"The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." ―Colin Kaepernick Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it.  Our History Has Always Been Contraband  was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,  Our History Has Always Been Contraband  brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum. Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others. Our History Has Always Been Contraband  excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back. To read  Our History Has Always Been Contraband  is to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all―through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond. Colin Kaepernick is a Super Bowl quarterback and New York Times bestselling author who fights oppression globally. He founded the Know Your Rights Camp, which advances the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown people through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization, and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders. Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of  Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination , and  Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original , among other titles. His writing has been featured in the  Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation,  and  Voice Literary Supplement . Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the co-founder of Hammer & Hope . Her book  From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book, was recently published in an expanded second edition by Haymarket Books, with a new foreword by Angela Y. Davis. ​Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. She is a contributing writer at  The New Yorker and a former Contributing Opinion Writer for  The New York Times . In 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. With Colin Kaepernick and Robin D. G. Kelley, she edited Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies . Her latest book is the expanded and updated edition of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective , featuring a new introduction by Taylor and a powerful new interview with Angela Y. Davis.