Literature

Revolutionary Threads: Rastafari, Social Justice, and Cooperative Economics

Revolutionary Threads: Rastafari, Social Justice, and Cooperative Economics

Bobby Sullivan, Author

Author Bobby Sullivan found his way to Asheville after growing up in the Washington, D.C., punk scene. “The independent media of the 1980s punk scene, as well as the misrepresentation of the Rastafari movement on the internet inspired me to write this book,” he says. “Each chapter begins with the lyrics to one of my songs and each song is telling a story that I wanted people to know about.”

With all of the research needed, Revolutionary Threads took him 15 years to write. “In doing the research, I was surprised to learn how obvious it is that Africans came to the Americas before Columbus,” he says. Ivan Van Sertima’s books Early American Revealed and They Came Before Columbus lay out a compelling case that led Sullivan deeper into his own research. “The fact that there were pyramids here makes it pretty obvious if you can get past the mental conditioning of ‘history’ that has been passed down to us by the colonial invaders and slave traders,” Sullivan says. “Thinking of Africans as ‘primitive’ peoples who couldn’t have achieved such triumphs is a by-product of that.”

Revolutionary Threads: Rastafari, Social Justice, and Cooperative Economics, December, 2018, political science/history/religion, trade paperback, $15.95, by Bobby Sullivan, and published by Akashic Books, Brooklyn, NY. To learn more, visit AkashicBooks.com.

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