Robin Kelley in March 2019
Faces of ALBA: Robin D. G. Kelley
By Aaron B. Retish
Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. The author of many books, including a biography of Thelonious Monk, he co-edited "This Ain't Ethiopia, But It'll Do": African-Americans and the Spanish Civil War (1990) and currently serves on ALBA’s Honorary Board.
The meetings I attended were robust, exciting, and sometimes contentious. And the vets wanted to see every draft I wrote. Do you recall a letter or an individual that jumped out at you in your research on Black volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade? How quickly in your research did you see that Black volunteers were connecting the Spanish Civil War with the struggle for racial and economic justice in the United States? First, I should give some background as to how I came to this research in the first place. Having written my first book on the Communist Party, I was familiar with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the basics of Spanish Civil War history. But in 1990, I was summoned by ALBA and Danny Duncan Collum, who edited the book of documents on African Americans in the Spanish Civil War, to write a lengthy introduction. So I had immediate access to the archives and, especially, the documents selected for the book. There were many more veterans alive back then and the meet4 THE VOLUNTEER December 2020
ings I attended were robust, exciting, and sometimes contentious. And they wanted to see every draft I wrote. So I imagined trying to write by committee, with various people chiming in—not just in terms of factual accuracy but political tone. Both Bill Susman and Marc Crawford were exacting yet brilliant in their criticism and encyclopedic knowledge. Susman, in particular, hipped me to the fact that John Gerassi’s oral history of the veterans of the Lincoln Brigade was filled with errors and passages that he had invented. That sent me to all of the original transcribed interviews he conducted. Those interviews proved to be the richest source, especially the interviews with Oscar Hunter and Admiral Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick was a former Wobblie from Oklahoma who had survived the Palmer raids in 1919. I loved his recollections of testifying before
