Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

The Diggers

The Pueblo Revolt

Jamaican Maroons Fend Off the British

The Stono Rebellion

John Brown (1800-1859)

The Haitian Revolution

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

Sequoyah and the Cherokee Writing System

Elisée Reclus (1830-1905)

The Underground Railroad

The Little Shell Band of Chippewa Indians

Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Action

Little Bighorn

El Hijo Del Ahuizote

May Day

Haymarket

Las Gorras Blancas

Battle of Homestead

Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

Gabriel Dumont and the Métis Resistance of 1869-1870 & 1885

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Dr. Marie Equi (1872-1952)

Major Taylor (1878-1932)

Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960)

Primo Tapia de la Cruz (1885-1926)

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964)

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

Red Feds

Lawrence Textile Strike

Kalamazoo Corset Company Strike

IWW Local 8

Louise Olivereau (1884-1963)

The Dil Pickle Club

Sacco (1891-1927) and Vanzetti (1888-1927)

Amazon Army

Seki Ran Kai

The Battle of Blair Mountain

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (& Maids)

Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934)

The Bonus Marchers

Highlander Folk School

The Funsten 500

Las Mujeres Libres

Flint Sit-Down Strike

The Durruti Column

Disney Animators Strike

The White Rose

Harry Hay (1912-2002)

Grace Lee (b. 1915) and Jimmy Boggs (1919-1993)

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)

Nueva Canción

Matzpen

El Hajj Malik Shabazz (1925-1965)

Dolores Huerta (b. 1930)

Muhammad Ali (b. 1942)

Compton’s Cafeteria Riot

The Brown Berets

DRUM

The Young Lords Organization

Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker

The Milwaukee 14

The International Hotel

Fred Hampton (1948-1969)

The Occupation of Alcatraz

Los Siete de la Raza

Sylvia Ray Rivera (1951-2002)

Jane

The Occupation of Ford Hall

Walter Rodney (1942-1980)

Os Cangaceiros

National Prisoners Reform Association

The Lesbian Herstory Archives

The Suicide Club

Prison Justice Day

The Animal Liberation Front

Madres De Plaza De Mayo

Crass

Wangari Maathai (b. 1940)

Co-Madres

B.U.G.A. U.P.

The Escape of Assata Shakur

The Silent Majority

Informal Recyclers

Phoolan Devi (1963-2001)

Chico Mendes (1944-1988)

Judi Bari (1949-1997)

ADAPT

The Great Arizona Mine Strike

Mothers of East Los Angeles

ACT UP Philadelphia

8.8.88

Battle of Tompkins Square Park

Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945)

Jana Sanskriti

Narmada Bachao Andolan

The Korean Peasants League

Sarah White and the Delta Pride Strike

The Red Army Faction Attack on Weiterstadt Prison

EZLN

Mystic Massacre Statue Moved

Cochabamba Water Struggle

J18 or the Carnival Against Capitalism

Vieques Libre

San Francisco Shutdown

Shannon Airport Plowshares

Atenco Aguanta

Oaxaca Women’s Resistance

Shut EDO/ITT

Youth-Led Resistance to Immigration Raids and Deportations

Artist Biographies

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page

Foreword

In times of revolution and social turbulence even the walls speak up and shout out: George Orwell wrote of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, “The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.” In Oaxaca after the extraordinary commune of 2006 was overthrown, the city was everywhere smeared with the gray paint that covered over the revolutionary slogans. Repressing the revolution necessarily included repressing the voices of the streets and the words on the walls.

A revolution is a moment of waking up to hope and power, and the state of mind can be entered into from many directions. If revolutions often prompt posters to appear, the appearance of posters, murals, and graffiti may foster revolution or at least breath on the cinders, keeping the sparks alive until next time—which is why gentrification and repression often seek to create silence as a texture. In one case memorialized by an early work of Angeleno painter Sandow Birk, a property-owner in the San Fernando Valley shot two Latino teenagers in the back while they were spray-painting; he claimed self-defense. He was clearly a vigilante, but what he was defending was not his own safety but his own reality against theirs. Billboard defacement by groups such as the Billboard Liberation Front takes back the public sphere from corporations and gives it to the radical imagination.

When the walls wake up, they remind us of who we are, where we are, whose shoulders we stand on; they make the world a place that speaks to us as we travel through it, that tells us we are not alone, others have gone before, and hope remains ahead. This is the vitality that street posters serve, now as much as ever. If graffiti at its most basic is tagging—“I exist, I am here,” a subversive statement for the young who are hardly allowed to exist—then the posters Josh MacPhee has organized tag the city for Emma Goldman, for Grace and Jimmy Boggs, for the Zapatistas, the Oaxaca Commune, the Highlander Folk School. They say: we existed, we exist, you are not alone, the past is alive and breathes life into possible futures.

For the past decade the romance of the Internet has made many—too many—think that it is itself a public space, one that can and has and will replace the public space of cities, of streets, boulevards, squares. But what we learned from the Seattle uprising of 1999 or the Zapatistas is that virtual space is only an auxiliary to the place that matters, which is still public space, the space in which we coexist, bodily, with strangers, the democratic space in which revolution has always unfolded, the spaces of our actual bodies. Revolutions are geographical in part; they liberate the actual space in which we live our lives, as well as our spirits; you can live differently first, but the space in which it is possible to do so matters. The streets still matter.

The demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 were among the early global actions organized by e-mail and Internet postings, but they mattered because people showed up from Korea and France and the West Coast, they put their bodies in the way of the meeting to sell the world, they risked and hoped and stood up and sat down together. Democracy must be embodied, which is why it always has a geography. This is why street posters matter today as much as ever.

More than a decade ago I wrote:

Only citizens familiar with their city as both symbolic and practical territory, able to come together on foot and accustomed to walking about their city, can revolt. Few remember that “the right of the people freely to assemble” is listed in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, along with freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion, as critical to a democracy. While the other rights are easily recognized, the elimination of the possibility of such assemblies through urban design, automotive dependence and other factors is hard to trace and seldom framed as a civil-rights issue. But when public spaces are eliminated, so ultimately is the public; the individual has ceased to be a citizen capable of experiencing and acting in common with fellow citizens. Citizenship is predicated on the sense of having something in common with strangers, just as democracy is built upon trust in strangers. And public space is the space we share with strangers, the unsegregated zone. In these communal events, that abstraction the public becomes real and tangible.

Such events require the actual space and a public that can and does exist in it, and the gestures that cultivate such places and sensibilities keep alive something profoundly necessary.

We are in an era of eroded public space, eroded for at least three reasons. One is that an increasingly large number of people, at least in the United States, live in zones where public space was never part of the design: they live in suburbs, car-based spaces where you can step in your car, punch the garage-door opener and then drive straight to the parking garage of your office and mall, avoiding being outdoors altogether. Another is that more and more people even in the old public space of cities are hurried and harried and move through such spaces obliviously. They have forgotten what these places have been and how to live in them. Just as foods that are considered delicacies in one culture are deemed disgusting and offal in others, so it is with public space: occupied as an act of gracious well-being in many parts of Europe, consigned to the homeless in many American cities. When we neither recognize nor prize what these places have been or can be, they lie dormant—though like seeds that germinate after a rain, any great social deluge can reawaken them. Finally such spaces are more policed and controlled in this era when the First Amendment is often consigned to a protest pen at political conventions and other key moments in the history of democracy, surveillance cameras proliferate, and new technologies of repression develop. Yet civil society and by extension democracy depend on public life—a life that is being throttled by these things, reawakened by others, from farmers markets to the Latinoization of many neighborhoods.

These are all reasons why Josh MacPhee’s long campaign of putting his series of radical history posters up around the country matter. They are a small gesture, perhaps, but small gestures accrue, and democracies and revolutions are made up of the myriad gestures of the small. I have long thought of pedestrians, of people who walk their cities and know them, as keeping alive a confidence and familiarity that has great potential in crisis and revolution. These posters do for the walls what those walkers do for the streets: keep alive some power and some hope in the public sphere. Just as individuals accrue into civil society, so these individual commemorations of bygone heroines and moments cohere into the radical past on which a radical future can be built.

—Rebecca Solnit

June 2010

Introduction

Around midnight, a half dozen of us walked surreptitiously down Madison Avenue on Chicago’s West Side. It was 1998, and the place looked like a ghost town, unlike the thriving, African American city center it had been in the 1950s and early 60s. Malt liquor ads were the only images on the streets. We slowly made our way, lugging buckets of gooey wallpaper waste, rolls of printed posters, and big brushes on poles, covering boarded up storefronts and abandoned advertisement hoardings with images of Malcolm X. After ten minutes of pasting these Celebrate People’s History (CPH) posters, we had attracted a small crowd. People came up to us asking for posters for their walls, and to give to their kids and friends. A number of passersby actually grabbed the paste buckets out of our hands, eager to help put the posters up.

