Winner of the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Award

When Aaron Henry returned home to Mississippi from World War II service in 1946, he was part of wave of black servicemen who challenged the racial status quo. He became a pharmacist through the GI Bill, and as a prominent citizen, he organized a hometown chapter of the NAACP and relatively quickly became leader of the state chapter.

From that launching pad he joined and helped lead an ensemble of activists who fundamentally challenged the system of segregation and the almost total exclusion of African Americans from the political structure. These efforts were most clearly evident in his leadership of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, which, after an unsuccessful effort to unseat the lily-white Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, won recognition from the national party in 1968.

The man who the New York Times described as being “at the forefront of every significant boycott, sit-in, protest march, rally, voter registration drive and court case” eventually became a rare example of a social-movement leader who successfully moved into political office. Aaron Henry of Mississippi covers the life of this remarkable leader, from his humble beginnings in a sharecropping family to his election to the Mississippi house of representatives in 1979, all the while maintaining the social-change ideology that prompted him to improve his native state, and thereby the nation.

An omnibus collection of concise and up-to-date biographies of four influential figures from modern African history.

Chris Hani, by Hugh Macmillan
Chris Hani was one of the most highly respected leaders of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and uMkhonto we Sizwe. His assassination in 1993 threatened to upset the country’s transition to democracy and prompted an intervention by Nelson Mandela that ultimately accelerated apartheid’s demise.

Wangari Maathai, by Tabitha Kanogo
This concise biography tells the story of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who devoted her life to campaigning for environmental conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty.

Josie Mpama/Palmer: Get Up and Get Moving, by Robert R. Edgar
Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered Black women’s political activism, South Africa’s Josie Mpama/Palmer was an outspoken advocate for women’s social and political equality, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa, and an antiapartheid activist.

Ken Saro-Wiwa, by Roy Doron and Toyin Falola
A penetrating, accessible portrait of the Nigerian activist whose execution galvanized the world. Ken Saro-Wiwa became a martyr and symbolized modern Africans’ struggle against military dictatorship, corporate power, and environmental exploitation.

Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.

In an excellent addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Robert Trent Vinson recovers the important but largely forgotten story of Albert Luthuli, Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967. One of the most respected African leaders, Luthuli linked South African antiapartheid politics with other movements, becoming South Africa’s leading advocate of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience techniques. He also framed apartheid as a crime against humanity and thus linked South African antiapartheid struggles with international human rights campaigns.

Unlike previous studies, this book places Luthuli and the South African antiapartheid struggle in new global contexts, and aspects of Luthuli’s leadership that were not previously publicly known: Vinson is the first to use new archival evidence, numerous oral interviews, and personal memoirs to reveal that Luthuli privately supported sabotage as an additional strategy to end apartheid. This multifaceted portrait will be indispensable to students of African history and politics and nonviolence movements worldwide.

Amílcar Cabral was an agronomist who led an armed struggle that ended Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. The uprising contributed significantly to the collapse of a fascist regime in Lisbon and the dismantlement of Portugal’s empire in Africa. Assassinated by a close associate with the deep complicity of the Portuguese colonial authorities, Cabral not only led one of Africa’s most successful liberation movements, but was the voice and face of the anticolonial wars against Portugal.

A brilliant military strategist and astute diplomat, Cabral was an original thinker who wrote innovative and inspirational essays that still resonate today. His charismatic and visionary leadership, his active pan-Africanist solidarity and internationalist commitment to “every just cause in the world,” remain relevant to contemporary struggles for emancipation and self-determination. Peter Karibe Mendy’s compact and accessible biography is an ideal introduction to his life and legacy.

An uncommon and intimate account of the lives of two conscientious objectors
 
In the summer of 2013, Suzanne Kesler Rumsey discovered hundreds of letters exchanged between her late grandparents, Miriam and Benjamin Kesler. The letters, written between 1941 and 1946, were filled with typical wartime sentiments: love and longing, anguish at being apart, uncertainty about the war and the country’s future, and attempts at humor to keep their spirits up. What is unusual about their story is that Ben Kesler was not writing from a theater of war. Instead, Ben, a member of the Dunkard Brethren Church, was a conscientious objector. He, along with about 12,000 other men, opted to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS) and contribute to “work of national importance” at one of the 218 CPS camps around the country.

In Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology, Rumsey has mined not only her grandparents’ letters but also archival research on CPS camps and historical data from several Mennonite and Brethren archives to recapture the narrative of Ben’s service at two different camps and of Miriam’s struggle to support herself and her husband financially at the young age of seventeen. Ben and Miriam’s life during the war was extraordinarily ordinary, spanning six years of unrecognized and humble work for their country. Ben was not compensated for his work in the camps, and Miriam stayed home and worked as a day laborer, as a live-in maid, as a farmhand, and in the family butcher shop in order to earn enough money to support them both. Small histories like that of her grandparents, Rumsey argues, provide a unique perspective on significant political and historical moments.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers also explores the rhetorical functions of letter writing as well as the methodology of family history writing. Ben and Miriam’s letters provide an apt backdrop to examine the genre, a relatively understudied mode of literacy. Rumsey situates the young couple’s correspondence within ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, granting new insights into the genre and how personal accounts shape our understanding of historical events.
 

When William "Blue" Jenkins was only six months old, he moved with his parents from a Mississippi sharecropper’s farm to the industrial city of Racine, Wisconsin with dreams of a new life. As an African-American in the pre–civil rights era, Blue came face to face with racism: the Ku Klux Klan hung a black figure in effigy from a tree in the Jenkins family’s yard. Growing up, Blue knew where blacks could shop, eat, and get a job in Racine—and where they couldn’t. The injustices that confronted Blue in his young life would drive his desire to make positive changes to his community and workplace in adulthood.
 

This addition to the Badger Biographies series shares Blue Jenkins’s story as it acquaints young readers with African-American and labor history. Following an all-star career as a high school football player, Blue became involved in unions through his work at Belle City Malleable. As World War II raged on, he participated in the home-front battle against discrimination in work, housing, and economic opportunity. When Blue became president of the union at Belle City, he organized blood drives and fought for safety regulations. He also helped to integrate labor union offices. In 1962, he became president of the U.A.W. National Foundry in the Midwest, and found himself in charge of 50,000 foundry union members.

Written in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, in Clouds without Rain, P. L. Gaus once again provides compelling intrigue and insight into Amish culture and tradition alongside contemporary American life.

In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions only grow when the trustee of the dead man’s estate disappears a few days later.

Faced with Amish teenagers in goat masks robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several mysterious deaths, and the disappearance of a bank official, Branden realizes that there is far more to the story than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.

This new edition of Clouds without Rain  features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.

"Every writer has advice for aspiring writers. Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father’s calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life’s work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug—still the poets are my favorites—but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling." 

The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls "shovel time"—a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, "It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.") But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: "My greatest privilege," he says, "lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another."

Dead Weight chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society to earn a PhD in creative writing and become the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions. Horton’s visceral essays highlight the difficulties of trying to change one’s life for the better, how the weight of felony convictions never dissipates.
 
