Adolph Reed, Jr. recently retired after four decades as a political science professor. He has held faculty appointments at Howard, Yale, and Northwestern universities, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the New School for Social Research, and, since 2004, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of four scholarly and popular books and editor of three others and is currently completing a book on the Decline and Transformation of the Left in the United States since the end of the Second World War. In addition to his scholarship focused on urban politics, black American politics, political theory and race and class in American political development, he has a substantial record of popular writing, having been a regular columnist at The Progressive and the Village Voice, as well a frequent contributor to publications like The Nation and Common Dreams. His political writing has appeared in Dissent, the Guardian, New York Times, and New York Newsday. In October of this year he will launch a regular column in The New Republic. He also has a history of active political engagement and organizing that stretches back to the civil rights, Black Power, and antiwar movements of the late 1960s that began when he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He worked in the administration of Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard H. Jackson, and has been active and a recognized voice in practical labor, left and working class politics for decades.
