Organizer, lawyer, professor, priest — Pauli Murray held many titles throughout her life. But as a black lesbian with a burning hatred of oppression, her goal was always the same: to challenge discrimination and topple the brutal hierarchies of US society.
A long history suggests that while the crisis of the moment dictates directing the state’s security resources and personnel toward the Right, this focus will, inevitably, shift back to the Left.
The history of queer liberation movements is often talked about as distinct from the history of the Left. But in the first half of the twentieth century, queer people were abundant among American radical leftists — decades before the rise of an organized mass movement for gay rights.
Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show tells the story of one of the most compelling and successful social movements of the past century, ACT UP. We talked to Schulman about the "New York Crimes," the messy joy of political commitment, and how ACT UP changed history.
Maida Springer isn’t a household name even among trade unionists and labor historians. But she was a lifelong union member and organizer who was committed to using unions to improve black people’s lives in the United States and Africa.
When Joe Biden was inaugurated a year ago, many expected his presidency to emulate the reforming ambition of FDR’s New Deal. But that ignores what made the New Deal possible: a climate of militant agitation and a populist president willing to align himself with it.
The question of what to do about the Democrats is a perpetual quandary for leftists. In the 1970s, the New Politics movement tried to move the party in a more progressive direction. Perhaps the movement deserves more credit than many socialists have given it.
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913. Far from being a face of respectability politics, she was a defiant and seasoned working-class organizer who despised the cringing submission that Jim Crow induced and who doggedly fought oppression in all its forms.
From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.
John Brophy earned the moniker “Mr. CIO” in the 1930s for his excellent organizing for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He was steadfast and never flashy, which is perhaps why he’s been forgotten. It’s also what makes him a model for our times.
The bipartisan obsession with schooling as an investment in “human capital” in the US since the 1970s has fostered a highly unequal society. We need wide-ranging redistribution to tackle inequality — and to defend public education against right-wing backlash.
Jonathan Eig’s new Martin Luther King biography stirs exhilaration and visceral pain at the unexpected triumphs and vicious violence that King and the freedom movement endured. But it largely leaves out a key piece of King’s legacy: his commitment to labor.
Historian Robin D. G. Kelley has uncovered a tradition of African American radicalism that was — and is — a crucial part of the American left’s history. He talks to Jacobin about the need to connect struggles against racism and class oppression.
The left-wing podcast Know Your Enemy engages seriously with conservative thinkers. A deep-pocketed conservative foundation tried to destroy the podcast with a serious lawsuit. Which side is serious about the free exchange of ideas?
In the mid-20th century, union leader Harry Van Arsdale Jr became obsessed with a simple idea: fewer working hours would mean a need for more workers, and therefore more jobs. He considered it the solution to unemployment, and his union fought to realize it.
Proposals for market-based solutions to the housing crisis have precedents in the elite-driven housing policy of the 20th century. Those policies favored business interests at the expense of poor and working-class people while worsening racial divides.
For the first century of its existence, the organized left mobilized around the “labor question”: who determines the what and how of production. For years, though, the Left has abandoned this question for a concern with inequality — at its own peril.
The 1960s saw massive student uprisings for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Here are five lessons from the ’60s for Palestine solidarity protesters today.
The Democratic Party has become, improbably, the preferred party of American capital. But in doing so, it’s lost more and more of its working-class base.
The story of the Congressional Black Caucus reflects the class contradictions of black politics in the post–civil rights era.