The memoir begins with a conversation between Horton and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man statue in New York City. Their imagined dialogue examines the psychological impact of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton’s separation from his mother, immediately after his birth, in a segregated Alabama hospital. From his current life as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his experiences as a drug smuggler and trafficker during the 1980s–1990s as well as the many obstacles he faced after his release. He also examines the lasting impact of his drug activity on those around him, reflecting on the allure of economic freedom and the mental escapism that cocaine provided, an allure so strong that both sellers and users were willing to risk prison. Horton shares historical context and vivid details about people caught in the war on drugs who became unsuspecting protagonists in somebody else’s melodrama.
 
Lyrical and gripping, Dead Weight reveals the lifelong effects of one man’s incarceration on his psyche, his memories, and his daily experience of American society.
 

Born to Slovenian peasants, Louis Adamic commanded crowds, met with FDR and Truman, and built a prolific career as an author and journalist. Behind the scenes, he played a leading role in a coalition of black intellectuals and writers, working class militants, ethnic activists, and others that worked for a multiethnic America and against fascism. John Enyeart restores Adamic's life to the narrative of American history. Dogged and energetic, Adamic championed causes that ranged from ethnic and racial equality to worker's rights to anticolonialism. Adamic defied the consensus that equated being American with Anglo-Protestant culture. Instead, he insisted newcomers and their ideas kept the American identity in a state of dynamism that pushed it from strength to strength. In time, Adamic's views put him at odds with an establishment dedicated to cold war aggression and white supremacy. He increasingly fought smear campaigns and the distortion of his views--both of which continued after his probable murder in 1951.

Desert Rose details Coretta Scott King's upbringing in a family of proud, land-owning African Americans with a profound devotion to the ideals of social equality and the values of education, as well as her later role as her husband's most trusted confidant and advisor. 

Coretta Scott King—noted author, human rights activist, and wife and partner of famed Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr.—grew up in the rural Alabama Black Belt with her older sister, Edythe Scott Bagley. Bagley chronicles the sisters’ early education together at the Crossroads School and later at the progressive Lincoln School in Marion. She describes Coretta’s burgeoning talent for singing and her devotion to musical studies, and the sisters’ experiences matriculating at Antioch College, an all-white college far from the rural South. Bagley provides vivid insights into Coretta’s early passion for racial and economic justice, which lead to her involvement in the Peace Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

As Coretta’s older sister, Edythe shared in almost all of Coretta’s many trials and tribulations. Desert Rose charts Coretta’s hesitance about her romance with Martin Luther King and the prospect of having to sacrifice her dream of a career in music to become a minister’s wife. Ultimately, Coretta chose to utilize her artistic gifts and singing voice for the Movement through the development and performance of Freedom Concerts. This book also charts Coretta’s own commitment and dedication, in the years that followed King’s death, to the causes of international civil rights, the antiapartheid movement, and the establishment of the King Center in Atlanta and the national King Holiday. Coretta’s devotion to activism, motherhood, and the movement led by her husband, and her courageous assumption of the legacy left in the wake of King’s untimely assassination, are wonderfully detailed in this intimate biography.

A life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy
 
Drawn from some 5,000 letters, six decades of daily-diary writings, and extensive interviews, Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy offers a life-and-times biography of the Alabama Black Belt minister, Renwick C. Kennedy (1900–1985). Here, Tennant McWilliams gives an unvarnished account of Kennedy’s tortuous efforts to make his congregants and other southern whites “better Christians.”

Kennedy came from “upcountry” South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians—people of biblical infallibility and individual piety and salvation. In 1927, after a life-changing theology education at Princeton, he moved to Camden, Alabama, county seat of Wilcox County. There, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to change the “Half Christian” conservative, and the often violent, racial behaviors around him. As a neo-orthodox Protestant, Kennedy never rejected literal approaches to the Bible. Still, out of the “Full Christian” Social Gospel, he urged changed racial behavior. Ultimately this led him to publish confrontational short stories and essays in Christian Century and New Republic—most set in fictitious “Yaupon County.”

In World War II, Kennedy served as a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital. He came home hoping the Allied victory would spur Americans to fight racial segregation just as they had fought racial fascism in Europe. The 1948 Dixiecrat movement dashed these hopes, turning much of his neo-orthodox optimism to cynicism. His hope found fleeting resurgence in the civil rights movement, and saw Kennedy quietly leading desegregation of Troy University, where he was an administrator. But the era’s assassinations, combined with George Wallace and the rise of southern white Republicans, regularly returned him to the frustrated hopes of 1948 and fostered a pessimism about truly changed hearts that he took to his grave in 1985.
 

Selected as a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of the Year for 2018 (Category: Twelve–Fourteen)
“A biography for the times … An excellent read for anyone hoping to believe one person can make a difference.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“This well-told, age-appropriate account of a vital and essential activist deserves a place in all middle grade collections.” —School Library Journal (starred review)

Today, we know Dolores Huerta as the cofounder, with Cesar Chavez, of the National Farmworkers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers of America. We know her as a tireless advocate for the rights of farmworkers, Mexican American immigrants, women, and LGBTQ populations. And we know her as the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012.

Before all that, though, Huerta was a child in the farming community of Stockton, California, and then a teenager whose teachers underestimated her because she was Chicana. When she became a teacher herself, she witnessed her students coming to school shoeless and hungry. Many took days off from school to work in the farm fields to help feed their families. What could she do to help them? A young mother at the time, Huerta quit her teaching job to organize their parents. That began her journey to educate a nation about who produces our food and the conditions under which they work.

Dolores Huerta Stands Strong follows Huerta’s life from the mining communities of the Southwest where her father toiled, to the vineyards and fields of California, and across the country to the present day. As she worked for fair treatment for others, Dolores earned the nation’s highest honors. More important, she found her voice.

This book is the story of legendary Spanish revolutionary, and uncompromising anarchist, Buenaventura Durruti, as well as a history of the Spanish revolution.  

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano was an activist, visionary, and storyteller who began his hugely influential career with the publication of Open Veins of Latin America in 1971, which set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. After this success, Galeano’s writing became increasingly lyrical and inspired by the storytelling of South America’s Indigenous peoples, while remaining politically engaged and prophetic.
 
This book picks up where Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy’s previous book on Galeano left off, focusing on timely and urgent themes in the last four books he wrote in the twenty-first century. Through his distinctive narrative style of short vignettes—tightly packed explosive stories—Galeano explores what it means to live as mortal beings with a finite amount of time on the earth, waxing and waning between despair and hope. As a hunter of stories, Galeano’s yarns place us, as his listeners and agents of history, in a web where past and future come together to create a present full of possibility.

Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View is an intellectual biography of a long-forgotten radical female journalist in Portland, whose daily women’s columns provide a window into the breadth of intellectual radicalism in Progressive Era journalism. Baldwin was one of an early generation of female journalists who were hired to lure female readers to the daily newspaper’s department store advertisements. Instead of catering to the demands of consumerism, Baldwin quickly brought an anti-capitalist, antiracist agenda to her column, “The Woman’s Point of View." She eschewed household hints and instead focused on the immorality of capitalists and imperialists while emphasizing the need for women to become independent and productive citizens. 
 
