As indicated by the subtitle, The Black Radical Imagination, Kelley is primarily concerned with how creativity, dreams, and utopian ideas have animated the Black civil rights movement in the United States and abroad. At the core of his thesis is the argument that a vision of the future is critical to continually enrich and motivate activism. Kelley argues that without an idea of what the world should look like, activists will not know what it is they are working toward and therefore will not be able to maintain resistance movements.

Kelley interprets imagination broadly throughout the text. One of the major sources of vision that he identifies are in the creative arts: poetry, hip-hop music, blues, jazz, and painting, to name just a few. He frequently breaks from traditional narrative history to identify and interpret these creative sources, highlighting their integrally relation to the political activism he is describing. Every essay in the collection begins with an epigraph of poetry, musical lyrics, or, in the case of the final essay, a quotation from jazz musician Thelonious Monk that directly relates to the historical argument that follows. While Kelley covers many different kinds of creative efforts, his greatest interest is in surrealist art and poetry and its intersection with political activism.