of the piano." 

La veuve de Hope, Bertha, avait publié plusieurs albums en hommage aux compositions de son ancien époux. Avec son futur mari, le contrebassiste Walter Booker, Bertha avait fondé un groupe appelé Elmollenium en 1999 qui interprétait les compositions de Hope. Un incendie survenu dans son appartement ayant détruit la majorité des arrangements originaux de Hope, Bertha avait retranscrit certains de ses enregistrements afin de reconstituer ses  arrangements.

Avec les années, certains critiques avaient tenté de réhabiliter la réputation de  Hope. Attribuant la méconnaissance de la contribution de Hope par plusieurs amateurs et critiques de jazz à l’originalité de de son style, le critique Chuck Berg du magazine Down Beat avait mis en opposition l’agressivité et la virtuosité technique souvent attribuée à certains grands noms du jazz (Parker, Monk, Gillespie, etc.) avec l’approche plus nuancée et intellectuelle de Hope. Sept ans plus tard, le critique Robert Palmer du New York Times écrivait au sujet de Hope et d’un autre pianiste souvent sous-estimé, Herbie Nichols: "They were practically categorized out of existence. Dismissed as second-stringers and copyists when they were both prolifically creative and highly original, they suffered a neglect that is only now beginning to be dispelled in the case of Nichols, and that still continues in the case of Hope." En 2010, The Penguin Jazz Guide avait ajouté: "Like many of his piano generation, [... Hope's] work is only now being properly studied and appreciated." Mais malgré l’originalité de ses compositions, les pièces de Hope étaient rarement reprises par les autres pianistes, car elles étaient plutôt difficiles à  interpréter.  

Hope avait publié plus d’une douzaine d’albums comme leader au cours de sa carrière. Il avait joué et enregistré avec les plus grands  noms du jazz, de John Coltrane à Sonny Rollins, en passant par Clifford Brown, Johnny Griffin, Lou Donaldson, Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Paul Chambers, Jackie McLean, Chet Baker, Harold Land, Curtis Counce, Lionel Hampton, Scott LaFaro, Frank Foster, Blue Mitchell, Freddie Hubbard et Billy Higgins.

En septembre 2016, la Place Lyman dans le Bronx avait été rebaptisée l’Elmo Hope Way Jazz Pioneer en l’honneur de Hope.

©-2025, tous droits réservés, Les Productions de l’Imaginaire historique

SOURCES:

‘’Elmo Hope.’’ Wikipedia, 2025.

‘’Elmo Hope.’’ All About Jazz, 2025.

‘’Elmo Hope est un géant du piano jazz qui n’a jamais eu son dû.’’ NPR,

18 août 2023.

‘’Elmo Hope, Pianist born.’’ African American Registry, 2025.

JOHNSON, Christopher. ‘’An Elmo Hope centennial celebration: Giving a jazz piano pioneer his due Jazz At Lincoln Center’’. WBGO, 17 août 2023.

[mongorevera]

Democrats Abandoned the Working Class: Robin D.G. Kelley on Trump’s Win ...

[sataniccapitalist]

Democrats Abandoned the Working Class: Robin D.G. Kelley on Trump’s Win & Need for Class Solidarity

[librewolf]

[Photo: "Trump Buddies". Pat Bagley. The Salt Lake City Tribune, UT. 10/15/2018.] By: Henry A. Giroux Source: Truthout If recent swing-state polls are to be believed, Donald Trump could be on his way to potentially being reelected president. He embodies the overt, brutal, punishing symptoms of the racism, class warfare, and attacks on youth and women that have marred the United States since its inception. Beneath these not-so-hidden authoritarian undercurrents lies neoliberalism’s erosion of and attacks on critical and civic education. This ideology is characterized by a staggering indifference to human needs, systemic racism, intensified class warfare, the fear of living with difference, and a profound obsession with instrumentalist methods, such as racially discriminatory and class-based “zero tolerance” policies, and teaching that focuses on standardized testing outcomes. These issues have been exacerbated by a culture of “disimagination machines,” in which the ruling financial elite control all major media apparatuses. These tools of indoctrination relentlessly churn out manufactured ignorance and a shallow notion of self-interest, promoting a depoliticized notion of individualism. Additionally, these machineries of misinformation undermine the moral imagination’s power to empathize with the claims of others while undercutting the courage of individuals to see beyond the socially induced fog of a culture of immediacy. In this context, critical inquiry and thinking are divorced from the public imagination as sources of resistance. One consequence is that individuals and the larger public are thwarted from envisioning a future that advances democratic values of social and economic justice. The educational force of U.S. society is now dominated by cultural and political institutions such as Fox News and conservative talk shows that erode any sense of shared citizenship, historical consciousness and common vision. No longer part of a moral, civic and ethical project, cultural politics has increasingly degenerated into a repressive corporate-controlled pedagogical apparatus. Functioning as a right-wing war machine, far right cultural platforms battle critical ideas, language, social relations and values that highlight the promise of radical democracy. Under such circumstances, cultural politics are dominated by observation posts of pedagogical repression, transforming what historian Robin D.G. Kelley labels “freedom dreams” into freedom’s nightmares. Propaganda has become the political weapon of the 21st century, corrupting every form of education and every institution associated with the production of ideas, values and knowledge. This has undermined both the capacity for critical thinking and the concept of truth itself. The past does not simply live in the present; it is now being used to cancel out reason and justice as harbingers of a more democratic future. Furthermore, imagining a better world is no longer related to learning from the past. On the contrary, historical knowledge is now being erased as far right legislators ban ideas and subjects that reveal the legacy of slavery, Indigenous genocide, and repression. What Ralph Ellison once called “the shadows of our historical knowledge” are now being purged from public and higher education. No longer a crucial archive and “treasure trove of resources” that “gives shape and contour to present imaginings,” history and remembrance are being suppressed by the new McCarthyite assassins of memory, who engage in censorship, misinformation and political repression. What far right politicians and right-wing media make clear and want to suppress, as historian Tiya Miles observes, is that “U.S. history would not make sense without the study of slavery. Period.” The powerful influence of manufactured ignorance isn’t confined to the morally and politically vacuous right. The liberal mainstream media rarely summon up the truth or journalistic integrity by attacking gangster capitalism or inviting truly informed commentators who have addressed the roots of U.

