The Groundings with My Brothers

Walter Rodney · 1969 · Nonfiction

Why we chose it: Walter Rodney’s 1969 classic gathers the speeches and “groundings” — open, face-to-face reasonings — that Guyana’s most influential historian shared with Rastafari brethren, workers, and students during his time in Jamaica, before the island banned him and sparked the Rodney Riots. Short, incendiary, and foundational to Caribbean Black Power, it is Rodney thinking aloud about liberation alongside the people he refused to talk down to.