Overview
An associate professor of history at Cornell University, Russell Rickford specializes in African American political culture after World War II, the Black Radical Tradition, and transnational social movements. His latest book, A Proxy Africa: Guyana, African Americans, and the Radical 1970s, was released by the University of North Carolina Press in 2026. His previous monograph, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination, received the 2016 Hooks Institute National Book Award and the 2017 OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award.
Publications
A Proxy Africa: Guyana, African Americans, and the Radical 1970s. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2026.
“‘These People are No Charles Mansons or Spaced-out Moonies’: Jonestown and African-American Expatriation in the 1970s,” in Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History, Brandon Byrd, Leslie Alexander, and Russell Rickford, eds. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022).
“1944-1949,” in Four Hundred Souls, eds. Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (New York: One World, 2021), 312-316.
“‘To Build a New World’: African American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity,“ Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 52-68.
“Black Power as Educational Renaissance: The Harlem Landscape,” in Educating Harlem: Schools and the Referendum on the American Dream, ed. Ansley Erickson (Columbia University Press, 2019), 210-233.
“African-American Expats, Guyana, and the Pan-African Ideal in the 1970s,” in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley Farmer, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 233-252.
“Power to the People: Attica and Radical Reconstruction,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2017): 96-99.
“‘We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete’: The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black Nationalist Thought in the late 1960s and 1970s.” Journal of American History. 103. 2017
We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016
“Black Power and Education for Liberation.” in Black Power 50. Ed. Diouf, Sylviane and Komozi Woodard. New York: New Press. 51-69. 2016
“‘Kazi is the Blackest of All’: Pan African Nationalism and the Making of the ‘New Man’, 1969-1975.” Journal of African American History. 101:97-125. 2016
Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle. New Labor Forum. Winter, 2015.
“‘Socialism From Below’: A Black Scholar's Marxist Genealogy.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. 13:371-392. 2011
Russell Rickford, ed., Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011).
“Integration, Black Nationalism and Radical Democratic Transformation in African-American Philosophies of Education, 1966-74.” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Transformation. Ed. Hinton, Elizabeth Kai and Manning Marable. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 287-317. 2011
Betty Shabazz: A Life Before and After Malcolm X. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks. 2003.
John Rickford and Russell Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 2000.
In the news
- ‘Racism in America’ webinar to examine protest movements
- Faculty critique documentary 'I Am Not Your Negro'
- 'Skin,' LGBT festival highlight Cornell Cinema spring events
Courses - Spring 2026
- ASRC 1595 : African American History from 1865
- ASRC 2353 : Civil Rights vs. Human Rights in the Black Freedom Struggle