A century before the Occupy movement and the Women’s March, Baldwin spoke truth to power. Imbued with a New Thought spirituality that presumed progressive thought could directly affect material reality, she wrote to move history forward. And yet, the trajectory of history proved as hard to forecast then as now.  While her personal story seems to embody a modern progressivism, blending abolition with labor reform and anti-banker activism—positions from which she never wavered—her path grew more complicated as times changed in the aftermath of World War I, when she would advocate on behalf of both the Bolsheviks and the Ku Klux Klan.
 
In this deeply researched and nuanced account of Eleanor Baldwin’s intellectual journey, historian Larry Lipin reveals how even the most dedicated radical can be overcome by unforeseen events. Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View restores a missing chapter in Portland’s Progressive Era history and rescues this passionate, intriguing, and quixotic character from undeserved obscurity.

Father Groppi Marched to Change Milwaukee

"Father Groppi: Marching for Civil Rights" tells the story of Father James Groppi, a Catholic priest from Milwaukee, Wis., who stood up for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s.

This important new addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers also tells about a turbulent time in Wisconsin history and sheds light on the civil rights movement and its place in the North.

Growing up on the south side of Milwaukee as the son of Italian immigrants, young James Groppi learned early on what it felt like to be made fun of just because of who you are, and he learned to respect people from other races and ethnic groups. Later, while studying to become a priest, he saw the discrimination African Americans faced. It made him angry, and he vowed to do whatever he could to fight racism.

Father Groppi marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement. But he knew there was work to be done in his own city. In Milwaukee, he teamed up with the NAACP and other organizations, protesting discrimination and segregation wherever they saw it. It wasn't always easy, and Father Groppi and the other civil rights workers faced great challenges.

“It was one of those periods that you got through, as opposed to enjoyed. It wasn’t an environment that . . . was nurturing, so you shut it out. You just got through it. You just took it a day at a time. You excelled if you could. You did your best. You felt as though the eyes of the community were on you.”—Glenda Wilson, East Side Junior High

Much has been written about the historical desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American students in 1957. History has been silent, however, about the students who desegregated Little Rock’s five public junior high schools—East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest, and West Side—in 1961 and 1962.

The First Twenty-Five gathers the personal stories of these students some fifty years later. They recall what it was like to break down long-standing racial barriers while in their early teens—a developmental stage that often brings emotional vulnerability. In their own words, these individuals share what they saw, heard, and felt as children on the front lines of the civil rights movement, providing insight about this important time in Little Rock, and how these often painful events from their childhoods affected the rest of their lives.

Psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon is one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. He presented powerful critiques of racism, colonialism, and nationalism in his classic books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This biography reintroduces Fanon for a new generation of readers, revisiting these enduring themes while also arguing for those less appreciated—namely, his anti-Manichean sensibility and his personal ethic of radical empathy, both of which underpinned his utopian vision of a new humanism. Written with clarity and passion, Christopher J. Lee’s account ultimately argues for the pragmatic idealism of Frantz Fanon and his continued importance today.

From Jail to Jail  is the political autobiography of Sutan Ibrahim gelar Tan Malaka, an enigmatic and colorful political thinker of twentieth-century Asia, who was one of the most influential figures of the Indonesian Revolution. Variously labeled a communist, Trotskyite, and nationalist, Tan Malaka managed to run afoul of nearly every political group and faction involved in the Indonesian struggle for independence. During his decades of political activity, he spent periods of exile and hiding in nearly every country in Southeast Asia. As a Marxist who was expelled from and became a bitter enemy of his country’s Communist Party and as a nationalist who was imprisoned and murdered by his own government’s forces as a danger to its anticolonial struggle, Tan Malaka was and continues to be soaked in contradiction and controversy.

Translated by Helen Javis and with a new introduction from Harry A. Poeze, this edition of From Jail to Jail contextualizes the life and political accomplishments of Tan Malaka in one of the few known autobiographies by a Marxist of this political era and region.

From Jail to Jail  is the political autobiography of Sutan Ibrahim gelar Tan Malaka, an enigmatic and colorful political thinker of twentieth-century Asia, who was one of the most influential figures of the Indonesian Revolution. Variously labeled a communist, Trotskyite, and nationalist, Tan Malaka managed to run afoul of nearly every political group and faction involved in the Indonesian struggle for independence. During his decades of political activity, he spent periods of exile and hiding in nearly every country in Southeast Asia. As a Marxist who was expelled from and became a bitter enemy of his country’s Communist Party and as a nationalist who was imprisoned and murdered by his own government’s forces as a danger to its anticolonial struggle, Tan Malaka was and continues to be soaked in contradiction and controversy.

Introduction by George Woodcock

These essays, which either have not been previously published or have been out of print, embrace Kropotkin's philosophy at a time when he first gave it expression.

This collection contains selected essays by Peter Kropotkin who was, unquestionably, the most widely read and respected theorist of anarchism. It is intended to make some of his most representative writings more accessible. The material consists of essays which either have not been previously published or have been out of print since their original publication.

While the entire scope of Kropotkin's political thinking cannot possibly be projected in a single volume, it is hoped that many of his most fundamental conceptions have been exemplified here, for these essays embrace Kropotkin's philosophy at a time when he was struggling to first give them expression.

In this context, Kropotkin's very first political essay, Must We Occupy Ourselves With An Examination of the Ideal of a Future System, written in 1873, which foreshadows most of his later writings, is of particular value.

Apart from a general introduction to the most significant aspects of Kropotkin's life and thought, George Woodcock has prepared a preface to each essay allowing the reader to enter into the spirit of the time.


Table of Contents

Preface

Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal Future System?

Preface

Anarchist Communism: Its Basics and Principles

Preface

Anarchist Morality

Preface

The State: Its Historic Role


1993: 240 pages

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu was born in the Cape Colony in British southern Africa on October 20, 1885, when a few African men could vote and the prospects for black equality with the ruling whites seemed promising. He died on August 3, 1959, in the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa, eleven years after the apartheid state had begun stripping blacks of their rights and exorcising the ‘ghost of equality’ with a completeness unparalleled in the country’s history. The ‘ghost of equality was the last vestige of the Cape liberal tradition — itself best summed up by the dictum ’equal rights for all civilized men‘ — finally erased in 1959 with the passage of legislation that would, the following year, remove from parliament the last elected white representatives of Africans.…

If D.D.T. Jabavu’s life reveals anything about South Africa’s political history, it is that this history was not monolithic. It was not simply a lengthly confrontation between a black elite represented by the African National Congress and the white segregationist state. Rather, there was a range of black political opinion and activity, of which Jabavu, an active participant in virtually every government-sponsored and every major extraparliamentary conference between 1920 and the late 1940s, represented one prominent historical strain.

This book, however, is about more than D.D.T. Javavu’s politics; it is about his public life, or perhaps more accurately, his public lives. The book is arranged thematically, divided according to the parts Jabavu played: student, teacher, Methodist, and politician.

— from the introduction by the author

The iconic leader of one of America’s most powerful unions, Harry Bridges put an indelible stamp on the twentieth century labor movement. Robert Cherny’s monumental biography tells the life story of the figure who built the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) into a labor powerhouse that still represents almost 30,000 workers.

