by Modibo Kadalie, edited and introduced by Andrew Zonneveld
On Our Own Authority
8/19/2019, paperback
SKU: 9780990641889
Modibo Kadalie has spent nearly six decades as an activist, organizer, teacher, and scholar in the civil rights, Black power, and Pan-African movements. In this collection of interviews and public talks, he reflects on the sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, urban rebellions, and anticolonial movements that have animated the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Kadalie demonstrates how the forms of direct democracy that have evolved through these freedom struggles present the promise of a future defined by social liberation as well as ecological healing.
This concise, radical, and iconoclastic book connects Black liberation struggles to ecological activism in the era of climate change, calling on present and future generations of activists to reconnect with the spirit of past movements without lionizing individual leaders or lending legitimacy to any governments or politicians.
Reviews:
"This collection offers a gift of understanding and clarity in a way we shouldn't take for granted and at a time when almost nothing feels certain." -- William C. Anderson, co-author of As Black As Resistance
"Modibo Kadalie is a storyteller--in the most honorable and powerful sense of the word--who opens up the possibilities of fundamental social transformation... reminding us that power and truth always reside in the people, not their 'leaders'" -- Natsu Saito, author of Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law