The experience was an epiphany for me. It taught me that if we make art that speaks to people’s interests, history, and desires, and bring it into public spaces, people might actually engage with it. The streets aren’t dead to political dialogue. They are a place where powerful conversations can begin, and art can play an important role in making that happen.

The decision to make the first CPH poster of Malcolm X came out of a series of conversations with my friend Liz Goss, now a Chicago public school teacher. We chose Malcolm as a subject not only because he is an important American political figure, but also because of this quote that Liz discovered: “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can charter a course for our future. Only by knowing where we’ve been, can we know where we are, and look to where we want to go.”[1] In many ways this idea—to make history present in our everyday lives—perfectly encapsulates my mission for this project. I want to engage people with history and share information, without any expectation or requirement that the audience buy something or go somewhere.

The linoleum block cut for the first CPH poster.

The contemporary Left political poster was developed in the 1960s. A Cuban internationalist group, the Organization in Solidarity with the People’s of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL), hit on the brilliant idea of folding posters up and stuffing them into their publication, Tricontinental, which at its height was distributed to over eighty countries in multiple languages. Soon these posters graced the walls of student dorm rooms across the globe. By the late 60s, political movements in a dozen countries, from France to Mexico, had developed scrappy but effective community- and student-run print workshops of their own, churning out an explosion of new visual ideas.

The Celebrate People’s History posters are rooted in this do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda. From the beginning, CPH posters have been created with extremely limited resources, which inform their aesthetics. The posters are almost all two-color (as opposed to a more expensive four-color process), printed on inexpensive uncoated paper, and produced on largely outdated and analog offset printing equipment. Unlike slick digital images run off on glossy photo paper, the posters have a tactile feel, giving the sense that they were crafted by hand. In this way they hold great aesthetic affinity with the rushed screenprints of poster workshops run by striking students, or the off-register, poorly trapped, and hastily made posters printed on underground presses by Latin American or African revolutionaries.

CPH posters diverge from typical political posters, at least most made in the US today, in a few significant ways. There is a long tradition of Left posters that represent disasters or failures, either imaging or imagining the fallout from bad decisions made by politicians, or serving as a reminder of some previous or current atrocity. The best examples of these are the outpouring of anti-George W. Bush posters created between 2000 and 2008, and the tradition of antinuclear posters illustrated with ominous mushroom clouds, created by antiwar activists since the 1970s. In short, they are depressing yet important symbols of the problems of the world today. Another type of poster is one that serves as an immediate call to arms against a direct foe, rallying for a cause or protest. The most recent examples of this type are the text-heavy calls to come out to antiwar rallies.

It’s rare that a political poster is celebratory, and when it is, it almost always focuses on one of a very small canon of individuals, almost exclusively male: Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Ghandi, Che Guevera, or Nelson Mandela. Rather than create another exclusive collection of “heroes,” I decided I’d rather generate a diverse collection of posters that bring to life successful moments in the history of social justice struggles. To that end, I’ve asked artists and designers to find events, groups, and people throughout history who were inspiring in some way, who moved forward the collective struggle of humanity to create a more equitable and just world.

Screenprint poster designed by Alberto Blanco Gonzáles for OSPAAAL in 1982.

Secession of the Plebs CPH poster designed by Art Hazelwood.

Although I’ve long considered myself an anarchist, CPH has always been a nonsectarian, ecumenical project, pulling together diverse historical moments and activities coming out of multiple political traditions, from communist to national liberation, liberal to libertarian. The posters tell stories from the subjective position of the artists. They are very often the stories of the underdogs, those marginalized, or written out of mainstream histories. Some of the artists did an immense amount of research, tracking down all they could find, while I’m sure others might not have even picked up a book, but instead had a conversation that sparked their interest, or got to work after some quick online research. The goal of this book and poster series is not to tell a definitive history, but to suggest a new relationship to the past.

Some of the stories told by these posters are well-known. Many people have heard of Emma Goldman, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. But how many know that Tubman carried out the only female-led US military attack ever with the Combahee River Action? We may know these individual heroes, but history is not simply a collection of great protagonists. It is a social fabric, a chronological quilt of actions and reactions, collections of people moving in concert and in conflict. How many know about the activities of Las Gorras Blancas, or that in the 1970s a group of prisoners in Walpole, Massachusetts, functionally ran the prison they were confined in? Many have heard of John Brown and his armed attack on Harper’s Ferry. But how many know of his relationship with Henry David Thoreau, a figure presented to school children across the US as the progenitor of liberal nonviolence? In fact, Thoreau had a much more complicated relationship to violence, and believed there were evils much greater than individual aggression, particularly slavery. By putting Brown and Thoreau back in dialogue with each other, not only can the posters correct historical inaccuracies, they can show that how we understand history effects how we understand politics, both in the past and in the present.

CPH posters on the streets of Chicago.

On the streets, we’re inundated with an endless barrage of brightly colored advertisements, street signs, and commercial window displays that evolve and change daily. So much of what we see are directives of some kind. “Buy this!” or “Be this!” Living in this ever transforming and saturated visual landscape, how do we understand the past of the spaces we move through? Where do we learn history? Physical spaces where important events happen are abandoned, bought, sold, torn down, or made into monolithic historical monuments. The creation of these monuments, whether statues of guys on horses or the preserved homes of Founding Fathers, is intended to acknowledge history, but more often than not it ensures that history is ossified. It becomes lifeless, a thing of the past.

CPH posters on the streets of Brooklyn.

Street art can be something else altogether, by navigating the narrow space between the pillars of past monuments and present advertisements. The CPH project has clarified for me a series of questions about history and public space: Can our streets become active galleries of ideas and information we can use to understand who we are and where we come from? Can these galleries evolve and change, instead of calcifying, fading, and cracking, and make room for new ideas, images, and conversations? Since that first night in Chicago, CPH posters have been pasted up in Philadelphia, Nashville, San Francisco, Brooklyn, Portland, and in over a dozen other cities. Each time they go up, I receive emails from people wanting to know more. Our streets can be a venue for asking these questions, and the CPH posters can play a role in answering them.

At the same time that my friend Liz was helping me develop this project, she was studying to become a teacher. She told me about the serious lack of radical political materials for educators. Indeed, soon after the first posters were printed, teachers began coming to me to ask for posters for their classrooms. The reasons they are interested in the posters generally fall into two categories: “I need these in my classroom as direct teaching tools,” or “I want to hang these in my class in order to piss off my principal.” The former seems the more important of the two, but I have to admit I also love the latter. There are clearly ideological battles that need to happen in schools, and it’s nice to know that the posters play a role in those struggles.

It’s been great to see the posters become part of curriculums, and to see lessons built around them. I’ve gone into many schools and presented CPH as a kick-start for kids to make their own posters. Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts School (CAPA) has had high school students make posters as part of a printmaking class, with amazing results. Several undergraduate color theory classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) have used the CPH posters for exploring the uses of duo-tones and controlled color usage in design work.

CPH posters in use at the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago.

When giving a talk about the poster series a couple years back, I was approached by a graduate school student in training to become a teacher. It turned out that she was first introduced to the posters when they hung in one of her grade school classrooms, almost a decade earlier. She had encountered them throughout her life, and now she intends to use them in her future classes. I hope that these posters can continue to act as some small corrective to the dominant narratives told in schools, and that more teachers engage students in alternative ways of understanding the past.

To initally fund this project, I saved up money from my day job to pay for printing. Offset printing is relatively inexpensive—about two thousand posters can be printed for six hundred dollars. Over ten years into the project, I’ve been able to sell thousands of posters, so now they more or less pay for themselves. The idea has always been to make the posters inexpensive and accessible to most people: they sell from two to five dollars each, and you can get them online (justseeds.org) or at one of the dozen events, conferences, festivals, and fairs that I attend every year. Today CPH posters to grace the walls of dorm rooms, apartments, community centers, classrooms, and city streets. Over sixty different designs have been printed in the past twelve years, adding up to over 150,000 total posters.

Although I’ve organized and funded these posters myself, they have always been a collective project. Almost one hundred artists have designed posters. Multiple print shops have run the presses they have been printed on.[2] Dozens of people have run around at night pasting them on city electrical boxes and construction sites, and thousands have helped distribute them around the world.

Printing CPH posters at Stumptown Printers.

As individual works, these posters pay tribute to each artist, each poster subject, and to the idea of a people’s history. With the posters collected for the first time in this book, we can assess how they function in an entirely new way. It is important, for example, that as a whole they don’t simply speak to individual moments, but to broader sweeps of the past. They attest to the evolution and movement of over five hundred years of struggle for social justice, and yet speak to how much more there is to tell.