An Australian immigrant, Bridges worked the Pacific Coast docks. His militant unionism placed him at the center of the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike and spurred him to expand his organizing activities to warehouse laborers and Hawaiian sugar and pineapple workers. Cherny examines the overall effectiveness of Bridges as a union leader and the decisions and traits that made him effective. Cherny also details the price paid by Bridges as the US government repeatedly prosecuted him for his left-wing politics.

Drawing on personal interviews with Bridges and years of exhaustive research, Harry Bridges places an extraordinary individual and the ILWU within the epic history of twentieth-century labor radicalism.

Biography of a forgotten poet who used his name and influence to speak up for those on the margins of society

Few surnames resonate in American history more than Beecher. The family’s abolitionist ministers, educators, and writers are central figures in the historical narrative of the United States. The Beechers’ influence was greatest in the nineteenth century, but the family story continued—albeit with less public attention—with a descendant who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the early twentieth century.
 
John Beecher (1904–1980) never had the public prominence of his famous ancestors, but as a poet, professor, sociologist, New Deal administrator, journalist, and civil rights activist, he spent his life fighting for the voiceless and oppressed with a distinct moral sensibility that reflected his self-identification as the twentieth-century torchbearer for his famous family. While John Beecher had many vocations in his lifetime, he always considered himself a poet and a teacher. Some critics have compared the populist elements of Beecher’s poetry to the work of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, but his writing never gained a broad audience or critical acclaim during his lifetime.
 
In Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher, Angela J. Smith examines Beecher’s writing and activism and places them in the broader context of American culture at pivotal points in the twentieth century. Employing his extensive letters, articles, unpublished poetry and prose, and audio interviews in addition to his numerous published books, Smith uncovers a record of public concerns in American history ranging from the plight of workers in 1920s steel mills to sharecroppers’ struggles during the Depression to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

In the late 1960s, new age communes began springing up in the American Southwest with names like Drop City, New Buffalo, Lama Foundation, Morning Star, Reality Construction Company, and the Hog Farm. In the summer of 1969, Roberta Price, a recent college graduate, secured a grant to visit these communities and photograph them. When she and her lover David arrived at Libre in the Huerfano Valley of southern Colorado, they were so taken with what they found that they wanted to participate instead of observe. The following spring they married, dropped out of graduate school in upstate New York, packed their belongings into a 1947 Chrysler Windsor Coupe, and moved to Libre, leaving family and academia behind.

Huerfano is Price's captivating memoir of the seven years she spent in the Huerfano ("Orphan") Valley when it was a petrie dish of countercultural experiments. She and David joined with fellow baby boomers in learning to mix cement, strip logs, weave rugs, tan leather, grow marijuana, build houses, fix cars, give birth, and make cheese, beer, and furniture as well as poetry, art, music, and love. They built a house around a boulder high on a ridge overlooking the valley and made ends meet by growing their own food, selling homemade goods, and hiring themselves out as day laborers. Over time their collective ranks swelled to more than three hundred, only to diminish again as, for many participants, the dream of a life of unbridled possibility gradually yielded to the hard realities of a life of voluntary poverty.

Price tells her story with a clear, distinctive voice, documenting her experiences with photos as well as words. Placing her story in the larger context of the times, she describes her participation in the antiwar movement, the advent of the women's movement, and her encounters with such icons as Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Abbie Hoffman, Stewart Brand, Allen Ginsburg, and Baba Ram Dass.

At once comic, poignant, and above all honest, Huerfano recaptures the sense of affirmation and experimentation that fueled the counterculture without lapsing into nostalgic sentimentality on the one hand or cynicism on the other.

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." Like all of Steve Biko's writings, those words testify to the passion, courage, and keen insight that made him one of the most powerful figures in South Africa's struggle against apartheid. They also reflect his conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness movement that he helped found.

I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko's writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Students' Organization, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. The collection also includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; an introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, who were both involved with Biko in the Black Consciousness movement; a memoir of Biko by Father Aelred Stubbs, his longtime pastor and friend; and a new foreword by Professor Lewis Gordon.

Biko's writings will inspire and educate anyone concerned with issues of racism, postcolonialism, and black nationalism.

John L. Lewis (1880-1969), who ruled the United Mine Workers for four decades beginning in 1919, defied presidents, challenged Congress, and kept American political life in an uproar. Drawing upon previously untapped resources in the UMW archives and upon oral histories by major figures of the 1930s and 1940s, the authors have created a remarkable portrait of this 'self-made man' and his times.
 
 

While African National Congress narratives dominate much of the scholarship on South Africa’s freedom struggle, Josie Mpama/Palmer’s political life offers a different perspective. Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered black women from actively participating in politics, Mpama/Palmer was an outspoken advocate for women’s social equality and encouraged black women to become more involved in national conversations. The first black woman to join the Communist Party of South Africa and an antiapartheid activist, Josie Mpama/Palmer remained involved in critical issues all her life, especially protests against Bantu Education and other forms of racial and sexist discrimination. She was an integral figure in establishing the Federation of South African Women, an organization open to women of all races. Mpama/Palmer’s activism and political legacy would become an inspiring example for women in South Africa and around the world to get up and get moving.

Winner, 2019 Booker Worthen Prize from the Central Arkansas Library System.

A dedicated advocate for social justice long before the term entered everyday usage, Rabbi Ira Sanders began striving against the Jim Crow system soon after he arrived in Little Rock from New York in 1926. Sanders, who led Little Rock’s Temple B’nai Israel for nearly forty years, was a trained social worker as well as a rabbi and his career as a dynamic religious and community leader in Little Rock spanned the traumas of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the social and racial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Just and Righteous Causes—a full biographical study of this bold social-activist rabbi—examines how Sanders expertly navigated the intersections of race, religion, and gender to advocate for a more just society. It joins a growing body of literature about the lives and histories of Southern rabbis, deftly balancing scholarly and narrative tones to provide a personal look into the complicated position of the Southern rabbi and the Jewish community throughout the political struggles of the twentieth-century South.

Marian Alexander Spencer was born in 1920 in the Ohio River town of Gallipolis, Ohio, one year after the “Red Summer” of 1919 that saw an upsurge in race riots and lynchings. Following the example of her grandfather, an ex-slave and community leader, Marian joined the NAACP at thirteen and grew up to achieve not only a number of civic leadership firsts in her adopted home city of Cincinnati, but a legacy of lasting civil rights victories.

Of these, the best known is the desegregation of Cincinnati’s Coney Island amusement park. She also fought to desegregate Cincinnati schools and to stop the introduction of observers in black voting precincts in Ohio. Her campaign to raise awareness of industrial toxic-waste practices in minority neighborhoods was later adapted into national Superfund legislation.

In 2012, Marian’s friend and colleague Dot Christenson sat down with her to record her memories. The resulting biography not only gives us the life story of remarkable leader but encapsulates many of the twentieth century’s greatest struggles and advances. Spencer’s story will prove inspirational and instructive to citizens and students alike.

Hanged by the Nigerian government on November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa became a martyr for the Ogoni people and human rights activists, and a symbol of modern Africans’ struggle against military dictatorship, corporate power, and environmental exploitation. Though he is rightly known for his human rights and environmental activism, he wore many hats: writer, television producer, businessman, and civil servant, among others. While the book sheds light on his many legacies, it is above all about Saro-Wiwa the man, not just Saro-Wiwa the symbol.

