Above: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Greta Thunberg in Austria, May 2019 In September of last year, a young girl stood in a Washington DC congressional building to give a speech. Audaciously, she professed to follow in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famed address to the March on Washington in 1963. “I also have a […]

Some Boomers are distorting the history of their own movement for the sake of respectability politics.

The history of the civil rights movement is often used to pressure militants into passive resistance. But how nonviolent was the Black Freedom Movement, particularly when it was winning? Historians now agree that the use of force played a constructive role for many liberation projects of the period, including not just the Black movement, but the […]

Above:  Lois Scott, organizer for the Brookside, Kentucky chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, retrieves a handgun in the documentary Harlan County, USA (Barbara Koppel, 1976) “We become depressed when we look around and see 1100 white supremacist militia groups, and some of our names at the top [of their kill lists]! You […]

The civil resistance mythos is damaging the public’s understanding of how social movements and direct action really function.

“The way they respond may not be the way we responded years ago — nonviolence — we’ve got to catch up to that.  Right now, we’re playing catchup,” – Rev. John Richard Bryant, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, commenting on Black Lives Matter protesters “You can’t get funding from Tides Foundation Canada or […]