Proverb Masters: Shaping the Civil Rights Movement
By Raymond Summerville
In Proverb Masters: Shaping the Civil Rights Movement, author Raymond Summerville explores how proverbs and proverbial language played a significant role in the long civil rights era. Proverbs have been used throughout history to share and disseminate brief, powerful statements of truth and philosophical insight. Oftentimes, these sayings have helped unite people in struggles for social justice, serving as rallying cries for just causes. During the civil rights era, proverbs allowed leaders to craft powerful and evocative messages. These statements needed to be made implicitly, as explicit messages were often met with retaliation and even violence.
Looking at the autobiographies, biographies, speeches, diaries, letters, and critical texts of Charles W. Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Bob Dylan, Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, and Septima Clark, the volume analyzes how these figures employed proverbs in support of social justice causes and in civil rights struggles. Summerville argues that these individuals generated enough print material embedded with proverbs and proverbial language that they should be considered proverb masters. With chapters dedicated to each figure, Summerville reveals their adept uses of this powerful linguistic tool.
Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World
By Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce
How do underdogs, facing far stronger opponents, sometimes win? In the tradition of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce’s Practical Radicals offers winning strategies, history, and theory for a new generation of activists.
Based on interviews with leading organizers, this groundbreaking book describes seven strategies to bring about transformative change. It incorporates stories of organizations and movements that have won, including Make the Road NY, the St. Paul Federation of Educators, the welfare rights movement, the Working Families Party, New Georgia Project, Occupy Wall Street, 350.org, the Fight for 15, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Two overarching case studies anchor the book: the brilliant techniques used by enslaved people and their allies to end slavery, and the sinister but effective ways elites imposed our current system.
Practical Radicals offers insights on strategy used by business, military, and political elites, addresses the challenges of overcoming conflict within organizations and movements, and concludes with a discussion of how our movements must adapt to meet new challenges in the twenty-first century.
A book for activists, organizers, and anyone hoping to win the fight for a better society, Practical Radicals is a deeply informed resource designed to help us win on the big issues of our time.
We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition
Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson
A vital anthology exploring the intersections between caregiving and abolition
Abolition has never been a proposal to simply tear things down. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What if abolition is something that grows?” As we struggle to build a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future, we have much to learn from the work of birthing, raising, caring for, and loving future generations.
In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.
Contributors include:
Beth Richie
Harsha Walia
EJ, 6 years old
Dorothy Roberts
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Dylan Rodríguez
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn
Shira Hassan
Victoria Law
Mariame Kaba
The PDX Childcare Collective
adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown
and more
Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice
By Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam
A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.
In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.
Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.
An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.
Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom
By Pam Houston
Without Exception is a call for freedom by way of abortion rights.
With equal parts candor and lyricism, Pam Houston illuminates the interconnected histories of abortion in the United States and in her own life during the decades when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. Houston guides us through the shifting landscapes of politics, the law, and self-determination in a country where access to medical care and the power to determine your own destiny are increasingly—and once again—dependent on geography and circumstance.
Set the Earth on Fire: The Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 and the Birth of the Police
By David Correia
An eye-opening account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, showing how the strike—and the violent backlash that ensued—reveal the genesis of modern policing.
In the early years of the twentieth century, in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, nearly 150,000 miners took part in one of the most critical events in the history of US labor organizing. The brutal response by the state of Pennsylvania—as well as the federal government—inaugurated the structure and power of policing that we know today.
In this gripping account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, scholar and activist David Correia takes readers through the story of the United Mine Workers of America, their struggle against systems of private policing—which were present in practically every industry in the US—and the development of public, professionalized, state-sanctioned, and state-serving police.
The demands of their strike included shorter work days, higher wages, and safer conditions in the deadly mines. However, their labor was crucial to westward expansion, colonial occupations in the Caribbean and the Philippines, and many burgeoning industries in the US. To keep the fires of capitalism burning, industrialists prodded state and federal governments to intervene. Together, they established the first uniformed police force of its kind—a model soon emulated in other states.
Constructing Worlds Otherwise: Societies in Movement and Anticolonial Paths in Latin America
By Raúl Zibechi
Translated by George Ygarza Quispe
A new collection from one of Latin America’s most dynamic radical thinkers—in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Eduardo Galeano.
Through a survey of the most marginalized voices across Latin America—feminists, the Indigenous, people of African descent, and inhabitants of urban favelas and rural towns—Zibechi introduces the Anglo world to a range of critical perspectives and new forms of struggle in Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia. His book contributes to global geographies of autonomous and anti-state thinking, including that of the revolutionaries in Rojava and Abdullah Öcalan, ideological theorist of Kurdish resistance, for a rich and dynamic survey of movements of nonstate power. Constructing Worlds Otherwise comes at a time when the global left—struggling to expand its vision in an era of climate chaos and rising authoritarianism—finds itself at an impasse, desperate to animate and renew its critical imaginary.
The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-lynching to Abolition
By Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen
The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism.
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger.
The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.
Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care
Edited by Mimi E. Kim, Cameron W. Rasmussen, and Durrell M. Washington Sr.
A critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work in academia and within impacted communities.
Within social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and radical praxis are shifting the field. Critical scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of carceral social work as a form of “soft policing.” For radical social work, abolition moves beyond critique to the politics of possibility.
Featuring a foreword by Mariame Kaba, Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of abolition, transformative justice, and collective care.
Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur
By Derek Hyra
Exposing the roots of racial unrest that consistently harm Black communities
In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra links police violence to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, he shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities.
Repeated decisions to “upgrade” the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations have resulted in pockets of poverty inhabited by people experiencing displacement trauma and police surveillance. These interconnected sets of divestments and accumulated frustrations have contributed to eruptions of violence in response to tragic, unjust police killings. To confront American unrest, Hyra urges that we end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality.