Portside

For over 70 years, the U.S. Student Association represented millions, weathered CIA infiltration, and championed civil rights and free higher education. Learn how this organization was built in the 1940s and why a new generation is rebuilding it.

It is impossible to separate liberation struggles from song. And in the 1960s — at marches, and in jailhouses — the voice leading those songs was often Bernice Johnson Reagon. She died Tuesday at the age of 81.

The “greatest teacher of nonviolence in America” was a mentor to generations of activists, from Martin Luther King Jr. to today’s union organizers and immigrant rights campaigners.

Prohibition Gets Started (in 1919), Slave Owners Get Nervous (1834), Swing Comes to the Opera House (1944), Repression Takes Practice (1934), Nazis Make a Reality of Wage Slavery (1934), Wilmington Occupation Ends (1969), Voting Rights Victory (1964)

Everything about this moment cries out for a bold intervention like SNCC knew they had to make in 1963. Their clarity and creativity offers a major lesson to our current stalemate between the multiracial democratic forces and the MAGA authoritarians.

Reader Comments: March to End Fossil Fuels - THIS SUNDAY; Looming UAW Strike - What You Can Do; Abortion Rights Attacks on All Workers; Africa and France; Class Visits by Anti-War Veterans; 50 Years Ago Democracy Died in Chile; Cartoons; more....

It’s not enough for students to simply learn about the sit-ins or Freedom Rides. SNCC’s organizing campaigns need to be at the center of civil rights curriculum.

August 28th was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. Ignore the lies and distortions — the reality, as the latest research shows, is that scores of socialists influenced or were themselves key figures in the civil rights movement.

Curtis's beliefs in a cooperative society and bottom up organizing learned from Moses and Ella Baker and a life-time of organizing and struggle, have been embraced by many contemporary movements for social justice today.