S. fascism, criticized Israel’s war on Palestinians, addressed the plague of global neoliberalism, or analyzed the war on higher education. Nor do they uplift voices of those critical of the onslaught against reproductive rights, the attacks on oppositional journalists, the threat of nuclear war, the war on the ecological system, the far right war on democracy, the rise of the carceral state, and racial capitalism and systemic racism. The punishing state now wraps itself in mindless entertainment and cruel invective parading as political theater. Americans are bombarded with the babble of liberals who are too cowardly to name Trump as a fascist or as a racist, treating him as either a normal candidate or a bullying clown rather than as a symptom of a deeper malaise of fascism, echoing a pernicious and frightening past. The culture of Google, Instagram, Facebook and X is the enemy of historical consciousness. It is a place where history as a repository of resistance and record of violence dies, along with the power to learn from the past. Historical consciousness, civic courage, and historic movements of resistance are diluted, if not erased, in a culture awash in misinformation and the cult of the self — a culture of willed and commodified ignorance. In such an environment, informed thinking vanishes amid a relentless image-based tsunami of advertisements, reality TV, game shows, and a regressive tide of commodification, atomization and privatization. The spectacle swallows any viable notion of critical agency, turning out zombies consumed with the emotional release and satisfaction that comes with the embrace of bigotry. MAGA hats are the new symbols of a death culture. While there has been a historical tradition in the U.S. of civil rights advocates making education central to politics — especially with the emergence of Freedom Schools and the Highlander Folk School, among other popular cultural pedagogical institutions — too many on the left have neglected the importance of acknowledging the centrality of education to politics for years. In doing so, they have underestimated the pedagogical dimensions of struggle, the power of persuasion, and the pedagogical strategies necessary for challenging forms of domination and for shaping mass consciousness. The recognition that forms of domination are not merely structural but also intellectual and educational has once again emerged within the movements for Black lives, reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights and planetary justice. However, we must make the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical at all levels of society and in a wide range of institutions. With the exception of the vast work done in the field of cultural studies and critical pedagogy, many on the left have for too long downplayed matters of culture while focusing on structural analysis, often using jargon that sabotages their politics by functioning as a firewall of obscurity. I am not suggesting that the broad left use language and modes of analysis that are overly simplistic. On the contrary, it is crucial for us to hold the bar of analysis high while still being rigorous and accessible, so that people can recognize themselves in the rhetoric of persuasion and calls for economic and social justice. The U.S. is now home to a significant number of utterly reactionary, ignorant people who are complicit with a politics and social order that will ultimately destroy their dignity, welfare and agency — not to mention democracy itself. Authors George Orwell and Aldous Huxley could not have imagined a scenario where the merging of power and culture today works so insidiously to usher in fascism under the guise of electoral integrity. Trump and his followers have run the authoritarian gambit, supporting election fraud, aligning themselves with dictators, such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, calling for racial cleansing, threatening violence against Muslims and immigrants, embracing antisemitism,

