On Hard Knock Radio, I sat down with Jelani Cobb”dean of Columbias Journalism School, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and a thinker rooted in Hip Hops 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 isnt chasing hot takes; hes 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. Hes 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. Were 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 Roofs trial, he read it alongside a 1947 lynching case previously covered in the same magazine. Thats 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 cant sell alternate histories to a public that refuses to face the real one. He broke down Quentin Tarantinos 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 Spielbergs 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 isnt to cancel the films; its to treat them as texts”with footnotes, counters, and context.
Cobbs 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”Obamas second term, Trumps 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 Belafontes hard, principled eye on presidents (What made you think thats not what Ive been doing? he once said when asked to cut Obama some slack), Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, the Ferguson uprising, Stacey Abramss 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 didnt 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 isnt surprised were here; hes concerned we dont remember how weve gotten out of places like this before.
Thats 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 cant 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 its fashionable homework, but because its a survival guide dressed like a reader. The past isnt past in these pages; its a set of tools for the moment were in.