In the postwar-Cold War period U.S. corporations used anti-communist hysteria to attack the labor movement. Salt of the Earth - tells the story of heroic Mexican American mineworkers, and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.
It wasn't only Odetta's selection of material that set her apart from many other white folk singers in the early 1950s. It was also her extraordinary interpretive ability. Among Her Fans Were Rosa Parks, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King.
Reader Comments: Building Unity to Defeat Trump; Concentration Camps; Debating History and contributions from the Left; Arnautoff Mural; Syriza Lessons; Ida B. Wells; Lights for Liberty demonstrations; Beyond NAFTA 2.0; Resources; Announcements; more
From the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and the McCarthy era’s end, the author weaves his father’s story of inquisitors and defenders as the family struggles with racism, fascism, communism, and tenuous first amendment freedoms
Reader Comments: Extreme Poverty Returns; GOP Tax Robbery; Bitcoin; Iran; U.S. Nuclear Tests; Rape of Recy Taylor; Puerto Rico; High School Protests; Yemen; Global Refugees; Cold War history of immigrant rights; Story of Ferdinand; Correction: Subversive Involvement: Chicago and HUAC - Tribute to Dr. Quentin Young; Climate Change and the Left; and more....
My mother was devastated that I never became the radical she dreamed I’d be. — Peter Andreas, “My Mom, The Marxist,” New York Times, May 14, 2017
Communist bookstores provided a critical public space for radicals, operating in virtually every major American city. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York had several apiece. Smaller and ostensibly less radical locales such as Birmingham, Houston, and Omaha, had communist bookstores, too. Some radical bookstores operate today. Venture into one of these shops in which left bookstores helped customers envision radical worlds that were often otherwise unimaginable in America
Clancy Sigal died Monday night at 90. He wrote "Going Away" in the midst of the McCarthy period. It is a soul-searching memoir filled with fascinating characters. He chronicles the battles over racism at a time when the modern civil rights movement was just getting started. The novel became something of a cult favorite among the baby-boom generation of radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, and has remained in print and popular among subsequent generations.
Most Americans know the song “MTA,” popularized by the Kingston Trio in 1959. It’s the one about a “man named Charlie” doomed to “ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston . . . the man who never returned.” What’s forgotten, however, is that the song was originally made for a left-wing political campaign. In 1949, the Boston People’s Artists wrote “MTA” for a left-wing candidate. The song became a hit — the man behind it disappeared.
The great American radical showed how ordinary people mattered more than stars - a lesson today's celebrities could do with learning. These are strange times for popular music and politics. On the one hand, the opposition to Donald Trump now extends so deeply into the entertainment industry that the president struggled to find any real talent willing to play his inauguration.
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