expressing a contempt for dissent, endorsing white Christian nationalism, calling for the jailing of alleged “enemies,” and expressing a contempt for democracy. Novelist Sinclair Lewis’s purported statement made 80 years ago, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” speaks presciently to a current brand of U.S. fascism that blends white Christian religious fundamentalism, ultranationalism, and a culture of lies and ignorance. This observation challenges the claim that fascism is limited to a specific historical period, suggesting that it offers no insights into the present. In The Black Hole of Auschwitz, Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi rejects that view, asserting that the seeds of fascism are not only present in every society but are spread in a variety of ways, including through the use of a repressive culture and educational system. He writes: Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many. The forces of fascism at work in the U.S. have grown from an endless series of assaults on democracy. The memory of fascism and its consequences are disappearing with the erosion of historical memory and a politics of erasure, most evident in the GOP’s banning of books, repression of dissent and whitewashing of history. Racism, nativism and a culture of cruelty now shape the mission of schools at various levels while broadcasting an insidious pedagogy of bigotry, hatred and white nationalism through various circuits, platforms and channels of culture. Equally insidious is the presence of Vichy-like politicians and celebrities condemning young people in the U.S. fighting for Palestinian freedom while facing police violence. These same individuals ignore (if not perpetuate) some of the most serious problems facing the globe. As the blood flows and tens of thousands die in Gaza, with reports of mass graves of Palestinian civilians becoming more public, the mainstream media dismiss and disparage campus protesters as uninformed and antisemitic. These accusations often serve to cover up the genocide in Gaza while highlighting the alleged moral indignation of far right antisemites in the GOP, such as the bullying New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. Attacks on campus protesters have also come from Trump, who claimed in a speech to wealthy donors that if elected in 2024, he would expel student demonstrators from the United States, asserting that many of them are foreign students. He also praised the New York City Police Department for forcibly removing the protesters from Columbia University. Instead of condemning Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians, Trump stated that he supports Israel’s “war on terror,” while boasting of his support for Netanyahu’s Israel. Trump’s rhetoric of punishment and deportation is especially dangerous given his relentless admiration for dictators, support for authoritarian governance, and repeated calls for using state violence against his enemies, including Black people, immigrants and the dissident media. Moreover, Trump and his billionaire enablers despise democracy, aligning perfectly with Trump’s vision, as presented in a recent video, of a “unified Reich.” Those who attack higher education institutions as bastions of radical leftists are often the same ones who believe that Trump won the 2020 election and remain silent about his indictments, his lying, his endless threats of violence and his embrace of the language of dictators.

They’re also the same people who support the violent and racist rhetoric embraced by Trump and who claim, with no irony intended, that the people who ransacked the Capitol and carried out violence on January 6 are hostages instead of violent perpetrators. Individuals and groups who support this politically and morally bankrupt view of politics and education, including the indoctrination factories being produced in Florida and elsewhere, have nothing to be proud of. As enemies of democracy, they are either complicit in or willing to implement a counterrevolution in the U.S. against what they have rightly labeled (albeit for the wrong reasons) as the radical spirit of democracy embraced by various social movements in the 1960s. The moral and political degeneracy depicted in the film The Zone of Interest is no longer merely a subject of entertainment or far right distortion. It is a stark reality that no longer hides in the shadows of history. The film focuses on the horror of Auschwitz, which takes place removed from the suffocating cocoon of moral and political indifference defining everyday life. It prompts the viewer to analyze the brutality of the concentration camps through conditions not readily seen or visible. Death and massive suffering are explored through the lens of invisibility. The film makes clear that those who remain silent, look away, or find solace in comforting lies have become akin to the “good Germans” who looked the other way in the 1930s. The brutality of a fascist past is with us once again, bolstered by a merging of manufactured ignorance, the collapse of civic consciousness, and a plague of historical and social memory loss that invites a future too horrible to contemplate. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020);  Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury 2023). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.  His website is www.henryagiroux.com

[dontbestingybaby]

“Black women’s contribution to the [Share Croppers’ Union (SCU)] rarely appeared in the pages of the Party press, in part because their strong presence countered an essentially male-centered version of radicalism generated by Communist writers and national leaders, most of whom had never worked in the South. Indeed, the Party’s advocacy of black self-determination conjured up masculine historical figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner, and writers like Eugene Gordon and V.J. Jerome portrayed the movement as a struggle for manhood. Armed resistance, in particular, was deemed a masculine activity. When the central black character, a young Southern-born Communist, in Grace Lumpkin’s novel A Sign for Cain observed ‘shot guns stacked in the corner of the cabin,’ he assured his comrades, ‘we ain’t dealing with cowards, but men.’ For nearly all writers in Communist circles—black and white, male and female—the martyred Ralph Gray assumed the symbol of black manhood in the South. Radical poet Ruby Weems published a moving account of ‘The Murder of Ralph Gray,’ the final stanza closing the episode with a great climactic vision:

His muscles swelling into a mighty challenge, Mount into a vision of a million clenched fists. He wears his death like a joyous banner of solidarity, A sceptre of militant Negro manhood. He lies still and silent—but under his unmoving form Rise hosts of dark, strong men, The vast army of rebellion!”

from Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelley