By a "leading black historian of the age,"* a fierce, distilled history of the pillage and defiance of Black AmericaGeorge Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Breonna Martin, Freddy Gray--their names are etched in America's shameful record. In a distilled, smoldering indictment, Robin Kelley approaches the lives and deaths of today's victims as a portal to the racist histories that strangled them and their communities. From the slave patrols and lynch law of Georgia and Kentucky to the segregated housing of the north, from the war on drugs to slum clearance, predatory lending, and extraction of wealth, Kelley draws a direct line from the "blood at the root"--the racial terror at the heart of the American social and economic order--to the most recent casualties of that terror.Black Bodies Swinging is also the story of Black resistance. Kelley shows that the mass protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd have deep historical roots. The millions who came out swinging, who took to the streets in a multiracial, militant, and mobile uprising, were part of a long lineage of combatants. In a riveting and original reckoning, the current demand--not only for justice for Black victims but for vast and visionary social change--is revealed as the newest chapter in the fight to emancipate, democratize, and lay to rest the America we know so that a new world may be born.