This discussion is with Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson, an assistant professor of African American history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a 2019-2020 Barra Sabbatical Fellow at University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research interests include enslaved black life, comparative slavery, Black Atlantic studies, and urban history. In this conversation, we discuss his book Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic which was published in 2022 by the University of Georgia Press as part of its Race and the Atlantic World Series. Our conversation here focuses on the key concepts and arguments in the book where he argues how the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience.