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Category: Activism

  • Steve Early Brings Richmond’s Culture of Resistance to Cambridge

    By Nicholas DiSabatino “Is there anybody out here tonight still feeling the Bern?” Labor journalist Steve Early called out this question to a group of over eighty-five people at his Porter Square Books event in Cambridge, MA, on the evening of January 25, coyly referring to the foreword from Senator Bernie Sanders for his new…

  • Meet the Stars of Richmond’s Municipal Reform Movement and Grassroots Organizing

    Yesterday, we released labor activist Steve Early’s Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. In Refinery Town, Early tells the story of Richmond, California, once a prototypical company town, dominated by the Chevron Corporation, with one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the country. Its jobless rate…

  • Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaks Out on the Limits of Northern Liberalism

    By Jeanne Theoharis: While Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are typically associated with the South, both spent a great deal of their lives challenging the racism of the Jim Crow North. Yet this part of their history is repeatedly ignored. Parks described the Detroit she moved to in 1957 as the “Northern promised land…

  • Which Side Are You On?: A Speech Against Climate Science Denial and Post-Truth Politics

    By Wen Stephenson Some of you have heard me say this before. I’ve said it many times, and I’m going to keep on saying it, because it’s true: Given what scientists know, and have known for decades, about climate change—indeed, given what Exxon Mobil has known for decades about climate change—to deny the science, deceive…

  • The Way Forward for Unions Facing the Trump Era

    By Jonathan Rosenblum The salvation of unions, and more generally, of the US working class, resides not in struggling to fix a broken national Democratic Party that repeatedly has betrayed workers, but in joining with allies to fight the coming Trump onslaught—and then to go beyond that to define a bold, unapologetic vision of society…

  • I Knew Him as “Granddaddy”: Martin Luther King, Sr. and His Influential Legacy

    By Isaac Newton Farris, Jr. The world knew him formally as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. Many knew him affectionately as “Daddy King.” I knew him simply as “granddaddy,” but all who were acquainted with his presence respected this influential man of God. As new generations of Americans become familiar with the life…

  • Transformative Organizing in the Age of Trump

    By Eric Mann I had hoped that the Obama administration would support a broad anti-racist, anti-war, and environmental justice movement built from the bottom up. I understood he was commander in chief of US imperialism, and only a powerful movement rooted in Black and Latino communities with a transformative political program could transform our society…

  • Beacon’s Bestsellers and Highlights of 2016

    It’s December, which means it’s time for our holiday sale! All this month, get 30% off every purchase on our website using code HOLIDAY30. This year, we’re donating 20% of all sales in December to the Water Protector Legal Collective, which provides legal support for water protection activities in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.…

  • This Is What Deportation Looks Like

    By Margaret Regan What if Donald Trump follows through on his vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants as soon as he becomes president? Due process for the immigrants may slow him down, but he says he’s determined to get started right away with deportations of immigrants convicted of crimes. (He says the number is…

  • From Alcatraz to Standing Rock: Indigenous Resistance Has Always Been About Sovereignty

    By Dina Gilio-Whitaker The resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline taking place at Standing Rock right now is the most significant political event in Indian country since those struggles of the early 1970s, and there was no way I was going to miss it. I managed to carve out a few days and take a…