History is not simply something that has passed. It is the culmination of all that has come before us—something that is still alive, moving, evolving, and changing. It affects the way we see and interpret the present. I hope this book, and all the posters within it, will reinvigorate our collective desire not only to learn from yesterday, but to keep history alive today.

—Josh MacPhee

May 2010

The Diggers

In 1649, to St. George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will. They defied the landlords, they defied the laws, they were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs. We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow, we come to work the land in common, and to make the wasteland grow. This earth divided, we will make whole, so it can be a common treasury for all. The sin of property we do disdain, no one has the right to buy and sell the earth for private gain. We work, we eat together, we need no swords. We will not bow to masters, or pay rent to lords. We are free men, though we are poor. You diggers all stand up for glory, stand up now. From men of property, the orders came. They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers’ claim. Tear down their cottages—destroy their corn. They are dispersed—only the vision lingers on. You poor take courage. You rich take care. The earth is a common treasury for everyone to share.

ARTWORK: ERIK RUIN

The Pueblo Revolt

“One leader perhaps said to another that the man from Oke Owinge has ‘the cunning of the fox and the heart of the bear’ ... according to tradition, it was said that Popé was not arrogant but instead was always willing to learn, consider advice and to explain his decisions.”—Joe Sando, Pueblo Profiles

Po’pay was a Tewa spiritual leader who led the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, an anticolonial movement to remove the Spanish colonial presence in what is now known as the upper Rio Grande Valley. Born with the name Popyn, meaning “ripe squash,” Po’pay was convicted alongside dozens of Indigenous leaders for practicing “sorcery.” Following the public and violent punishment of these “criminals,” the Spanish authorities released the prisoners following the direct action of local communities. Upon his release from jail, Po’pay relocated to Taos, where in 1680 he organized a successful and well-planned assault on the colonial administration in Santa Fe. Carrying knotted deerskins to announce the day of the attack, Pueblo runners informed local communities about a scheduled August 11 uprising. Although commencing a day prematurely, thousands of Indigenous warriors engaged in a ten day offensive that forced the settler community (including Tlaxcala servants, mestizo residents, detribalized Natives known as genízaros, and Pueblo allies) to relocate hundreds of miles south to El Paso del Norte. The anticolonial struggles of Po’pay and his contemporaries remain a specter of the potential and possibility of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism.

ARTWORK: DYLAN A.T. MINER

Jamaican Maroons Fend Off the British

In the early 1700s, Queen Nanny and the Windward Maroons used guerilla warfare to defeat the British from the mountains of Jamaica. In doing so, they avoided further enslavement and forced the British to capitulate. In 1939-40, the British Governor in Jamaica gave the Maroons two thousand five hundred acres and they were able to live under their own governance.

ARTWORK: DAMON LOCKS

The Stono Rebellion

On Sunday September 9, 1739, a group of Charles Town-area slaves set out toward Spanish-controlled Florida, determined to become free from their white masters in the South Carolina colony. After killing around two dozen people, and burning property, the well-armed group of about one hundred played drums and waved banners in celebration during their hopeful escape south. By chance they were discovered, and a militia of armed churchgoing whites put down what became known as the Stono Rebellion. With about seventy-five deaths, Stono stood as the bloodiest revolt in the English Colonies.

ARTWORK: MARK CORT; TEXT/STENCIL: RUSSELL HOWZE

John Brown (1800-1859)

“It was his [John Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.”—Henry David Thoreau

ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE

The Haitian Revolution

The most successful slave uprising in history which led to the formation of the first Black republic in 1804.

ARTWORK: AARON RENIER

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

“Education makes a man unfit to be a slave.”

ARTWORK: JOHN JENNINGS

Sequoyah and the Cherokee Writing System

In 1821 Sequoyah completed the development of a Cherokee writing system. Each character represents a syllable, instead of one sound as when one writes English, so it’s called a syllabary. There are eighty-five characters in the writing system and these were cast into metal for printing. A Cherokee dictionary was produced in the mid-1970s, one hundred and fifty years after the first editors and printers of the Cherokee Phoenix came to New Echota to print the first Native American newspaper. Some say Sequoyah was illiterate, but how can you be illiterate if you’re the person who developed your own system of writing? Some say the writing system, or portions of it, may have existed even before Sequoyah.

ARTWORK: SPEAKEASY PRESS (DESIGN: FRANK BRANNON; ILLUSTRATION: LUZENE HILL; TRANSLATION: LAURA PINNIX)

Elisée Reclus (1830-1905)

Elisée Reclus, influential French geologist and anarchist, proposed that humanity take full responsibility as the conscience of the Earth.

“Wild nature is so beautiful! Is it then necessary that man, in his seizure of it, has to proceed systematically to exploit each newly conquered domain and to mark his ownership with vulgar constructions and property boundaries as straight as a die?” —L’Homme et la Nature,1865

ARTWORK: SHAUN SLIFER

The Underground Railroad

“Yes I was a slave and I’ll say this to the whole world: slavery was the worst curse ever visited on the people of the United States.”—John Rudd

ARTWORK: SAM KERSON

The Little Shell Band of Chippewa Indians

“We are a scattered tribe. We weren’t claimed by the whites. We weren’t claimed by the full bloods. They used to call us persons with no souls. Now at least we have an identity.”

ARTWORK: LARRY CYR

Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Action

On June 3, 1863, Harriet Tubman led union troops in a guerrilla action at Combahee River, South Carolina, leading over seven hundred and fifty slaves to freedom. It was the first and only military action to be conceived and led by a woman in US history.

ARTWORK: DARRELL GANE-MCCALLA

Little Bighorn

On June 25, 1876, General George Custer and a heavily armed cavalry regiment attacked a camp of Lakota, Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in what is now Montana. Custer’s regiment was part of the forces clearing the region of indigenous peoples so white settlers could mine gold in the Black Hills. That day Custer met a crushing defeat at the hands of the assembled tribes, under the leadership of Crazy Horse and Gall. Custer and his men were entirely wiped out in one of the greatest victories for Indian peoples during the last five hundred years of genocide in the Americas.

ARTWORK: ROGER PEET

El Hijo Del Ahuizote

El Hijo del Ahuizote fue un perodico revolucionario que luchó contra la dictadura de Porfirio Diaz en Mexico. La publicación combinó el pensamiento anarquista de Ricardo Flores Magón y su hermano Enrique, con la grafica popular de protesta de Jose Guadalupe Posada para desatar una larga guerra contra el autoritarismo, que despues de que el peridico se ve reprimido y cerrado definitivamente se expresa en otras publicaciones que juntas irían a ayudar a pavimentar el camino hacia la Revolucion Mexicana en 1910.

“Que a sangre y fuego caiga, lo que a sangre y fuego se mantiene.”—Ricardo Flores Magón

El Hijo del Ahuizote was a revolutionary newspaper that fought against Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship in Mexico. The paper combined the anarchist ideas of Ricardo Flores Magón and his brother Enrique, with Jose Guadalupe Posada’s graphics, to unleash a war against authoritarianism. Founded in 1885, it was shut down and censored multiple times. Even after the paper fell victim to repression, Magón and Posada were involved in other publications that expressed the same unrest and helped pave the road towards the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

“That which is maintained with blood and fire through blood and fire shall fall.”—Ricardo Flores Magón

ARTWORK: SANTIAGO ARMENGOD

May Day

May Day is International Workers’ Day, a time of celebration and opposition throughout the world, except in the United States where it began. May Day commemorates the May 1, 1886 nationwide protest for the eight-hour day and the following “Haymarket Affair,” a pivotal event in the history of workers’ and anarchist movements in which four labor organizers were hanged by the State in Chicago. May Day is also the ancient celebration of Spring and rebirth—the traditional time for planting new seeds in old ground.

ARTWORK: ERIC DROOKER

Haymarket

May 4, 1886. In response to the Chicago Police Department’s killing of four workers during a strike at the McCormick Harvesters Works on May 3, labor leaders organized a meeting at Haymarket Square for the following night. About three thousand persons assembled, later dwindling to a few hundred. A detachment of 180 policemen showed up. The speaker said the meeting was almost over. Then a bomb exploded in the midst of the police, wounding sixty-six, of whom seven later died (one died from the bomb blast, six others died from gunshot wounds from their fellow officers). The police fired into the crowd, killing several people, wounding two hundred.

Eight anarchists were arrested and put on trial. Facing an openly biased judge in Joseph Gary and a clearly hostile jury, the Haymarket Affair is one of the most infamously unjust trials in American history. The prosecution focused on the men’s anarchist ties rather than determining whether the accused had any real connection with the crime. Essentially, eight men (seven of whom were not even present at the time the bomb was thrown) were tried and convicted because of their political beliefs.

August Spies, Albert Parsons, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were hanged. Louis Lingg killed himself before the state could. Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe were sentenced to prison (eventually being granted clemency in 1892).

