If Your Back’s Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement
By Dorothy F. Cotton
An unsung hero of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle reveals the true story behind the Citizenship Education Program—a little-known training program for disenfranchised citizens—reflecting on its huge importance to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and explaining its indisputable relevance to our nation today.
“Nobody can ride your back if your back’s not bent,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously proclaimed at the end of a Citizenship Education Program (CEP), an adult grassroots training program born of the work of the Tennessee Highlander Folk School, expanded by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and directed by activist Dorothy Cotton. This program, called the best-kept secret of the twentieth-century’s civil rights movement, was critical in preparing legions of disenfranchised citizens across the South to work with existing systems of local government to gain access to resources they were entitled to and to demonstrate peaceably against injustice, even in the face of violence and hatred.
For the first time, Cotton, the only woman in King’s inner circle, offers her account of this important project, which the media, focused at the time on marches and demonstrations, largely ignored. Cotton reveals the significant accomplishments and the drama of the CEP training and describes how the program transformed its participants, inspiring them, in turn, to transform their communities, and ultimately the country as a whole, into a place of greater freedom and justice for all. A timely account of fighting inequality, If Your Back’s Not Bent shows how CEP was key to the civil rights movement’s success and how the lessons of the program can serve our troubled democracy now.
Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration
By Julian Hattem
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book
An urgent wake-up call about the coming large-scale human displacement caused by climate change, from one of the world’s leading experts
Mere decades from now, millions of people all over the world will be forced to move because of climate change. Entire islands will disappear into the sea. Once-in-a-century hurricanes will occur on a regular basis, decimating cities and wiping out peoples’ homes. Wildfires fed by prolonged drought will rage through communities. No one will be immune: in countries rich and poor, climate change will usher in a new era of migration.
In Shelter from the Storm noted journalist and migration researcher Julian Hattem tells the story of the massive human displacement that is already being caused by climate change. With hard-hitting journalism from the front lines of the environmental apocalypse, Hattem takes the reader on a journey from the South Pacific to the Indian subcontinent, the Mediterranean, and beyond, offering a shocking glimpse into the human geography wrecked by a warming planet.
Shelter from the Storm also provides rich historical perspective on how climate has impacted migration and a primer on cutting-edge climatological research, creating a multidimensional portrait of this uncertain new age. A work of profound expertise and storytelling, Shelter from the Storm gives a human face to the millions of climate migrants who are leaving their homes—and the millions more who will follow.
Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia
Edited by Davis Shoulders
“Communion is about more than truth. It’s a holy coming together, an intimate exchange of love…. Communion, it seems, doesn’t have to happen in the same space and time. Communion, it seems, is something altogether bigger.”—Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
Queer Communion is a collection of twelve essays, poems, and stories that follows and fractures the expectations surrounding LGBTQIA+ Appalachians and their religious beliefs. Gathered by Davis Shoulders, the pieces delve into themes of chosen family, loss, congregation, and alternative expressions of faith. Set against the backdrop of Christian cultural mores and a region considered to be deeply pious, these writings offer diverse perspectives on religion, queerness, and growth.
Queer Communion explores everything from the joy and excitement of worship to the complexities of navigating one’s queerness and spiritual convictions in oppressive environments. The authors highlight their personal journeys, illuminating the ways in which folks find spirituality while confronting bigotry, loneliness, and fear. Queer Communion represents an act of creation, reclaiming and redefining faith in the face of changing beliefs and societal pressures.
White Property, Black Trespass Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization
by Andrew Krinks
Uncovers the inherently religious structure of the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and dispossessed peoples
Most popular critical accounts of mass criminalization interpret police and prisons as purely social or political phenomena. While such accounts have been indispensable in moving millions into collective action and resistance, the carceral state remains as pervasive as ever.
White Property, Black Trespass argues that understanding why we have police and prisons, and building a world of safety and abundance beyond them, requires that we acknowledge the inherently religious function that criminalization fulfills for a colonial and racial capitalist order that puts its faith in cops and cages to save it from the existential threat of disorder that its own structural violence creates.
The story of criminalization, Krinks shows, begins with the eurochristian aspiration to become God at the expense of all others—an aspiration that gives rise to the pseudo-sacred powers of whiteness and property, and, by extension, the police power that exists to serve and protect them. Tracing the historical continuity and religiosity of the color line, the property line, and the thin blue line, Krinks reveals police power as the pseudo-divine power to exile nonwhite and dispossessed trespassers to carceral hell.
At once incisive and expansive, this groundbreaking work deepens understanding of racial capitalism and mass criminalization by illuminating the religious mythologies that animate them. It concludes with thoughts on what might be entailed in a religion rooted in rejection of the religious idolatry of mass criminalization—a religion of abolition.
Toward Just Transitions Visions for Regenerative Communities in Appalachia
Edited by Shaunna L. Scott and Kathryn Engle
Central Appalachia has long endured the exploitation of its abundant natural resources, like timber and coal, and suffered the ensuing fallout, including high poverty, low educational attainment, and persistent health and environmental problems. In Toward Just Transitions, editors Shaunna L. Scott and Kathryn Engle explore the regional damage wrought by extractive capitalism and outline the need for “just transitions.”
A just transition is “a vision-led, unifying, and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy,” which supports conservation and faces climate change head-on. The just transitions movement emphasizes locally based solutions and democratic decision-making, recognizing there are many perspectives on strategies that will help “provide dignified, productive, and ecologically sustainable livelihoods” for all.
Just as Central Appalachia follows global trends of predatory capitalism, so too can it become an example of how to rectify them. Toward Just Transitions offers solutions for wresting power from corporations and oligarchs and returning it to the communities and marginalized groups their actions have harmed most.
The 1895 Segregation Fight in South Carolina
By Damon L. Fordham
In 1895, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina attempted to solidify his political power. He proposed to rewrite the South Carolina Constitution to deny African Americans their constitutional rights and make racial segregation the law of the state. Six Black leaders–Robert Anderson, Isaiah Reed, Robert Smalls, William J. Whipper, James Wigg and Thomas E. Miller–went to the state capitol in the face of insult and ridicule to make an eloquent stand against these developments. The erudite and forceful addresses of these men drew worldwide headlines but are largely forgotten today. Author Damon L. Fordham attempts to rectify that omission and inspire generations to come.
Never Whistle at Night An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Nadie es ilegal La lucha contra el racismo y la violencia de Estado en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos
by Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis
Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers
by Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott
An inside look at how the experiences of Black workers created lifelong revolutionaries Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries offers a fresh perspective on class, race, and revolution in the United States. Drawing on more than forty hours of interviews with former members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Scott and Katz-Fishman share the rich story of the League, including the women and students. That story includes the history of the automotive industry in Detroit, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, and the wildcat strike that sparked the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). The authors describe the rise of the League from 1968 to 1971. They explore the centrality of struggle and political education as the League split and a section of League comrades moved into revolutionary organizations and social movement spaces, many of which remain active today. League comrades share their analysis of the current moment and staying the course of revolutionary struggle.
Milagro: Poems
Penelope Alegria’s Milagro is a retracing of parental lineage, a recount of the stories that course through the veins of family. The collection examines the effects of immigration from the perspective of both the immigrant and the immigrant’s child, investigating how the act of leaving reverbrates through generations. These poems echoe with fondness and longing, with love and sacrifice that reflects the first-generation American’s struggle to belong. Alegria writes about uncles, Peruvian cuisine and first boyfriends to show how what immigrants choose to leave behind is often what their children carry with them.