Response: Robin D.G. Kelley

How would I answer “The Question” if it were asked of me? I wasn’t even an embryo when Nikita Khrushchev unveiled Stalin’s reign of terror to the rest of the world, though I was taught about it in excruciating detail beginning in the fifth grade. That was 1972. I knew Stalin as the world’s most vicious slaughterer, and any thought of him returning from the dead scared me more than my grandfather’s sermons about the devil delivered from his pulpit at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church. As a kid I also remember hearing how the communists were taking over Vietnam and enslaving little children. Yet, a couple years earlier, while grubbing down at a Black Panther party free breakfast program in New Y...