The Haymarket Riot was an important event for the labor movement. The year 1886 became known as “the year of the great uprising of labor.” From 1881 to 1885, strikes had averaged about five hundred each year, involving perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand workers each year. In 1886 there were over one thousand four hundred strikes, involving five hundred thousand workers.

“The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”—August Spies

ARTWORK: ADAM FANUCCI

Las Gorras Blancas

New Mexico, 1889-1897. Las Gorras Blancas, or the White Caps, were a close-knit secretive group that rose in collective struggle against powerful cattle ranchers, land owners, and railroad expansion. The encroaching settlers began fencing the best pasturing and watering lands that had previously been held in common. In 1889 the White Caps began cutting barbed wire, burning fences and railroad track, and destroying bridges. They quickly gained popular support among the Las Vegas, New Mexico community.

“If the fact that we are law abiding citizens is questioned, come to our houses and see the hunger and desolation we are suffering. Be fair and just and we are with you, do otherwise and take the consequences.”

The White Caps, one thousand, five hundred strong and growing daily.

ARTWORK: PETE YAHNKE

Battle of Homestead

Carnegie Steel, July 6, 1892

“That was a war between laboring men because these pinkertons were there under pay and the person who employed that force was safely placed away by the money that he has wrung from the sweat of the men employed in that mill, employing in their stead workmen to kill the men who made his money.”

ARTWORK: ERIC “EROK” BOERER

Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

“While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Eugene V. Debs, the renowned labor leader, ran for president five times for the Socialist ticket. His most famous campaign was in 1920 from the federal prison (sentenced to ten years under the Espionage Act for giving an antiwar speech) where at age sixty-three he received over nine hundred thousand votes.

His campaign button read, “For President, Convict no. 9653.”

ARTWORK: NICOLAS LAMPERT

Gabriel Dumont and the Métis Resistance of 1869-1870 & 1885

For the Métis of North America, the political and spiritual resistance of Gabriel Dumont stands against the Euro-Canadian expansion emerging from Ottawa. As the Canadian Pacific Railway headed into the native lands of the Upper Great Lakes and the Western Prairie, the traditional lifeways of the Métis people were attacked. As a leader in the great buffalo hunts, Dumont used advanced guerrilla tactics in various struggles of the Métis. With the passing of the Dominion Lands Acts of 1872, Euro-Canadian settlers began moving en masse to the Canadian West. In the same year, Dumont was elected president of his community, Batoche, Saskatchewan. During the 1885 Resistance, Dumont led his people into battle against the encroaching policies and armies of the Dominion of Canada.

We are the Otipemisiwak—the Free People!

ARTWORK: DYLAN A.T. MINER

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Anarchist, writer, and activist who fought for human rights, women’s equality, sexual freedom, contraception, fair labor practices, education, individual liberty, and social revolution.

ARTWORK: BEN RUBIN

Dr. Marie Equi (1872-1952)

Anarchist, political prisoner, antiwar activist, abortionist, militant, IWW physician, lesbian, fighter, feminist.

“We may think we live in a free country, but we are in reality nothing but slaves. When President Wilson said we are at war he spoke the truth once. But it isn’t a war against another nation, but a never-ending class war within our own country.”

ARTWORK: ALEC ICKY DUNN

Major Taylor (1878-1932)

Major Taylor was an African American cyclist who won the World One Mile Track Cycling Championship in 1899. He set numerous world records during his thirty years of racing, and was the first African American international sports star. The League of American Wheelmen, the governing body for cyclists, ruled in 1894 to exclude blacks from membership, and Major Taylor had to fight discrimination at every step of his career.

ARTWORK: JANET ATTARD

Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960)

Ballad Singer, Midwife, Union Organizer.

“Tell me, fellow workers, how can this be? A home of the brave and the land of the free. Starvation and misery is all that is free for poor hard-working masses like you and like me.”

For forty-seven years, from the age of five until her exile from the mine country in 1931, she was the life and spirit of the Kentucky miners, not only as a nurse and midwife, but as a union organizer. These forty-seven years saw a great many troubles, tragedies, struggles, and victories, all of which she chronicled in song, so that the other miners and miners’ wives would neither forgive nor forget.

In the black days of the Kentucky miners during the first years of the Depression, Aunt Molly carried on a bitter struggle against the operators undaunted by the sight of her fellow organizers being shot down in cold blood. “I have often wondered why they have not killed me—they have beat me and tear-gassed me and had me thrown in jail. Ah yes, they tried to get rid of me but somehow they failed.”

ARTWORK: PETE YAHNKE

Primo Tapia de la Cruz (1885-1926)

Primo Tapia was born into the indigenous Tarascan community of Naraja, Mexico. While working as a migrant laborer in California he studied with the Magon brothers (fathers of Mexican anarchism). He went on to become a member of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World). At a sugar beet refinery in Nebraska he organized his fellow workers into a five hundred-man union. Returning home, he battled for agrarian reform in the Zacapu Valley region. Primo led the Tarascan communities to many victories, winning back their stolen land. Ultimately he was murdered by soldiers disguised as peasants and became a martyr for the Mexican agrarian movement.

ARTWORK: CHRISTOPHER CARDINALE

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964)

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Rebel Girl,” gave her first speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” at age sixteen at the Harlem Socialist Club. Shortly thereafter she joined the IWW and quickly became one of the organizations most important strike organizers and speakers. Flynn helped lead the IWW free speech fights in Missoula, Montana (1908) and in Spokane, Washington (1909-1910), was a strike organizer during the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912), and the silk workers general strike in Paterson, New Jersey (1913). In 1920, she became a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and continued to fight for labor, social justice, and women’s rights throughout her life.

ARTWORK: NICOLAS LAMPERT

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

American athlete, singer, actor, and political activist. Performed and spoke out against racism and in support of labor and peace. Fought for an antilynching law. The US revoked his passport. To circumvent this travel restriction he performed two concerts on the US-Canadian border. Forty thousand people came.

“The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I made my choice. I had no alternative.”

ARTWORK: DAVID LESTER

Red Feds

The New Zealand Federation of Labor was the first significant NZ labor organization with the intention of uniting the various trades together for class struggle, revolutionary unionism, and the abolishing of capitalism.

Between 1908 and 1913 “unskilled” miners, general laborers, and watersiders directly challenged the labor laws of the time, including the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. Under this law, strike actions by unions was illegal and all disputes went through an arbitration process, a process viewed by many as “the leg iron of the working class.” Instead, the federation encouraged workers to use direct action against their employers.

Their preamble was eventually adopted from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.”

Hence their name, the . . . Red Feds.

ARTWORK: JARED DAVIDSON

Lawrence Textile Strike

Lawrence, Mass., Sept. 30. First “Demonstration Strike.”

For the first time in this country a “demonstration strike” against the imprisonment of labor leaders took place here today. After hand-to-hand fights between rioters and police from the opening of the textile mill gates in the morning until the closing at night, the demonstration was called off by the Industrial Workers of the World.

ARTWORK: SHAWN GILHEENEY

Kalamazoo Corset Company Strike

In 1911, the Kalamazoo Corset Company was the largest manufacturer of women’s corsets in the world. In spring of 1912, the Kalamazoo Corset Workers’ Union, Local 82 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union went on strike, citing poor wages, long hours, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and sexual harassment as grievances.

In a company whose products bore names like Madame Grace and American Beauty, it was common practice for foremen to give the most desirable jobs to women who allowed their sexual advances. Women workers were forced to pay out of pocket for thread purchased from the same foremen, who in turn often chose to withhold the thread and the women’s means of livelihood in exchange for sexual favors.

In the end, despite the workers’ best efforts, the strike was unsuccessful. However, due to the efforts of Pauline Newman and representatives from Local 82, who traveled throughout the Midwest advocating a company boycott to women consumers, the Kalamazoo Corset Company went bankrupt in 1914.

ARTWORK: SHAUN SLIFER AND SARA MEISTER

IWW Local 8

In 1913 thousands of Philadelphia longshoremen formed the nation’s most progressive union. Local 8 welcomed African Americans, Irish Americans, Poles, Lithuanians, West Indians, and others. The dockers proudly belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which is that rare institution that both advocates and practices equality. Alas, such radicalism got Local 8 into trouble with employers and the government, which arrested its leaders, fomented racial tensions, and locked out the unionists. The legacy of Local 8, nevertheless, lives on.

ARTWORK: MARC NELSON; TEXT: PETER COLE

Louise Olivereau (1884-1963)

One of many arrested during World War I for speaking their mind—her heinous crime was merely mailing out a few thousand antidraft leaflets.

She was charged with sedition and served twenty-eight months of a ten-year sentence.

ARTWORK: APRILLE THURHEIMER

The Dil Pickle Club

1914-1933. A literary nightspot at the heart of the Chicago renaissance.

Around the corner from Bughouse Square, down Tooker Alley, was Chicago’s radical nexus billed the Dil Pickle Club. Here, every openness on the road to anarchy was extolled through plays, dancing, readings, lectures, and heckling. The ringleaders asked,“Are you a nut about anything?”

If so, Jack Jones and the Dil Pickle Club went looking for you.

The Impresarios! Jack Jones, arsonist, bomb maker, and Wobbly. Jim Larkin, trade union leader and social activist, on the lam from Dublin. Slim Brundage, beatnik janitor and founder of the college of complexes. Ben Reitman, clap doctor and lover to Emma Goldman.

Home to hobohemians, newberry librarians, derelicts, ozone orators, poets, painters, journalists, sex workers, Wobblies, professors, lawyers, doctors, and earnest young husbands and wives.

ARTWORK: MARC MOSCATO, FRED SASAKI, AND DEAN RANK

Sacco (1891-1927) and Vanzetti (1888-1927)

Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born anarchists who arrived in the US in 1908. Sacco was a shoe-maker and Vanzetti, a fish seller. A payroll was held up in Braintree, Massachusetts on April 15, 1920, where the paymaster and security guard were killed. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for the action. Multiple trials and appeals later, they were found guilty and executed by electric chair on August 23, 1927. Today there is significant evidence that they did not commit the crime, and few contest that their trial was grossly unjust. During the trial they did not shy away from their anarchist beliefs or their commitment to revolutionary violence.

ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE

Amazon Army

Franklin, Kansas, December 15, 1921. On December 11, 1921, propelled by the need to feed their children and outraged at Kansas’s new antilabor legislation, a crowd of more than five hundred women gathered in Franklin, Kansas, and resolved to march in solidarity with miners striking at Union District 14 coal mines. The strike was called in response to the new Industrial Court Law signed by Kansas Governor Allen, which forced unions into arbitration and outlawed strikes. On December 12, the women began their march on the mines, armed only with the American flag, which they carried to make clear that the values it symbolized were synonymous to those of their cause.

By December 15, the march had swelled to more than four thousand, stretching over a mile long. With the mines at a standstill, word spread that the militia was en route, and the women, dubbed the “Amazon Army” by the New York Times, voluntarily chose to end their march in hopes of preventing bloodshed. Victory for the marchers and their striking coal miners came the following year when the US Supreme Court ruled that the compulsory arbitration clause of the Industrial Court Law was unconstitutional. Workers still had the right to strike.

ARTWORK: DAVE LOEWENSTEIN

Seki Ran Kai

In April 1921, in the wake of the Japanese Socialist League, which was formed in December of 1920, the Seki Ran Kai (Red Waves Society) was formed with the adoption of socialism as its goal. It was the first anti-imperialist women’s body in Japan, and came at a time when women were banned from participation in any political association. Immediately after its formation, they participated in the second May Day with their handmade flag and earned plaudits from comrades of various labor movements and political organizations. They were vigorously suppressed by the police force and two members were taken into longterm custody. Though there were clamp-downs, they actively carried on their movement by holding a lecture on women’s problems in June, giving a five-day series of summer lectures in July, and, as needed, distributing newspapers and pamphlets denominated as book day. In the fall of the same year, on the occasion of extensive maneuvers by army troops, members of the Seki Ran Kai distributed antimilitary, antiwar fliers to the military personnel who stayed at different private residences. This action was regarded as a secret publication by police. The public saw this incident as the Seki Ran Kai persuading the army to turn red. Key members were taken into long-term custody, which made it difficult for them to hold regular meetings on a monthly basis and naturally led to their dissolution after their eight month activities. However, most members dedicated their whole life to the social movements, women’s movements, and antiwar movements.

ARTWORK: KEISUKE NARITA AND REDEYE

The Battle of Blair Mountain

After years of inhumane living and working conditions, in 1921 the coal miners of Appalachia answered the call to organize. The largest armed uprising in US labor history, twelve thousand workers from West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio flooded Kanawha County, West Virginia, to set up a union by force. Vehemently anti-union, a local sheriff and the coal companies attacked the miners. Thousands of armed and angry miners rushed into the lush hills and winding paths of Blair Mountain to fight for the union. Federal troops were called in and the miners dispersed in order to avoid further bloodshed. At the time the struggle was seen as a failure, but in retrospect the Battle of Blair Mountain led directly to a much larger and stronger union movement.

ARTWORK: CHRIS STAIN

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (& Maids)

Begun 1925. Built the groundwork for the US civil rights movement, the Brotherhood was a labor-based movement seeking civil and economic rights for African Americans. Joined by women in the black community of Chicago from the Ladies Auxilary to the Alpha Suffrage Club, the union gained support and members.

August 25, 1937. They were the first black union to meet with a major US company and negotiate a new contract.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”—Frederick Douglass

ARTWORK: MEREDITH STERN

Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934)

“General Sandino’s six year struggle in the Nicaraguan mountains leading a handful of campesinos and laborers, must be viewed as the result of centuries of foreign domination of the country and of the repeated surrender by the ruling groups to those same foreign powers. Those men who fought bitterly with their machetes and antiquated rifles, who made bombs from empty tin cans filled with rocks and scrap iron, who brought down enemy planes practically with stones, who always maintained high morale in the face of an enemy a hundred times more powerful—they demonstrated something that until the appearance of that popular army had been concealed in the difficult terrain of Latin American history: the hopeful prospect that campesinos, with their own leaders, with tactics forged in the course of the fight, and doctrines arising from the process itself, could organize a successful struggle for national autonomy.”—Sergio Ramirez

ARTWORK: ERIK RUIN

The Bonus Marchers

In 1932 World War I veterans came to Washington, DC, to demand payment for the service bonds they had been issued. They became known as the Bonus Marchers. Their actions helped turn the country against the Hoover Administration, which treated them with brutal repression. General Douglas MacArthur led the last cavalry charge in US Military history against the forty-three thousand Bonus Marchers camped out on the Anacostia Flats in DC. Finally, in 1936 the veterans were allowed to redeem their service bonds.

ARTWORK: ART HAZELWOOD

Highlander Folk School

1932-1961. Highlander opened its doors in 1932 with the express intent of enabling poor and working class people in the South to radically change society. Its educational philosophy valued democracy, justice, and learners’ self-empowerment. It became the first openly integrated educational space in the South while training union leaders in the 1940s. This led Highlander to be a nerve center of the civil rights movement, hosting desegregation workshops and providing space for radical groups such as the SNCC to strategize. Highlander was closed by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1961, the victim of a red-baiting campaign aided by those who wanted to maintain a segregated South and keep organized labor under control. Highlander rechartered and moved to New Market, Tennessee.

“The best teachers of poor and working people are the people themselves. They are experts on their own experiences and problems.”—Myles Horton, founder of Highlander

ARTWORK: LINDSAY STARBUCK

The Funsten 500

St. Louis, Missouri, 1933. Five hundred black women who were nutpickers for the Funsten Nut Company mounted a successful labor strike against the industry giant citing low wages and inhumane working conditions as major concerns. This strike was one of many midwestern radical labor strikes organized by African Americans in our country’s history.

ARTWORK: JOHN JENNINGS

Las Mujeres Libres

During an era of extreme gender division in Spain, women’s freedom was severely restricted. In response to the women’s situation, two groups of anarchist women in Barcelona and Madrid had begun organizing two years before the revolution. In preparation for the revolution, they built up a network of women activists which would soon merge to form the Mujeres Libres (Free Women) organization in September 1936. Over thirty thousand of Las Mujeres Libres advocated the alliance of women and the anarchist movement, involved more women in the CNT (Confederacion Nacional de Trabojo, the anarchist-syndicalist trade union), and raised consciousness and education to “free herself from triple enslavement: her enslavement to ignorance, her enslavement as a producer, and her enslavement as a woman.” The social revolution in Spain was made by people like Las Mujeres Libres, who pressed for radical changes in an oppressive, conformist society.

ARTWORK: CRISTY C. ROAD

Flint Sit-Down Strike

The Sit-Down Strike hurts the boss.

Although Michigan’s economic future is in peril, the state’s history as a hotbed of working-class radicalism is one that cannot be denied. In 1936, one year after the founding of the United Auto Workers, the union began organizing workers against the repressive Fordist tactics of the automotive industry. In December 1936, as a strategic maneuver, workers occupied Fisher Body Plant 1 to prevent the management from moving machinery to another plant.

Once occupied, the workers established a democratic structure inside the plant and spread the sit-down to other plants within the city. Collectively, the workers kept outside forces from entering the plants. Initially, black and women workers were heavily involved in the sit-down, although they are not frequently written into its history. Figures such as Roscoe Van Zandt, possibly the only black worker to remain inside the plants during the sit-down, serve as a specter of hope for Michigan and its working classes.

