Armed struggle by militant groups in the 1970s, who hoped to topple unjust and racist governments and end imperial wars, may seem like the dark side of a tumultuous but increasingly distant era. Yet they posed questions still unanswered today. Historian and activist Jeremy Varon talks about the complex legacy of the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction.
Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times Melville House, 2011
Greasers, red necks, crackers, hillbillies--the view of poor whites in the US, by the left as well as the mainstream, has not been a flattering one. Their racism in opposing civil rights and busing has been taken as a fixed phenomenon. James Tracy and Amy Sonnie argue that there's more to the story. They discuss the organizations formed by poor and working class whites in the 1960s and 70s, some allied with the Black Panthers, against racism and for social justice.
Van Dyke & McCammon, eds., Strategic Alliances: Coalition Building and Social Movements U. of Minnesota Press, 2010
Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism Cambridge U. Press, 2003
US feminists in the 1960s and 70s did not build coalitions across racial and ethnic lines. Was that because women of color were put off by white feminist racism? Benita Roth rejects this argument; she contends that second wave feminists' adoption of a New Left ethos of "organizing one's own" militated against the formation of cross-racial coalitions.
Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile U. of Minnesota Press, 2009
Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer: tremendously influential thinkers all, and all part of a grouping of German scholars called the Frankfurt School. A new book by Thomas Wheatland examines the Frankfurt School's interactions with US intellectuals in New York City. It also contests conventional understandings of the impact of Marcuse's ideas on the New Left.
David Austin, You Don't Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James AK Press, 2009
The great Trinidadian intellectual CLR James was an anti-colonial fighter, radical historian, cricket expert, Marxist theoretician, Melville scholar, playwright, and novelist. David Austin talks about James's life, ideas, and wide-ranging influence, from Caribbean and African anti-colonial and post-independence struggles to the Caribbean diasporic New Left in Canada. (Encore presentation.)
