Phil Campbell's Revolutionary Optimism

Hunter grad Phil Campbell is earning his PhD at Yale

As I exit the station, the cold air hits me with a whoosh, knocking the post-train exhaustion right out of me. It's a quick walk to Campbell's apartment at Yale, only 15 minutes or so. A student walks by, their knee-length trench coat buttoned up and dress shoes shiny. 

On this night, most students at the university are crowding outside college bars, Christmas wreaths and lights around their necks, dressed in t-shirts and tank tops despite the 30-degree weather. Some wear ugly Christmas sweaters; none wear coats. They laugh loudly, walking down the block to the bar on the next corner, where they will continue to drink and enjoy their Saturday.

I meet Campbell outside his apartment, the cold air rustling the last leaves off of the bare trees that line the neo-Gothic buildings. Lamp posts turn on, softly illuminating Campbell as he waves a greeting. He wears a dark green trench coat, and the Keffiyeh wrapped around his neck blows gently in the wind. He greets me with a hug, his 6’4” frame squeezing me tight.

At just 23 years old, Campbell’s accomplishments are more than many people twice his age. While earning his bachelor's degree from Hunter College-CUNY, he taught classes at the Bronx Documentary Center on Black studies, journalism, and cultural studies. At Hunter, he won seven fellowships and awards, including the prestigious Beinecke Scholarship, presented at Yale and Stanford Universities, and published over 50 articles. He founded two artist collectives and organized jazz poetry open mics that focus on liberation and the decolonization of poetry. He also held events educating the public on Palestinian liberation and helped organize the Gaza solidarity encampments at City College in 2024.   

Campbell’s dimly lit studio apartment offers a glimpse inside his mind. Posters of Black activists and communists cover his walls. Claudia Jones, Fidel Castro, and Sonia Sanchez watch me as I step across the patterned rug that covers his floor and take a seat on one of the maroon floor cushions he’s set up for us. A bookshelf packed with the teachings of Black liberation and history, jazz, poetry, and Marxism stands behind me. A single drum sits in the corner, and as Campbell brings out sodas for us to drink, the coasters he places down are mini vinyl records. 

Campbell grew up surrounded by performance and musicality. The small Bronx apartment his grandmother raised him in was filled with instruments: a tambourine, drums, a trumpet. It was only after she passed that Campbell learned of her stint as an opera singer. 

Hailing from Arkansas, his grandmother valued a well-rounded liberal arts education. As a young boy, Campbell attended all sorts of performance classes, from ballet and tap to modern dance and hip-hop. In middle school, he learned African drums and traditional African dances, and began participating in theatre. 

It was then that Campbell learned how to articulate and express himself in a way he had never been able to before. It led him to his current, and favorite, type of performance: spoken word poetry. 

Poetry became an outlet for Campbell. He loved the community of poets and artists he met at performances and eventually began organizing his own events.

When the pandemic hit, he began practicing his poetry at home and learning about poets and writers like Gil Scott-Heron, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, many of whom were part of the Black liberation movement. That was the start of his journey into leftism and organizing. “They kind of became my teachers,” Campbell says.  

Campbell pauses for a moment and looks at me. “Do you mind if I play my guitar while we speak?” he asks. As we resume talking, the soft lull of blues chords fills the room, giving his words a melodic feel. 

As he strums the rhythmic, three-chord progression that makes up a blues song, Campbell discusses the core of blues pedagogy. “People underestimate the blues so much,” he says. “It’s deceivingly simple.” 

Typically, the blues are sung strictly in the first-person, he explains. They often follow a pattern; the singer starts with something bad and ends with something good, or the reverse. A man laments about his girl leaving him, then ends the song with a promise to find her one day. There is a sense of temporality in that first-person perspective, and then a sense of reflection.  

But the blues are more than just a simple ballad, Campbell says. They are a reflection of the social conditions of the time. “These are the ingredients that any radical needs to really engage with the masses, because it shows you how the masses are feeling," he says.

A self-described Marxist-Leninist, the core of Campbell’s belief system is attending to the needs of every sector of society, something that he feels the blues reflect. The musical and poetic tradition of the blues is that of the working class and the oppressed singing about their desires and fears. And as a Marxist-Leninist, Campbell knows that when you really get to the root of what people want -- even if it’s as simple as wanting a sweet treat or a new pair of shoes -- you realize that their basic needs and wants are contradictory to the system they are living in.

Campbell believes that it would be a betrayal to everybody he’s loved, as well as those he has studied, to not at least try and service the needs of the people. “Once you’re conscious of the issues and you’re conscious of," he says, "you have no responsibility greater than affecting change.”

Sitting with Campbell on the floor of his snug apartment, sharing a ginger ale while he plays guitar, it is clear to me that he does truly love community. His love for people as a whole, whether he’s known them for years or met them that day, is evident in the way he welcomes me into his space and shares himself. 

For Campbell, maintaining optimism comes from a unity of thought and action. Idealism, the philosophical view that ideas and thoughts shape our reality, is only half of the recipe needed to effect change. Real change starts with the material world; it takes action informed by thought. And that’s why Campbell keeps moving, always working on his next book of poems or organizing a youth coalition activism workshop.  

The blues detail the good and the bad. They tell a tale of luck and loss, of love and hardship. But at its core, the blues are about change. And for Campbell, knowing that he possesses power to effect change is all he needs.