Solidarity forever!

ARTWORK: DYLAN A.T. MINER

The Durruti Column

In July, 1936, soon after General Franco’s facist troops revolted against the Spanish Republic, Buenaventura Durruti led a military column made up of two thousand anarchist workers to fight the fascists. Not a typical military unit, the column was organized by the soldiers themselves, with rank holding only minimal importance, and officers being elected by their units. In Zaragossa, the column defeated the much better equipped fascist troops. Near the end of 1936, Madrid was under bombing attacks by the Germans and Italians, and the now four thousand soldier column moved there to join the fight. On November 20, Durruti was killed. The column continued to fight until the end of the war.

The role the Durruti Column played in supporting the social revolution happening across the Spanish countryside was as important as their military victories. They assisted in the establishment of agricultural collectives along their route and helped set up the directly democratic Council of Aragon. Local political party bosses and rich landowners fled in a panic. This also upset the authoritarian communist and socialist parties, who believed the social revolution had to wait until after the war was won.

ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE

Disney Animators Strike

Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs made the studio record profits in 1938. Yet its animators received no credits, and were instead left facing low wages and layoffs. The Screen Cartoonists’ Guild Local #858 Hollywood had won union contracts with MGM and Looney Tunes, and tried to open negotiations. But Disney refused to recognize the union, and on May 29, the animators went to the picket line. The five-week strike only ended when FDR sent in federal mediators. They found in the guild’s favor on every issue, from pay to screen credits.

After unionization, the atmosphere at Disney became intolerable for guild members. Several left to form United Productions of America, the studio that defined the modernist style of animation in the 1950s. Disney, meanwhile, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he believed the strike leaders were communists. Many of his former artists were blacklisted.

ARTWORK: LINDSAY STARBUCK

The White Rose

After Hitler took power in 1933, several resistance groups fought against the regime. The White Rose was founded in 1942 and based in Munich. Its members were students Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell, and professor Kurt Huber. Against great odds and heavy repression, they printed six different leaflets against the Nazis, and at one point they painted slogans like “Down with Hitler” and “Freedom” in the streets.

While distributing leaflets in 1943 they were caught and later executed. Their resistance made them legendary and gave great courage to all who opposed the Nazis.

“Support the Resistance Movement—Spread Leaflets!”

—The White Rose

ARTWORK: NICHOLAS GANZ

Harry Hay (1912-2002)

Harry Hay composed the first manifesto of the American Gay Rights Movement in 1948.

“We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you’re going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you.”

ARTWORK: MIRIAM KLEIN STAHL

Grace Lee (b. 1915) and Jimmy Boggs (1919-1993)

“A revolution must be made upon a declaration of aspirations and not upon bitterness.”

Two fiery activists, organizers, movement founders, and writers who began, throughout the gritty reality of post-industrializing Detroit, envisioning and creating a better world. They’ve worked to bring humanity together to create solutions through a sense of belonging, with the notion of common good, and from the ground up.

ARTWORK: BEC YOUNG

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

“To be conscious in America is to live in a constant state of rage.”

ARTWORK: JOHN JENNINGS

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)

June Jacobs, writer, activist, and urbanist, and her Greenwich Village neighbors stopped proposed expressways and demolitions in lower Manhattan in the 1960s.

In the name of “urban renewal,” post-war planners were tearing down old neighborhoods. Jacobs gave voice to the popular resistance. She celebrated cities as living organisms that thrive on density and diversity. No longer could grand plans be imposed without the consent of the community.

ARTWORK: SABRINA JONES

Nueva Canción

Nueva Canción (new song) began in Argentina with a man called Atahualpa Yupanqui whose guitar became its voice, and whose exile became its birth. It began in Chile where Violeta Parra gathered a life of songs and gave them all away. It began as Victor Jara wrote songs to the rhythm of falling canisters of tear gas, on the streets of Santiago.

Many of its voices died there, from Pinochet’s bullets and from a world’s silence. Yet still we hear Victor Jara, audible through the noise of the crowd, “walking, walking. I am looking for a road, to continue walking . . . ”

The song remains unfinished.

ARTWORK: EIAN WEISSMAN

Matzpen

Matzpen (Compass) was the first leftist organization in Israel founded on anti-Zionism. Through publications and protests, Matzpen supported Palestinian self-determination in the face of settler colonialism. Though its members were mostly Jewish, Matzpen united Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs organizing for a shared country with national rights for both peoples and full citizenship rights for all who lived there. For more than forty years, Matzpen’s vision and activism has influenced attempts to fundamentally transform Israel.

“De-Zionization of Israel and its integration in a socialist union with the Arab countries—this is the road for solution.”

ARTWORK: DAN BERGER AND JOSHUA KAHN RUSSELL

El Hajj Malik Shabazz (1925-1965)

“Armed with the knowledge of our past we can charter a course for our future. Only by knowing where we’ve been can we know where we are and look to where we want to go.”—Malcolm X

In memory of El Hajj Malik Shabazz, May 19, 1925-February 21, 1965.

ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE

Dolores Huerta (b. 1930)

¡Si Se Puede!

Dolores Huerta nació en 10 de abril de 1930. Líder del movimiento laboral chicano, confundadora y vicepresidenta del Sindicato de Trabajadores del Campo (UFW), ha dedicado su vida a la lucha por la justicia y dignidad de los trabajadores inmigrantes del campo. Su trabajo durante el Boicot Nacional Contra la Venta de Uva del UFW condujo a la aprobación del Acta de Relaciones Laborales en la Agricultura de 1975 en que se establecieron los derechos básicos de los trabajadores. Dolores sigue luchando por que haya mejores salarios, agua limpia y excusados en los campos agrícolas; vivienda digna, prestaciones de salud y un ambiente de trabajo libre de acoso y agresiones sexuales. En 2006, sigue encabezando la lucha a favor de los derechos civiles y promoviendo el activismo no violento.

Dolores Huerta, born April 10, 1930, Chicana labor leader, co-founder and vice-president of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), has dedicated her life to the struggle for justice and dignity for migrant farm workers. Her direction of the UFW’s National Grape Boycott led to the passage of the groundbreaking Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, establishing the farm workers bill of rights. Dolores continues the struggle for a living wage, clean water and toilets in the fields, decent housing, health benefits, and the freedom to work without sexual harassment and assault. In 2006, she can still be found on the front lines fighting for civil rights and promoting nonviolent activism.

ARTWORK: BOBBY CORTEZ AND BLAKE RILEY

Muhammad Ali (b. 1942)

“Why should I drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”—Muhammad Ali, 1967

ARTWORK: COLIN MATTHES

Compton’s Cafeteria Riot

San Francisco, 1966. Transwomen and drag queens working in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco often took refuge in Gene Compton’s, an after-hours cafeteria. They would buy coffee and stay for hours, temporarily escaping the troubles of the street. After the owner began harassing them with discriminatory policies, the queens formed an organization named Vanguard to fight for their rights to use the cafeteria. On a hot summer evening after an unsuccessful picket, the owner summoned police to evict the queens and a riot broke out as they fought back.

ARTWORK: ANDRE PEREZ

The Brown Berets

The Brown Berets were a group of Chicano/a individuals who formed in Los Angeles in 1960. They stood for and fought for the liberation of Chicanos everywhere. In 1968 they organized a massive student walk out in East LA, demanding equality in schools and education.

ARTWORK: JULIO CORDOVA

DRUM

On July 23, 1967, Detroit erupted in a violent rebellion which stemmed from deep racial tension. The National Guard was called in and the city was put under curfew; no one could go to the grocery store or to a hospital, except workers carrying ID badges from the big three Detroit automakers.

This led black autoworkers to believe that it was through their work in the factories that they were most valued by society, and through which they held collective power. They began to confront the racist practices of the United Auto Workers Union and the car companies individually, and learned that they would have to organize themselves.

In response to a speedup of the assembly lines, a wildcat strike was organized at the Dodge main plant in Hamtramck on May 2, 1968. Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) formed out of this strike. Workers at other plants began to organize themselves too, and soon there were Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) at the Ford plant at River Rouge, and the Eldon Avenue Chrysler plant. The RUM model quickly spread to other industries in which large numbers of black workers participated in a skilled trade. The spirit and actions of the RUMs continue to resonate in and shape Detroit.

ARTWORK: BEC YOUNG

The Young Lords Organization

Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazon. The Young Lords Organization was born in 1968 when a Puerto Rican Chicago street gang turned to political action and community service. Influenced by the Black Panther Party, they confronted developers, police, and city hall. They established preschool breakfast programs, community health services, and defended housing rights. Along with the Panthers and the Appalachian Young Patriots they formed the “Rainbow Coalition” to fight for the common interests of their communities. They inspired the formation of similar groups in other cities.

