Beacon Broadside

recent posts

about

Category: Activism

  • Chimp Relief: The End of Biomedical Research on Our Closest Relatives

    Given that chimpanzees are humankind’s closest relatives, it only seems logical that they should merit our special respect. Yet these intelligent creatures—capable of making and using tools, having strong social and family bonds, and mirroring us in so many ways—seem to continuously suffer from our actions. Anthropocentrism has always been an enemy of chimpanzees, and…

  • #PublishUP: Beacon Press in Conversation with Jeanne Theoharis

    Today’s theme for University Press Week is Presses in Conversation with Authors. In our entry in the blog tour, our executive editor Gayatri Patnaik interviews Jeanne Theoharis, author of the 2014 NAACP Image Award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of CUNY and the…

  • Facing the Facts

    Wen Stephenson was invited by the Reverend Kyle Childress, longtime pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas and one of the key voices in What We’re Fighting For Now Is Each Other, to speak to the congregation. The church’s congregation plays a crucial role in the resistance to the southern leg of the…

  • Freedom Fighters Never Retire

    By Jeanne Theoharis | I wrote The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks to challenge the limited stories and troubled uses of Parks and the movement. There was nothing natural or passive about what Rosa Parks did but rather something fiercely determined. It was not a singular act but part of her larger lifelong history…

  • Wen Stephenson’s Counter-Friction to Stop the Machine

    My mother took me to my first protest when I was six, against the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire in 1976. She also took me for walks in the local woods and taught me about trees. So I had a good grounding both in caring about nature and citizen activism, which has stayed with…

  • Fierce Activists, Fierce Agitators: Women at the Vanguard of the Labor Movement

    I’d been following the domestic workers movement here in Massachusetts as they campaigned to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. In 2014, Massachusetts became the fourth state to approve the domestic workers bill of rights which guarantees basic work standards, such as meal and rest breaks, parental leave, protection from discrimination, sexual harassment, etc.…

  • Siempre Luchando: Mothers and Their Children Under Fire in Detention Centers

    By Margaret Regan Photo credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Department of Homeland Security) Dilley, a small Texas city eighty-three miles north of the Mexican border, greets visitors with a cheerful sign.  “Welcome to Dilley, Texas,” it reads. “A Slice of the Good Life.” That good life extends only so far. Just west of town,…

  • On the Bridge

    By Ronnie Greene Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Danziger Bridge shootings. Ronnie Greene’s Shots on the Bridge was released on the same day the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed an order granting the officers a new trial based on misconduct by prosecutors that judges said tainted the officers’ trial back in…

  • Striking Down the Nostalgia for Mammy: Black Women and Labor Activism

    By Premilla Nadasen Nearly eighty years ago, Margaret Mitchell published what would become a best-selling novel, Gone with the Wind. More than thirty million copies have sold worldwide, and in 1939, the film adaptation was released. The novel tells the tale of a young white woman slaveholder, Scarlett O’Hara, who struggles to come to terms…

  • The Long Homecoming: Ten Years After Hurricane Katrina

    By Tom Wooten Georgia Johnson's new home. Photo credit: Tom Wooten Georgia Johnson, the great-grandmother, expert wordsmith, and longtime Lower Ninth Ward resident about whom I wrote in We Shall Not Be Moved, has not followed an easy path to recovery. When I interviewed her for the book in October 2008, she sat happily in…