Jelani Cobb’s History Lesson for Right Now

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On Hard Knock Radio, I sat down with Jelani Cobb—dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and a thinker rooted in Hip Hop’s habit of connecting dots across time. We talked about his new book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here (2012–2025). I called it “a book of books” on air for a reason: Cobb isn’t chasing hot takes; he’s building a historical map for a decade that feels like whiplash.

Cobb traces the spark back to his first New Yorker assignment: the killing of Trayvon Martin. An editor asked him to “keep track of where this story goes.” He’s still following it. Trayvon becomes a tuning fork, the vibration that carries forward into Black Lives Matter, into the massacre at Mother Emanuel, into the mainstreaming of extremist politics that now shapes the courts, policing, and public life. “We’re seeing masked agents roaming the streets with license to racially profile,” he says, linking scattered headlines to a single drift of power.

What separates this book from a clip file is the method. Cobb reports with history at his elbow. When he covered Sanford, Florida, he pulled the hidden thread to Harry and Harriet Moore—the NAACP organizers whose home was firebombed on Christmas 1951 for registering Black voters. When he sat through Dylann Roof’s trial, he read it alongside a 1947 lynching case previously covered in the same magazine. That’s the point: none of this started yesterday. To understand the “now,” you have to excavate the “again.”

We spent time on pop culture because movies teach history to millions—often badly. Cobb argues you can’t sell “alternate histories” to a public that refuses to face the real one. He broke down Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained as a revenge fantasy that turns the final boss of slavery into a Black character—“morally unconscionable” in a system designed and enforced by white power. Then he pivoted to Spielberg’s Lincoln, pushing past the saintly portrait to the actual politics: agitation from Frederick Douglass, the pressure of Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, and a president whose true heroism was stubborn, lonely resolve to hold the Union together—not divine emancipation from above. The lesson isn’t to cancel the films; it’s to treat them as texts—with footnotes, counters, and context.

Cobb’s title also carries history in its teeth. After the Stono Rebellion of 1739, South Carolina codified that “more than two Negroes outside the company of a white man” could be defined as insurrection. Centuries later, American law still leans on formulas that turn Black assembly into threat—“public mayhem committed by three or more,” the boilerplate of riot statutes. The title becomes a quiet indictment of how power names our gatherings, then polices them.

The book moves in acts—Obama’s second term, Trump’s first, then the Biden years sliding toward a second Trump administration—and connects political weather to the culture we breathe. There are portraits and moments: Harry Belafonte’s hard, principled eye on presidents (“What made you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?” he once said when asked to cut Obama some slack), Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, the Ferguson uprising, Stacey Abrams’s voting fight, even D-Nice turning quarantine into a civic commons. Cobb engages Ta-Nehisi Coates on reparations and memory, not as a side note but as an argument for how policy and imagination meet.

I asked whether he saw this crisis coming. He didn’t flinch. The rise of Trumpism and the Charleston massacre arrived within a day of each other in 2015, expressions of the same “redemptionist” current in American life—the old idea that white supremacy can restore itself through backlash. Cobb isn’t surprised we’re here; he’s concerned we don’t remember how we’ve gotten out of places like this before.

That’s his closing charge: Study history strategically. Not to feel good. Not for trivia night. For tactics. What did people do to fight lynching? To win voting rights? To crack segregation? Read the books—but also read the conditions under which those books were written, when Carter G. Woodson ran from mobs and W.E.B. Du Bois battled segregation just to reach the archives. If the Smithsonian is under attack and Black history is being shoved off the shelf, then the counter is to institutionalize memory elsewhere—and, yes, to put the receipts in a book the censors can’t quietly bury.

When Three or More Is a Riot hits shelves, my kids are getting chapters at the dinner table—same with yours, Jelani. Not because it’s fashionable homework, but because it’s a survival guide dressed like a reader. The past isn’t past in these pages; it’s a set of tools for the moment we’re in.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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