Tells the story of Claude Lightfoot, who was a follower of Marcus Garvey in his ideas about Black Nationalism. In 1930 he became an active spokesman for the Democratic Party in the black community, and was a founder of the first Young Men's Democratic Organization in Chicago. He headed the Chicago-area campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon. Later, he became secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. As Business agent for the Consolidated Trade Council of Negro Skilled Workers, who were banned from membership in the A.F. of L., he was arrested and beaten by police as a result of numerous picket lines and demonstrations. Under the Smith Act, he was sentenced to five years in jail and a $10,000 fine--later reversed by the Supreme Court.

One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle. Making her way in predominantly male circles while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists, Baker was a national officer and key figure in the NAACP, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In this definitive biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich career, revealing her complexity, radical democratic worldview, and enduring influence on group-centered, grassroots activism. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide throughout the twentieth century.

Laura Pulido traces the roots of third world radicalism in Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s in this accessible, wonderfully illustrated comparative study. Focusing on the Black Panther Party, El Centro de Acción Social y Autonomo (CASA), and East Wind, a Japanese American collective, she explores how these African American, Chicana/o, and Japanese American groups sought to realize their ideas about race and class, gender relations, and multiracial alliances. Based on thorough research as well as extensive interviews, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left explores the differences and similarities between these organizations, the strengths and weaknesses of the third world left as a whole, and the ways that differential racialization led to distinct forms of radical politics. Pulido provides a masterly, nuanced analysis of complex political events, organizations, and experiences. She gives special prominence to multiracial activism and includes an engaging account of where the activists are today, together with a consideration of the implications for contemporary social justice organizing.

In 1891, when coal companies in eastern Tennessee brought in cheap convict labor to take over their jobs, workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains. Over the next year, tactics escalated to include burning company property and looting company stores. This was one of the largest insurrections in US working-class history. It happened at the same time as the widely publicized northern labor war in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And it was largely ignored, then and now. Dixie Be Damned engages seven similarly "hidden" insurrectionary episodes in Southern history to demonstrate the region's long arc of revolt. Countering images of the South as pacified and conservative, this adventurous retelling presents history in the rough. Not the image of the South many expect, this is the South of maroon rebellion, wildcat strikes, and Robert F. Williams's book Negroes with Guns, a South where the dispossessed refuse to quietly suffer their fate. This is people's history at its best: slave revolts, multiracial banditry, labor battles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more.

Even a cursory look at U.S. society today reveals that protests against racial discrimination are by no means a thing of the past. What can we learn from past movements in order to understand the workings of racism and resistance? In this book, Franziska Meister revisits the Black Panther Party and offers a new perspective on the Party as a whole and its struggle for racial social justice. She shows how the Panthers were engaged in exposing structural racism in the U.S. and depicts them as uniquely resourceful, imaginative and subversive in the ways they challenged White Supremacy while at the same time revolutionizing both the self-conception and the public image of black people. Meister thus highlights an often marginalized aspect of the Panthers: how they sought to reach a world beyond race - by going through race. A message well worth considering in an age of "color blindness".

One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903–1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle. Making her way in predominantly male circles while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists, Baker was a national officer and key figure in the NAACP, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In this definitive biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich career, revealing her complexity, radical democratic worldview, and enduring influence on group-centered, grassroots activism. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide throughout the twentieth century.

Ever since the fifties, when television became ascendent in American popular culture, it has become commonplace to bemoan its "bad" effects. Little or nothing, however, has been said about its "good" effects. With this observation, Henry Perkinson introduces his provocative and original analysis of television and culture. Rejecting the determinism inherent in most studies of the effects of television ("We are what we watch"), he insists that it is people that actively change culture, media having no agency to do so. Nevertheless, he argues that television did facilitate the changes we have made in our culture over the past thirty years.Perkinson describes how television helped us become critical of our existing culture, especially of the relationships that were commonly accepted between men and women, blacks and whites, politicians and voters, employers and employees, and between people and the environment. These criticisms have brought about dramatic changes in our social, political, and economic arrangements, as well as changes in our intellectual outlook. Since these changes came about through our efforts to eliminate or reduce discrimination, suffering, and injustice, Perkinson argues that our culture has become more moral in the age of television.In what amounts to a history of recent social change in America, Getting Better examines the role television has played in the rise of feminism, the black protest movement, the presidential elections, the Vietnam War, Watergate, environmentalism, religious fundamentalism, and the New Age movement. This book will be essential reading for students of communications and American culture, and for anyone who wants to make sense of the transformations of American life from the 1950s to the present. Even those who do not agree that things are "getting better" will find that Perkinson's analysis helps to make things more coherent.