Walter Rodney was a Guyanese historian, Pan-Africanist, and revolutionary whose scholarship became a weapon in the hands of the oppressed. Born in Georgetown in 1942 to a working-class family, he earned his doctorate in African history in London. He then taught in Jamaica, where he refused to keep his knowledge inside the university. He held "groundings," open sessions of political education with Rastafari and working people in Kingston's poorest neighborhoods. In 1968 the Jamaican government banned him from the country, and the protests that followed became known as the Rodney Riots.

In Tanzania, at the University of Dar es Salaam, Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The book showed that Africa's poverty was not natural or accidental but the product of centuries of slave trading, colonial extraction, and imperialist exploitation, and that Europe's development was built on Africa's underdevelopment. Alongside The Groundings with My Brothers, it became essential reading for liberation movements and students across Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora. Rodney believed that intellectuals must commit what Amílcar Cabral called class suicide and place their skills at the service of the masses.

In 1974 he returned to Guyana. There he helped build the Working People's Alliance, a multiracial movement that brought together Afro- and Indo-Guyanese workers against the authoritarian government of Forbes Burnham. On June 13, 1980, Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown by a bomb hidden in a walkie-talkie. A 2016 commission of inquiry found that the state had been involved in his killing. His legacy endures as a model of revolutionary scholarship rooted in the lives and struggles of working people.

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