Portside

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.

The time appears to be ripe for a new wave of urban reform. Both socialists like Seattle’s Sawant and progressives like New York’s de Blasio have a chance to popularize “left wing of the possible” ideas that seem bold but not preposterous. But as their socialist and progressive counterparts over the past century recognized, good ideas don’t become policy without social movements behind them.

In Richmond, California, home prices plummeted 58 percent since their peak. Now the city is trying out a new way to help homeowners refinance—and halt the slide into foreclosure.

One of the great "What if?" questions of the 20th century is how America would have been different if Henry Wallace rather than Harry Truman had succeeded Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. Filmmaker Oliver Stone has revived this debate in his current ten-part Showtime series, "The Untold History of the United States," and his new book (written with historian Peter Kuznick) of the same name.

The majority of Americans favor strict gun control laws. No, let's not burden Americans with collective guilt. The problem is more narrow - and more fixable - than that...The long list of killings is due in large measure to the political influence of the NRA - and the campaign finance system that allows the gun lobby to exercise so much power.