Roy Doron and Toyin Falola portray a man who not only was formed by the complex forces of ethnicity, race, class, and politics in Nigeria, but who drove change in those same processes. Like others in the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Ken Saro-Wiwa is written to be accessible to the casual reader and student, yet indispensable to scholars.

A steel town daughter’s search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Alabama
 
“As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation,” Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of 1963. From the height of the Civil Rights Movement through its long aftermath, images of police dogs, fire hoses and four girls murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church have served as an uncomfortable racial mirror for the nation. Like many white people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement’s wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about this history. Only after moving away and discovering writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker did she realize how her hometown and family were part of a larger, ongoing story of struggle and injustice.

When Armstrong returned to Birmingham decades later to care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth’s admonition rang in her mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator, Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham holds for a twenty-first century America. Those lessons extended far beyond what a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report describes as the common distillation of the Civil Rights Movement into “two names and four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and ‘I have a dream.’” Seeking to better understand a more complex local history, its connection to broader stories of oppression and resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see what she would find.

Beginning at the center, with her family’s 1947 arrival to a housing project near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong works her way over time and across the map. Weaving in stories of her white working-class family, classmates, and others not traditionally associated with Birmingham’s civil rights history, including members of the city’s LGBTQ community, she forges connections between the familiar and lesser-known. The result is a nuanced portrait of Birmingham--as seen in public housing, at old plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways, beneath airport runways, on highways cutting through town, and under the gaze of the iconic statue of Vulcan.

In her search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating easy narratives of civil rights progress. Among the discoveries she finds in America’s racial mirror is a nation that has failed to recognize itself in the horrific images from Birmingham’s past and to acknowledge the continuing inequalities that make up the Civil Right’s Movement’s unfinished business. Learning from Birmingham reminds us that stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege, abuse, race and gender bias, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary.
 

Established by Martin Eakes and Bonnie Wright in North Carolina in 1980, the nonprofit Center for Community Self-Help has grown from an innovative financial institution dedicated to civil rights into the nation's largest home lender to low- and moderate-income borrowers. Self-Help's first capital campaign—a bake sale that raised a meager seventy-seven dollars for a credit union—may not have done much to fulfill the organization's early goals of promoting worker-owned businesses, but it was a crucial first step toward wielding inclusive lending as a weapon for economic justice.
In Lending Power journalist and historian Howard E. Covington Jr. narrates the compelling story of Self-Help's founders and coworkers as they built a progressive and community-oriented financial institution. First established to assist workers displaced by closed furniture and textile mills, Self-Help created a credit union that expanded into providing home loans for those on the margins of the financial market, especially people of color and single mothers.
Using its own lending record, Self-Help convinced commercial banks to follow suit, extending its influence well beyond North Carolina. In 1999 its efforts led to the first state law against predatory lending. A decade later, as the Great Recession ravaged the nation's economy, its legislative victories helped influence the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Self-Help also created a federally chartered credit union to expand to California and later to Illinois and Florida, where it assisted ailing community-based credit unions and financial institutions. 
Throughout its history, Self-Help has never wavered from its mission to use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of justice to extend economic opportunity to the nation's unbanked and underserved citizens. With nearly two billion dollars in assets, Self-Help also shows that such a model for nonprofits can be financially successful while serving the greater good. At a time when calls for economic justice are growing ever louder, Lending Power shows how hard-working and dedicated people can help improve their communities.

At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990’s Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her "the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time." Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn't be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to surround all-white Central High School and prevent the entry of nine black students, challenging the Supreme Court's 1954 order to integrate all public schools. On September 25, Daisy Bates, an official of the NAACP in Arkansas, led the nine children into the school with the help of federal troops sent by President Eisenhower–the first time in eighty-one years that a president had dispatched troops to the South to protect the constitutional rights of black Americans. This new edition of Bates's own story about these historic events is being issued to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Little Rock School crisis in 2007.

Introduction by George Woodcock

This precious work, which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, was published in book form in 1899. Having delighted readers as varied as Leo Tolstoy and Lewis Mumford, Memoirs continues to be a classic in this literary genre.

Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was born into the highest rank of the Russian aristocracy. This fascinating account of his dramatic conversion from prince to anarchist is more than an autobiography; it is an extraordinary portrait of the old Russia, both before and after the liberation of the serfs.

Kropotkin was a remarkable writer in the Russian tradition, and this work stands as a non-fictional counterpart of the novels in which Turgenev and other great Russian writers portray the development of social conscience among the youth in autocratic society.

Having renounced his title, Kropotkin pursued his work as a scientist and won international acclaim as a geographer as well as a radical. Memoirs is also a study of the early anarchist movement in Western Europe, in which Kropotkin played a part after his escape from a Russian prison – thereby earning a second imprisonment, this time in France.

George Woodcock, one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters has written biographies of such monumental figures as Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.


Table of Contents

AN INTRODUCTION by George Woodcock

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I. CHILDHOOD

II. THE CORPS OF PAGES

III. SIBERIA

IV. ST. PETERSBURG – FIRST JOURNEY TO WESTERN EUROPE

V. THE FORTRESS – THE ESCAPE

VI. WESTERN EUROPE


1989: 504 pages

The mystery of how an ordinary Minnesota girl came to be, briefly, one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States

Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone’s child, an average American whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor’s daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals like Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah) in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a “good girl” like Camilla become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall’s life.

Camilla’s childhood in a tight-knit religious family was marred by loss and grief as, one after another, her three siblings died. Her path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family featured years as an artist and activist—in welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, culminating in a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla’s bewildering transformation from a “gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy” young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

During this time of mounting unrest and violence, Camilla Hall’s story is of urgent interest for what it reveals about the forces of radicalization. But as Hanel ventures ever further into Camilla’s past, searching out the critical points where character and cause might intersect, her book becomes an intriguing, disturbing, and ultimately deeply moving journey into the dark side of America’s promise.

***Winner PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award***

“A fine, taut analysis of the great African American athlete, singer, actor, and political activist.”
—Choice, Highly Recommended
 
Paul Robeson should be remembered today as the forerunner of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Muhammad Ali. He sacrificed his fame and fortune a performer and athlete in order to fight for the rights of African Americans during the time of Jim Crow and U.S. Apartheid.
 
A world-famous singer and actor, a trained lawyer, an early star of American professional football and a polyglot who spoke over a dozen languages: these could be the crowning achievements of a life well-lived. Yet for Paul Robeson the higher calling of social justice led him to abandon both the NFL and Hollywood and become one of the most important political activists of his generation, a crusader for freedom and equality who battled both Jim Crow and US Senator Joseph McCarthy during the communist witch hunt of the 1950s.    
 
In Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary, Gerald Horne discovers within Robeson's remarkable and revolutionary life the story of the twentieth century's great political struggles: against racism, against colonialism, against poverty—and for international socialism. Chapters include:
 
*”The Best Known American in the World"
*Rising Revolutionary
*From Moscow to Madrid
*"Black Stalin"?
*Robeson: Primary Victim of the "Blacklist"
*Triumph—and Tragedy
*Death of a Revolutionary      
 
In the Introduction, Horne writes: “Paul Robeson—activist, artist, athlete—experienced a dramatic rise and fall, perhaps unparalleled in U.S. history. From mingling with the elite of London society and Hollywood in the 1930s, by the time he died in 1976, he was a virtual recluse in a plain abode in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. What helps to explicate this tragic art of his life is a fateful decision he made when fascism was rising: he threw in his lot with those battling for socialism and decide to sacrifice his thriving artistic career on behalf of the struggle against Jim Crow—or U.S. apartheid.”
 
