Portside

The great scientist was a radical egalitarian—but subject nonetheless to some of the biases of his time.

Taking a knee is in the best American tradition of protest.

Seeger had been blacklisted as a communist and this gutsy defiance of a corporate media giant marked his return to the mainstream cultural scene.

The namesake of the high school where 17 people were killed was a remarkable progressive activist—much like the students now demanding real gun control.

Inspired by the rhythms of American folk music, this moving account of Seeger’s life teaches kids of every generation that no cause is too small and no obstacle too large if, together, you stand up and sing!

Gun safety advocates who until now have relied largely on traditional lobbying need to broaden their strategy to include partnerships with gun owners and civil disobedience.

Guy Carawan's music became the unofficial anthems of the Civil Rights movement. For over 50 years, Guy was the music director of Highlander Center, an inter-racial training center for labor, civil rights, and environmental activists, located in rural Tennessee. Guy graduated in 1949 from Occidental College, where he majored in math, played on the basketball team, and was a member of ATO fraternity - an unusual background for someone who would become a civil rights icon!

Sanders’s views are in sync with a longstanding American socialist tradition. Throughout our history, some of the nation’s most influential activists and thinkers, such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, Helen Keller, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinem, embraced socialism.

In 1964 . . . Ella Baker said: "Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest. Baker's words continue to resonate today . . . sparked by the police killings of young black men, but rooted in the underlying grievances of racial injustice around jobs, housing, schools, and the criminal justice system.

Across the nation, voters passed measures against fracking and abortion restrictions, and for the minimum wage, paid sick leave, public safety and gun reform.