ARTWORK: RICARDO LEVINS MORALES

Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker

Presenting the tale of that revolutionary art gang with an unprintable name: Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! Who rid Woodstock 1969 of fences, who fired blanks at the famous poet Kenneth Koch, who took over Columbia University, who inspired the Weather Underground (and their yippie friends), who caused the first utterance of the word “fuck” on television, and whose infamy keeps them out of even the most radical of histories!

ARTWORK: JAMES DAVID MORGAN

The Milwaukee 14

On September 24, 1968, fourteen people—including five priests and a minister—removed approximately ten thousand draft files from Milwaukee’s Selective Service and burned them with homemade napalm.

ARTWORK: BRANDON BAUER

The International Hotel

The International Hotel was a low-income residential hotel that became the most dramatic housing-rights battleground in San Francisco history. As a center for Asian American activism in the 1970s, the building housed nearly 150 Filipino and Chinese seniors, three community groups, an art workshop, a radical bookstore, and three Asian newspapers. The I-Hotel stood on the last remaining block of Manilatown, a once-thriving Filipino neighborhood that was gradually displaced by San Francisco expanding financial district.

From 1968 to 1977, landlords of the hotel tried to evict the residents and build a parking lot. Resisting eviction for almost a decade, the tenants organized a mass-based, multiracial alliance which included students, unions, and churches. During a final 3 a.m. eviction on August 4, 1977, over three thousand people unsuccessfully defended the I-Hotel from hundreds of club-wielding riot police. The building was demolished in 1979, and it remained a vacant hole for over two decades. Thanks to a concerted effort by local neighborhood groups, the I-Hotel was rebuilt in 2005, providing 104 units of low-income senior housing and a community center to continue the legacy of Manilatown.

ARTWORK: CLAUDE MOLLER; IMAGES: MANILATOWN HERITAGE FOUNDATION; HOTEL PHOTO: JERRY JEW; DEMONSTRATORS/ SPOKESPERSON WAHAT TAMPAO PHOTO: CHRIS FUJIMOTO.

Fred Hampton (1948-1969)

Fred Hampton was a Black Panther leader who was assassinated by the Chicago police on December 4, 1969. Using a bogus warrant and a detailed floor plan, the police burst into Hampton’s apartment at 4 a.m. They fired one hundred bullets, killed Black Panther Mark Clark, shot Hampton’s unconscious body at point black range, and then beat and arrested any surviving Panthers. An FBI infiltrator had supplied the floor plan and drugged Hampton before the raid. Twenty-one years old at the time of his murder, Hampton had organized one of the strongest Black Panther chapters in the country with free food, education, and healthcare programs. By 1969 he was ready to become the party’s national spokesperson, replacing leadership that had been destroyed by jail, court trials, and exile. Threatened by the Panthers’ militancy, the US government attacked the group with police beatings, false arrests, long prison terms, and illegal harassment. In 1982 the survivors of the raid and the families of Hampton and Clark won a $1.85 million civil lawsuit, but no criminal charges were ever filed against the Chicago police.

ARTWORK: CLAUDE MOLLER

The Occupation of Alcatraz

“Since 1492 to the present, November 9, 1969, the Indian people have been held in bondage. Alcatraz is a release from that bondage . . . ”—John Trudell, “Radio Free Alcatraz”

From November 1969 to June 1971 a coalition of American Indian students and urban Indians, calling themselves Indians of All Tribes, occupied Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco as a call to resistance against the US domination of Native peoples and land. The coalition publicized the occupation through a widely distributed newsletter and a radio show broadcast in multiple cities. This action sparked years of Native resistance, including the 1972 takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Headquarters in Washington, DC, and the re-occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.

ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE

Los Siete de la Raza

Los Siete de la Raza eran siete jovenes de la Misión de San Fransisco, acusados de matar a un policia el primero de mayo de 1969. Su juicio fué un momento clave en la conciencientización de Latin@s en la Bahía. Despues de un juicio de 18 meses que mobilizó a la comunidad, todos fueron absueltos. El Comité de Defensa de Los Siete se transformó en una organización comunitaria radical, animada por principios de auto-determinación y “servir al pueblo,” comenzando un programa de desayunos gratis, una clínica médica gratis, un restauran de trabajadores, y el periódico Basta Ya! Los Siete desarrollaron un internacionalismo tercermundista revolucionario, encarnado en el término inclusivo “Raza,” ligando las luchas de Latin@s con otras comunidades de color, incluyendo la toma de Alcatraz, las Panteras Negras, y los Young Lords Puertoriqueños. Los temas que alzaron Los Siete—incluyendo la lucha contra represión policiaca, deplazamiento, y líderes vendidos, la necesidad de programas del pueblo contra dependencia en caridad o el estado, ligando organización comunitaria con trabajo cultural, y enfrentando el desafia de ser “revolucionario” y mantener su base en la comunidad—continúan siendo revelantes en las luchas de hoy.

Los Siete de la Raza were seven youths from San Francisco’s Mission District, accused of killing a cop on May 1, 1969. Their trial was a key moment in the awakening of consciousness for Latin@s in the Bay Area. After an eighteen-month trial that mobilized the community, all of Los Siete were acquitted. The Los Siete Defense Committee transformed itself into a radical community organization, animated by principles of self-determination and “serve the people,” starting a free breakfast program, a free medical clinic, a workers’ restaurant, and the Basta Ya! newspaper. Los Sieta developed a revolutionary Third World internationalism, embodied in the inclusive term “Raza,” linking the struggles of Latin@s with those of other communities of color including the Alcatraz occupation, the Black Panthers, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords. The issues that Los Siete de la Raza raised—including fighting police repression, gentrification, and sellout leaders; the necessity for people’s programs vs. dependence on charity or government; linking community organizing with cultural work; and facing the challenges of being “revolutionary” and staying community-based—continue to be relevant in today’s struggles.

ARTWORK: FERNANDO MARTÍ

Sylvia Ray Rivera (1951-2002)

Stonewall 1969.

“Everybody says it was me that threw the first bottle. No, it was somebody behind me that threw it. But when that first bottle went by me, I said, ‘Oh lord, the revolution is finally here! Hallelujah, it’s time to go do your thing!’

“The movement was born that night, and we knew that we had done something that everybody in the whole world would know about. They would know that gay people stood up and fought, and that would make everybody else stand up and fight.”

ARTWORK: JOHN GERKEN

Jane

1969-1973. Feminist, underground abortion service, one hundred plus members performed over eleven thousand illegal abortions in Chicago.

“Those of us who were members of Jane were remarkable only because we chose to act with women’s needs as our guide. In doing so we transformed illegal abortion from a dangerous, sordid experience into one that was life-affirming and powerful.”—Laura Kaplan

ARTWORK: MEREDITH STERN

The Occupation of Ford Hall

A professor said, “You know, you should not take this personally. The administration reneges on its promises to us faculty all the time.” One of the black students, almost in disbelief, looked at him and replied, “Well, why do you take it?”

In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a student group called the Afro-American Organization at Brandeis University decided they were sick of getting treated like second class citizens at their own college. At 2 p.m. on January 8, 1969, sixty-five African American students armed themselves and occupied Ford Hall, officially inaugurating it Malcolm X University. Over 150 black students from other colleges came to Ford Hall to demonstrate solidarity. White Brandeis students held sit-ins, demonstrations, hunger strikes, and printed newspapers in support of the occupation. After eleven days the occupation ended, and the students were granted full amnesty. Their actions resulted in one of the first academic departments of African and African American studies in the nation. The students’ other demands were soon realized as well, including increased recruitment of black students, Martin Luther King, Jr. scholarships, and black student control of the hiring of certain administrators. The Ford Hall takeover coincided with simultaneous occupations at universities around the country, including the University of California, Columbia, Cornell, San Francisco State, and Swarthmore. Even though Ford Hall was demolished in 2007, its memory inspires students to this day.

ARTWORK: JOSHUA KAHN RUSSELL

Walter Rodney (1942-1980)

“What I am trying to say is this: The revolution is made by ordinary people, not by angels, made by people from all walks of life, and more particularly by the working class who are in the majority. And it is a sign of the times, the sign of the power of revolutionary transformation, when a street force [i.e. gang] member is developed into a fighting cadre in a political movement.”—Walter Rodney, from his last speech, June 1980

ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE

Os Cangaceiros

Cette Rue Est Interdit Aux Flics

A group of working class street thugs that came together to collectivize their resources and skills, Os Cangaceiros began in the 1970s in Nice and roved around France, Italy, Poland, Belgium, and England coordinating autonomous actions against the police, politicians, and union bureaucrats. They sought to identify areas where popular dissatisfaction was peaking, and contribute to those struggles in ways which didn’t manipulate the local participants or force onto them external political positions. They disagreed with the militarizing of resistance by groups like Action Directe and the RAF. Os Cangaceiros felt these armed groups marginalized themselves, thus alienating them from popular support and making them easier targets for government repression. Instead, they preferred sabotage and property destruction by those acting anonymously.

