In this special May Day segment of Rustbelt Abolition Radio, we speak with acclaimed scholar Robin D.G. Kelley to explore the critique of racial capitalism, the history of class struggle across the color line, and the abolitionist horizon.

We release this episode on May Day, or International Workers Day, celebrated annually by millions across the world in commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Square massacre and the ongoing global struggle for a world without capitalist exploitation and racial domination.

Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. Kelley’s intellectual work spans the far reaching histories of the black freedom movement, African American history, culture, music, and aesthetics, and the politics of the black radical imagination. His books include Africa Speaks, America Answers!: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, among many others.