Modibo Kadalie has spent nearly six decades as an activist, organizer, teacher, and scholar in the ongoing struggle for Pan-African freedom. In this collection of interviews and public talks, he reflects on the sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, urban rebellions, and anticolonialist movements that have animated the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Kadalie demonstrates how forms of directly democratic organizing that have evolved through these freedom struggles also present the promise of a ecological future. In so doing, he explains that direct democracy is the key to both Black liberation and ecological security. This concise, radical, and iconoclastic book calls on present and future generations of activists to reconnect with the spirit of these movements without lionizing individual leaders or lending legitimacy to any government or politician.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, many African people who were enslaved in North America emancipated themselves and fled into vast swamplands and across colonial borders, beyond the reach of oppressive settler-colonialism and the institution of slavery. On the peripheries of empire, these freedom-seeking "maroons" established their own autonomous, ethnically diverse, and intimately democratic communities of resistance.

This new volume from Modibo Kadalie offers a critical reexamination of the history and historiography surrounding two sites of African maroonage: The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina; and Fort Mose in Florida.

In these communities of refuge, deep-rooted directly democratic social movements emanating from West Africa converged with those of indigenous North Americans. Kadalie's study of these sites offers a new lens of "intimate direct democracy," through which readers are invited to re-examine their notions of human social history.