This exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora throughout the twentieth century begins with the premise that the catalyst for political engagement has rarely been misery, poverty, or oppression. People are drawn to social movement because of hope: their dreams of a new world radically different from the one they inherited. Our imagination may be the most revolutionary tool available to us, and yet we have failed to understand its political importance and recognize it as a powerful social force. From Paul Robeson to Aime Cesaire to Jayne Cortez, Kelley unearths freedom dreams in African and Third World liberation movements, in the hope that Communism offered, in the imaginative mindscapes of Surrealism, in the transformative potential of radical feminism, and in the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. With Freedom Dreams, Kelley affirms his place as "a major new voice on the intellectual left" (Frances Fox Piven) and shows us that any serious movement toward freedom must begin in the mind.