This critical and searching biography provides an opportunity for readers to comprehend the triumphs and tragedies of the revolutionary progressive movement of which Paul Robeson was not just a part, but perhaps its most resonant symbol.

Anarchism - the concept of a society without authority, of a civil order without any form of constitution or government - has fascinated people almost as long as we have possessed the power of speculative thought. In the general history of anarchism, the name of Peter Kropotkin dominates.

Born in 1842 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Tsar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, he had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could write with impunity to Lenin, “Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.”

Woodcock and Avakumovic’s biography, From Prince to Rebel, details the life that flowed between these two points in time. It surveys and analyses the most significant aspects of Kropotkin’s life and thought: his formative years in Russia, 1842-1876, and the origins of his anarchist thinking (military service in eastern Siberia, the influence of the works of Proudhon and Bakunin, his role in the Chaikovsky Circle); his years as an émigré in western Europe, 1876-1917, and the ripening of his political though (editor of Le Révolté, his views on Marxist socialism); and his last years in the Soviet Union, 1917-1921, the revolution and civil war, and his meeting and correspondence with Lenin.

Among the recent works of George Woodcock, a well-known Canadian author, are biographies of William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Black Rose Books). Ivan Avakumovic is Professor of History at the University of British Colombia and the author of History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.


Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Youth

2. The Explorer

3. The Convert

4. The Agitator

5. “The White Jesus”

6. The Traveller

7. The Writer

8. The Exile

9. The Neglected Sage

10. The Prophet

Bibliography

Supplement for 1971 Edition

Supplement to the 1990 Edition

Index


1990: 490 pages, index, illustrated

With an introduction by George Woodcock.

Nearly a century has passed since Kropotkin wrote In Russian and French Prisons, yet his criticisms of the penal system have lost none of their relevance. Prisons- far from reforming the offender, or deterring crime- are, in themselves, “schools of crime”. Every year, thousands of prisoners are returned to society without hope, without a trade, or without nay means of subsistence, and statistics show that once a man has been in prison he is likely to return. Moreover, the new offense is likely to be more serious than the first.

Although Kropotkin makes extensive use of the memoirs of former prisoners and the works of contemporary penologists, it is his own experience in prison--he spent five years behind bars, two in Russia, three in France--that gives this book its power. He shows from first hand knowledge the immense human suffering caused by prison life: how it destroys the mind and body, how it degrades and humiliates, how it perverts the prisoner’s character and robs him of his dignity, how it reduces him to the condition of a caged animal, how his whole life is subjected to a deadly mechanical routine, how everything is done to break his spirit and kill his inner strength.

In Russian and French Prisons is the 6th volume of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin.


Table of Contents

Introduction to the 1991 edition by George Woodcock

Author’s preface to the Russian edition (1906)

Introduction

I. My first acquaintance with Russian prisons

II. Russian prisons

III. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul

IV. Outcast Russia

V. The exile in Siberia

VI. The exile of Sakhalin

VII. A foreigner in Russian prisons

VIII. In French prisons

IX. On the moral influence of prisons on prisoners

X. Are prisons necessary?

Appendix A- Trial of the Soldiers accused of having carried Letters from Alexis Ravelin

Appendix B- On the part played by the Exiles in the Colonization of Siberia

Appendix C- Extract from a Report on “Administrative Exile,” read by M. Shakeeff at the Sitting of the St. Petersburg Nobility on February 17, 1881

Appendix D- On Reformatories for Boys in France


1991: 387 pages, index

The second instalment in a gripping memoir by Sakine Cansiz (codenamed 'Sara') chronicles the Kurdish revolutionary's harrowing years in a Turkish prison, following her arrest in 1979 at the age of 21. Jailed for more than a decade for her activities as a founder and leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, she faced brutal conditions and was subjected to interrogation and torture. Remarkably, the story she tells here is foremost one of resistance, with courageous episodes of collective struggle behind bars including hunger strikes and attempts at escape. Along the way she also presents vivid portraits of her fellow prisoners and militants, a snapshot of the Turkish left in the 1980s, a scathing indictment of Turkey's war on Kurdish people - and even an unlikely love story. The first prison memoir by a Kurdish woman to be published in English, this is an extraordinary document of an extraordinary life. Translated by Janet Biehl.

A radical abolitionist and early feminist, Francis George Shaw (1809–1882) was a prominent figure in American reform and intellectual circles for five decades. He rejected capitalism in favor of a popular utopian socialist movement; during the Civil War and Reconstruction, he applied his radical principles to the Northern war effort and to freedmen’s organizations.

A partnership with Henry George in the late 1870s provided an international audience for Shaw’s alternative vision of society. Seeking the One Great Remedy is the biography of this remarkable and influential man. In compelling detail, author Lorien Foote depicts the many aspects and exploits of the Shaw family. Their activities provide a perspective on the course of American reform that calls into question previous interpretations of the reform movement of this period.

Francis George Shaw is perhaps best known as the father of Robert Gould Shaw, subject of the movie Glory. Francis and his wife, Sarah Blake Shaw, achieved considerable notoriety for their activities, including their effort to shape public opinion during the Civil War. Turning the tragic death of their son into a public relations and propaganda triumph, they altered Northern opinion about the war and shaped a historical perception of the famous Massachusetts Fifty-fourth that continues today.

Seeking the One Great Remedy argues that social radicalism was pervasive among elite reformers before and after the Civil War and finds in the dramatic story of Francis George Shaw a model of that cause.

Twenty-five Latina agents of change share their inspirational stories.

Celebrated Latina civil rights activist Dolores Huerta once said, “Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” These are the stories of some of the Latina activists from Wisconsin who have lived Huerta’s words. Somos Latinas shares the powerful narratives of 25 activists—from outspoken demonstrators to collaborative community-builders to determined individuals working for change behind the scenes—providing proof of the long-standing legacy of Latina activism throughout Wisconsin. 

Somos Latinas draws on activist interviews conducted as part of the Somos Latinas Digital History Project, housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and looks deep into the life and passion of each woman. Though Latinas have a rich history of community activism in the state and throughout the country, their stories often go uncelebrated. Somos Latinas is essential reading for scholars, historians, activists, and anyone curious about how everyday citizens can effect change in their communities.  
 

Sophonisba Breckinridge's remarkable career stretched from the Civil War to the Cold War. She took part in virtually every reform campaign of the Progressive and New Deal eras and became a nationally and internationally renowned figure. Her work informed women’s activism for decades and continues to shape progressive politics today. Anya Jabour's biography rediscovers this groundbreaking American figure. After earning advanced degrees in politics, economics, and law, Breckinridge established the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, which became a feminist think tank that promoted public welfare policy and propelled women into leadership positions. In 1935, Breckinridge’s unremitting efforts to provide government aid to the dispossessed culminated in her appointment as an advisor on programs for the new Social Security Act. A longtime activist in international movements for peace and justice, Breckinridge also influenced the formation of the United Nations and advanced the idea that "women’s rights are human rights." Her lifelong commitment to social justice created a lasting legacy for generations of progressive activists.

Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. Through his example, he demonstrated fearlessness and self-esteem, and he led a black student movement countrywide that challenged and thwarted the culture of fear perpetuated by the apartheid regime. He paid the highest price with his life. The brutal circumstances of his death shocked the world and helped isolate his oppressors.

This short biography of Biko shows how fundamental he was to the reawakening and transformation of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century—and just how relevant he remains. Biko’s understanding of black consciousness as a weapon of change could not be more relevant today to “restore people to their full humanity.”

As an important historical study, this book’s main sources were unique interviews done in 1989—before the end of apartheid—by the author with Biko’s acquaintances, many of whom have since died.

The life and times of Ana Margarita Gasteazoro: political activist, clandestine operative, and prisoner of conscience
 
Ana Margarita Gasteazoro (1950–1993) was a Salvadoran opposition activist and renowned Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise:Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador recounts her extraordinary life story. From a privileged Catholic upbringing, with time spent studying and working abroad, Ana Margarita first became a member of the legal political opposition in the late 1970s and later a clandestine operative at work against the brutal military junta.

Gasteazoro recounts her early rebellion against the strictures of conservative upper-class Salvadoran society. She spoke perfect English and discovered a talent for organizing in administrative jobs abroad and at home. As the civil war progressed, she quickly became a valued figure in the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), a social democratic party, often representing it at international meetings. Against the backdrop of massive social oppression and the “disappearances” of thousands of opposition members, Gasteazoro began a double life as an operative in a faction of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Multitalented and energetic, she organized safe houses for fellow activists, transported weapons and equipment, wrote scripts for an underground radio station, and produced an award-winning documentary film. But the toll on her family life and personal relationships was heavy.

Ana Margarita was disappeared in May 1981 by the infamous National Guard and endured a nightmare 11 days of interrogations, beatings, and abuse. Through international pressure and the connections of her family, her arrest was finally made public, and she was transferred to the women’s prison at Ilopango. There, she and other activists continued the political struggle through the Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador (COPPES). During her two years in prison, tested by hunger strikes, violence, and factional divisions, she became one of Amnesty International’s best-known prisoners of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise is a gripping story of a self-aware activist and a vital young woman’s struggle to find her own way within a deeply conservative society.
 

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said of Wiley Austin Branton that he “devoted his entire life to fighting for his own people.” There When We Needed Him is the story of that fight, which began with Branton's being one of the first black students at the University of Arkansas Law School and which took him to the highest levels of business and government. From his private law practice in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Branton became, along with Marshall, counsel for the Little Rock Nine in their 1957 efforts to integrate Central High School. Under his leadership of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project, more than six hundred thousand black voters were registered from 1962 to 1965. He later became executive secretary of President Lyndon Johnson's Council on Equal Opportunity and special assistant to attorneys general Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark. He provided leadership to the United Planning Organization, the Alliance for Labor Action, and the NAACP; and he was dean of Howard University Law School. At Branton’s funeral in 1988, former Arkansas senator David Pryor described him as “quiet and unassuming. . . . It is his humility and desire to always put the goals of the civil rights movement before self which probably accounts for the fact that [he] was not more famous than he was.” The influence of this quiet and unassuming man continues to be felt decades later.

The Transformation of the Abolitionist Movement from Peaceful Demonstration to Radical Confrontation as Embodied in John Brown
Establishing himself as a fresh and important voice in the history of African American emancipation,William S. King provides a critical introduction to the lead-up to the Civil War. A skilled and judicious chronicler, King seamlessly weaves multiple and seemingly disparate threads, including early nineteenth-century Revivalism, the emergence of the Republic of Texas, the fugitive slave laws—and even the explosion of a cannon aboard the U.S.S. Princeton in 1844—to explain how the opposition to slavery in America changed from producing speeches and pamphlets to embracing the reality that slavery could be eradicated only through armed conflict. By tracing this transformation through the life of John Brown, King provides an entirely new assessment of this enigmatic figure who was characterized as a “mad man” in the wake of his butchering of proslavery settlers in Kansas and the inept raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. King puts these actions in context to explain the paradox of Brown’s legacy. On one hand he was vilified as an unstable threat to American democracy or a fanatical sideshow to the history of the Civil War, while on the other he was an inspiration to the oppressed, a man who garnered the indomitable Harriet Tubman’s commitment to the righteousness of his endeavor.
Elegantly written with a command of period sources, Till the Dark Angel Comes: Abolitionism and the Road to the Second American Revolution is the story of interracial opposition to slavery, the important debates among free blacks as to their future in America, and the arguments and compromises at the highest levels of government. Here we encounter many personalities of the time, some well known, such as Frederick Douglass,William Lloyd Garrison, and John C. Calhoun, and others less so, but no less important—Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, and Elijah Lovejoy.

Brings back into print a classic account of courage and calamity in the long march toward racial justice in the South, and the nation
 
On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young Black girls. The very next day, a prominent white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. was scheduled to speak at a luncheon held by the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham. A well-regarded figure in the city’s legal and business establishment, Morgan had been mentioned frequently as a candidate for political office. To the shock of his longtime friends and associates, Morgan deviated from his planned remarks, instead using his platform to place the blame for the murder of the four young girls squarely on the shoulders of the city’s white middle-class establishment, those seated before him.
 
As much as his stand was admired nationally, in Birmingham the results were destructive for him personally. Threats against his life and the lives of his family poured in daily by phone and mail, his political career was finished, and he was faced with financial ruin. Within weeks, he moved his family out of the state, and thenceforward committed himself to legal action in the name of racial justice. In 1964, he established the regional office of the ACLU in Atlanta. In the 1964 Supreme Court case Reynolds v. Sims, Morgan successfully argued that districts in state legislatures needed to be of nearly equal size, establishing the principle of “one man, one vote” to effectively end the use of gerrymandering.
 
A Time to Speak was originally published in 1964, a mere year after Morgan and his family fled Birmingham. The memoir recounts not only his speech, but his entire upbringing and the political, cultural, and social milieus in which he was raised and which gave rise to the cowardice, institutional silence, fear, and hate that those conditions nursed. This new edition features a foreword from US Senator Doug Jones.
 

Biography of a civil rights activist who worked tirelessly at the heart of two social and political revolutions

A native Alabamian, Reverend Robert E. Hughes worked full-time in the civil rights movement as executive director of the Alabama Council of Human Relations, where he developed a close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After facing backlash from the Ku Klux Klan, spending four days in jail for refusing to disclose ACHR membership lists, and ultimately being forced to leave the state of Alabama, he served as a Methodist missionary in Southern Rhodesia (now part of Zimbabwe). After two years of organizing Black liberation groups, he was banned as a “prohibited immigrant” by the Ian Smith government. His lifelong commitment to social justice, racial equality, and peaceful resolution of conflicts marks a fascinating career richly documented in this comprehensive biography.

