For Professor Robin D.G. Kelley, scholarship is not about accolades. To him the study of the conditions and lives of the working class is about envisioning a different future.
Kelley, chair of the History Department at New York University and professor of Africana Studies, returned to Dartmouth on Sunday for his second term in residence as the College's Summer term Montgomery Fellow.
"Coming back to the Montgomery House is a celebration of the publication of 'Freedom Dreams,'" he said, smiling and seeming very relaxed in the now-familiar setting of the Montgomery House living room.
Growing up in a poor family living in Harlem and in Southern California exposed Kelley to such issues of social justice. Throughout college he was a participant in radical organizations, which broadened his understanding of activism. He decided to pursue the study of history during graduate school in order to better understand the processes of social change.
"Freedom Dreams," Kelley's most recent book, stemmed from an idea developed during his first visit to Dartmouth, when he gave the Martin Luther King speech in January of 2000.
For the speech, he revisited ideas of Dr. King's concerning love and freedom and talked about the ways in which black movements since the 19th century have imagined freedom for themselves.
The strongly positive response to the MLK speech earned Kelley an invitation to be the Montgomery Fellow for the Summer term of that year. The five movements from the Montgomery lecture turned into the five chapters of the book.
In addition to studying American and African-American social history, Kelley is a student of music, particularly jazz, which he writes about for the Sunday New York Times. He believes that people should use their skills for the betterment of society, as he uses his skills as a writer to chronicle music.
Kelley is currently working on completing a biography of pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, whom he considers to be the most original artist in the field of jazz.
"You could hear one measure of his music and know it's him," he said, commenting on the uniqueness and dissonance of Monk's compositions for piano.
Kelley does not believe that writing or listening to music is a revolutionary act.
"Some people make too much of the political meaning of music," he said.
But Kelley does believe that social change can be the result of cultural movements. Social change, he argues, begins with imagining a different version of reality. All art is dependent on the imagination, though imagination is certainly not enough to create a different future.
Kelley has a daughter whom he has always sent to public schools. He is optimistic about the efforts being made to improve urban school systems, but remains disappointed in the quality of many individual schools. He has seen that children are being educated to perform well on standardized tests, and are growing up lacking powers of the imagination.
Describing the work he does in Africana Studies, Kelley said that occasionally it has been difficult to be taken seriously, as many academics do not view ethnic studies as being serious scholarship.
"I do this work because it is so important to me to build a different future," said Kelley. "I'd walk away from this any second if I knew the future for a vast number of people could improve."
Some of Kelley's plans for future projects include writing on music as historical narrative and collaborating on a textbook of African American history.
During the remainder of his time at Dartmouth -- he will depart on August 18 -- Kelley will be giving a talk to the African American Society and visiting classes, among other scheduled events.
Kelley will be giving a talk about the Dartmouth connection to his book during a book signing at the Dartmouth Bookstore on August 10, from 12 p.m. until 2 p.m.