To Do Justice: The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes traces the life and career of an admirable and lesser-known civil rights figure who fought injustice on two continents. This account presents valuable new evidence about the civil rights movement in the United States as well as human rights and liberation issues in colonial Southern Rhodesia in the years leading up to independence and self-rule. It provides an intimate portrait of a courageous individual who worked outside of the public spotlight but provided essential support and informational resources to public activists and news reporters
.
Randall C. Jimerson explores the interwoven threads of race relations and religious beliefs on two continents, focusing on the dual themes of the American civil rights movement and the African struggles for decolonization and majority rule. The life and career of Robert Hughes provide insight into the international dimensions of racial prejudice and discrimination that can be viewed in comparative context to similar oppressions in other colonial lands.

 

Jim Furnish joined the U.S. Forest Service in 1965, enthusiastic and naive, proud to be part of such a storied and accomplished agency. Nothing could have prepared him for the crisis that would soon rock the agency to its foundation, as a burgeoning environmental movement challenged the Forest Service’s legacy and legitimacy.

The Forest Service stumbled in responding to a wave of lawsuits from environmental groups in the late 20th Century—a phenomenon best symbolized by the spotted owl controversy that shut down logging on public forests in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. The agency was brought to its knees, pitted between a powerful timber industry that had been having its way with the national forests for decades, and organized environmentalists who believed public lands had been abused and deserved better stewardship.

Toward a Natural Forest offers an insider’s view of this tumultuous time in the history of the Forest Service, presenting twin tales of transformation, both within the agency and within the author’s evolving environmental consciousness. While stewarding our national forests with the best of intentions, had the Forest Service diminished their natural essence and ecological values? How could one man confront the crisis while remaining loyal to his employer?

In this revealing memoir, Furnish addresses the fundamental human drive to gain sustenance from and protect the Earth, believing that we need not destroy it in the process. Drawing on the author’s personal experience and his broad professional knowledge, Toward a Natural Forest illuminates the potential of the Forest Service to provide strong leadership in global conservation efforts. Those interested in our public lands—environmentalists, natural resource professionals, academics, and historians—will find Jim Furnish’s story deeply informed, thought-provoking, and ultimately inspiring.

Published in 1910, this was Addams's most successful book; 80,000 copies were sold before her death in 1935. This annotated edition was issued on the occasion of the Hull-House centennial. 

"<i>Twenty Years at Hull-House</i> is an indispensable classic of American intellectual and social history, and remains a rich source of provocative social theory. Jane Addams was both an activist of courage and 'a thinker of originality and daring.' Her life and writings exemplify the integration of social thought and action. Addams and her associates at Hull-House had wide-ranging influence not only on the key reform movements of their time but also on major currents of philosophical, sociological, and political thought. Filled with careful empirical observations, reflections on everyday life, accounts of practical action, and prescriptions for public policy, this small volume also embodies such important theoretical contributions as 'The Necessity of Social Settlement,' 'A Decade of Economic Discussion,' 'Tolstoyism,' and 'Problems of Poverty.' Long acclaimed for its autobiographical and historical value, <i>Twenty Years at Hull-House</i> should be read today as much for its enduring insights, critical analyses, and persuasive vision."--Bernice A. Carroll, editor of <i>Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays</i>

This remarkable biography features a white American pacifist minister whose tireless work for justice and human rights helped reshape Black civil rights in the U.S. and Africa.

George M. Houser (1916–2015) was one of the most important civil rights and antiwar activists of the twentieth century. A conscientious objector during World War II, in 1942 Houser cofounded and led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose embrace of nonviolent protest strategies and tactics characterized the modern American Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the 1950s, Houser played a critical role in pan-Africanist anticolonial movements, and his more than thirty-year dedication to the cause of human rights and self-determination helped prepare the ground for the toppling of the South African apartheid regime.

Throughout his life, Houser shunned publicity, preferring to let his actions speak his faith. Sheila Collins’s well-researched biography recounts the events that informed Houser’s life of activism—from his childhood experiences as the son of missionaries in the Philippines to his early grounding in the Social Gospel and the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi. In light of the corruption the U.S. and the world face today, Houser’s story of faith and decisive action for human rights and social justice is one for our time.

Walter F. White of Atlanta, Georgia, joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1918 as an assistant to Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson. When Johnson retired in 1929, White replaced him as head of the NAACP, a position he maintained until his death in 1955. During his long tenure, White was in the vanguard of the struggle for interracial justice. His reputation went into decline, however, in the era of grassroots activism that followed his death. White’s disagreements with the US Left, and his ambiguous racial background—he was of mixed heritage, could “pass” as white, and divorced a black woman to marry a white woman—fueled ambivalence about his legacy.

In this comprehensive biography, Zangrando and Lewis seek to provide a reassessment of White within the context of his own time, revising critical interpretations of his career. White was a promoter of and a participant in the Harlem Renaissance, a daily fixture in the halls of Congress lobbying for civil rights legislation, and a powerful figure with access to the administrations of Roosevelt (via Eleanor) and Truman. As executive secretary of the NAACP, White fought incessantly to desegregate the American military and pushed to ensure equal employment opportunities. On the international stage, White advocated for people of color in a decolonized world, and for economic development aid to nations like India and Haiti, bridging the civil rights struggles at home and abroad.

Wangari Muta Maathai is one of Africa’s most celebrated female activists. Originally trained as a scientist in Kenya and abroad, Professor Maathai returned to her home country of Kenya with a renewed political consciousness. There, she began her long career as an activist, campaigning for environmental and social justice while speaking out against government corruption. In 2004, Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership of the Green Belt Movement, a conservation effort that resulted in the restoration of African forests decimated during the colonial era.

In this biography, Tabitha Kanogo follows Wangari Maathai from her modest, rural Kenyan upbringing to her rise as a national figure campaigning for environmental and ecological conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty until her death in 2011.

Translated, with introduction, by George Woodcock

First published in 1885 in Paris, this collection of articles constitutes Kropotkin’s first book. Originally titled Paroles d’un Revolté, it includes his earliest works from period 1879 to 1882. In the succeeding years it was translated into Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, and Chinese. Long-awaited in English, Words of a Rebel is the first complete translation.

A different work from the more familiar books of the older Kropotkin, it is a product of an anarchist agitator and it derives its interest as much from what it reveals about an important transitional phase in the development of anarchism as it does for what it shows us of Kropotkin himself.

Seeing revolution as a popular insurrection, in the broadest terms, Kropotkin believed that public wealth should belong to its producers and consumers and not to the State or the rich.

This volume of Kropotkin’s articles was translated from the French by George Woodcock. A celebrated author, Woodcock is also an authority on the life and works of Peter Kropotkin and as a result, Words of a Rebel is not just a translation, but a scholarly work as well.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by George Woodcock

Introduction to the First French Edition by Elisée Reclus

I. The Situation Today

II. The Breakdown of the State

III. The Inevitability of Revolution

IV. The Coming Revolution

V. Political Rights

VI. To the Young

VII. War

VIII. Revolutionary Minorities

IX. Order

X. The Commune

XI. The Paris Commune

XII. The Agrarian Question

XIII. Representative Government

XIV. Law and Authority

XV. Revolutionary Government

XVI. All of Us Socialists!

XVII. The Spirit of Revolt

XVIII. Theory and Practice

XIX. Expropriation

Notes


1992: 229 pages