In the late 80s, Os Cangaceiros began to direct their efforts against the prison industrial complex. They carried out multiple acts of sabotage against prison construction sites, stole and published the architectural plans for new prisons, beat up architects designing prisons, and drew attention to the brewing resistance inside France’s prison walls. During France’s countrywide prison riots in May 1985, they attacked targets ranging from rail lines to Tour de France cars in order to publicize the prisoners’ resistance.

“Let’s not give free reign to our jailers, strike the tiger’s heart every day, in every way, according to our differences, against the sadness and solitude of our cells of confinement.”

ARTWORK: RYNE ZIEMBA

National Prisoners Reform Association

Building freedom behind bars. In 1973 a group of workers in Walpole, Massachusetts, forged a cross race coalition demanding better pay, improved safety, and a bigger say in determining their working conditions. When the “managers” went on strike—a company lock out—the workers seized control.

That the workers were prisoners and that in taking control of the factory they also took control of the prison makes the story even more amazing. During their period of control, Walpole went from one of the most dangerous prisons in the US to one of the safest. Education classes were developed and the idea of rehabilitation actually became a possibility.

Behind fellow inmates Bobby Dellelo and Ralph Hamm, prisoners organized as the National Prisoners Reform Association with a call for blue unity (as opposed to the brown uniforms of the guards). The NPRA fought for NLRB recognition and to democratically run Walpole prison. For an all-too-brief period the men of MCI-Walpole proved that the abolition of prison can be reality.

ARTWORK: ALEXANDER DWINELL AND SANYA HYLAND

The Lesbian Herstory Archives

We’ve got your past. Who’s got your future?

The Lesbian Herstory Archives opened in 1974 in the Upper West Side Manhattan apartment of Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel. Along with others in the original collective, they were concerned about the failure of mainstream publishers, libraries, archives, and research institutions to value lesbian culture. They recognized that an independent archive, governed by lesbians, would best protect, preserve, and share lesbian history.

In 1990, the Archives purchased a three-story landmark district limestone building in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. It was the first, and is the only, building owned by a lesbian organization in the New York metropolitan area, and was purchased with donations from lesbians, gay men, and friends from the extended community of caring individuals who support our work. The building, which is wheelchair accessible, was opened in 1993 after volunteers had helped with the renovations.

Inspired by the courage of lesbians who lived, struggled, and loved in more difficult times, the Archives is governed by a group of volunteer coordinators and sustained by the collective work of volunteers and the passions of women the world over. Today the Lesbian Herstory Archives is the largest and longest-lived lesbian archive anywhere.

Keeping it real since 1974!

ARTWORK: CARRIE MOYER; PHOTOGRAPH: MORGAN GWENWALD

The Suicide Club

In the mid-1970s, this unruly band of cultural revolutionaries turned San Francisco into a playground, staging elaborate pranks and urban adventures in pursuit of chaos, anarchy, and high times. The spirit persists in groups like the Cacophony Society, Dark Passage, and the Billboard Liberation Front.

ARTWORK: JEFF STARK

Prison Justice Day

August 10 is Prison Justice Day. PJD started in Canada in 1976 to pay tribute to prisoners who died in prison. On this day, prisoners hold a work stoppage while outside activists organize public events.

ARTWORK: ROCKY TOBEY

The Animal Liberation Front

The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is an animal liberation group who engage in direct action on behalf of animals. These activities include removing animals from laboratories and fur farms, and sabotaging facilities. Any act that furthers the cause of animal liberation, where all reasonable precautions are taken not to harm human or non-human life, may be claimed as an ALF action. The ALF is not a group with a membership, but a leaderless resistance. ALF volunteers see themselves as similar to the Underground Railroad, the nineteenth-century antislavery network, with activists removing animals from laboratories and farms, arranging safe houses and veterinary care, and operating sanctuaries where the animals live out the rest of their lives. ALF activists believe that animals should not be viewed as property and that scientists and industry have no right to assume ownership of living beings. They reject the animal welfarist position that more human treatment is needed for animals; their aim is empty cages, not bigger ones.

ARTWORK: KAREN FIORITO

Madres De Plaza De Mayo

“They only draw the outline of a body on the pavement . . . for how do you talk about the dead?”—Marjorie Agostin

Between 1976 and 1983 thousands of young people in Argentina were secretly kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by agents of the state. Their mothers and grandmothers would gather to bear witness to the absence of their children.

ARTWORK: JOHN ISAACSON

Crass

The nature of oppression is the aesthetic of our anger.

Crass, 1977-1984. Crass was a group of artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians that banded together using punk as a resistant cultural form for the promotion of anarchism as a political ideology—a way of living as a resistance movement. Crass was one of the earliest proponents of the anarcho-punk movement and created a distinctive and often referenced graphic aesthetic that is to this day an internationally recognized hallmark of anarcho-punk. Crass advocated direct action, animal rights and environmentalism, feminism, antiracism, and were decidedly antiwar. They advocated a do-it-yourself approach producing agitational sound collages, graphics, albums, and films as well as stenciled graffiti messages around London, coordinated squats, and organized political action.

ARTWORK: BRANDON BAUER

Wangari Maathai (b. 1940)

“The Greenbelt Movement is committed to increasing public awareness of the relationship between environmental degradation, poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, mismanagement of natural resources, and the political and economic impact of these throughout Africa.”—Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai, born in Kenya, Africa, wished to restore her country’s degraded environment while providing poor rural women with better economic lives. The Greenbelt Movement deliberately discouraged participation by technicians and managers from outside the community, to encourage confidence in local peoples, who are often overwhelmed by experts and come to think they are incapable and backward. As of 1955, more than sixty thousand women have planted over seven million trees in their communities. The Greenbelt Movement has spread to over thirty countries.

ARTWORK: ALLY REEVES

Co-Madres

Desaparecidos Y Asesinatos 1975-2009

En los años setenta el gobierno Salvadoreño de la derecha inció un periodo de represión brutal en contra de grupos y personas que participaron en las protestas publicas y otras formas de “actividades subversivas,” usando secuestros o “desapariciones forzadas,” tortura y asesinatos como metodos para intimidarlos y mantenerlos en silencio. Esto periodo duró hasta los años noventa.

El Comité de Madres de los Desaparecidos y Asesinatos de El Salvador (Co-Madres) fue fundado por mujeres buscando a sus hijos desparecidos. Las Co-Madres han trabajado incansablemente ye sin temor por los ultimos 33 años para documentar y dununciar las desaparaciones y asesinatos. Ellas continuarán su misión hasta que los casos sean traidos a la justicia, con el refrán: “Podemos perdonar, pero no podemos olvidar.”

The Disappeared and Assassinated 1975-2009

In the 1970s the right-wing Salvadoran government initiated a period of brutal repression against any group or individual that participated in public protest or other so called “subversive activities,” using abduction or “disappearance,” torture and assassination as methods to intimidate the public into silence. This lasted through the 1990s.

The Committee of the Mothers of the Disappeared and Assassinated of El Salvador (Co-Madres) was formed by women seeking their missing children. The Co-Madres have worked tirelessly and fearlessly over the past thirty-three years to document and denounce the disappearances and murders. They will continue their mission until these cases are brought to justice, saying, “We can forgive, but we cannot forget.”

ARTWORK: NICOLE SCHULMAN; TEXT AND RESEARCH: MARA KOMOSKA

B.U.G.A. U.P.

Australia. Formed in 1978 by a group of health professionals and others disgusted at the prevalence of tobacco advertising, Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (B.U.G.A. U.P.) rapidly made their mark on hoardings around the nation. By cleverly revising advertising slogans and disrupting tobacco-sponsored events, the group revealed the true cost of tobacco company deception. Having racked up numerous fines and arrests over its sixteen-year existence, B.U.G.A. U.P. formally wound up in 1994 as federal and state governments finally began to take action to ban tobacco advertising in newspapers and magazines, on billboards, television, and radio.

POSTER DESIGN: TOM CIVIL; TEXT: IAIN MCINTYRE; ORIGINAL SPRAY CAN EXTENSION ROD ILLUSTRATION: TOFY; PHOTOS AND D.I.Y. GUIDE TAKEN FROM B.U.G.A. U.P. SPRING CATALOGUE, 1981.

The Escape of Assata Shakur

November 2, 1979: Assata Shakur is free.

Targeted by law enforcement as the “soul” of the militant black liberation movement, accused (and acquitted) of participating in a slew of bank robberies, Assata Shakur was imprisoned in New Jersey following her 1973 arrest. Assata’s co-defendant Sundiata Acoli, previously one of the Panther 21, remains in prison serving a sentence of life plus thirty years. A third comrade, Zayd Shakur, was killed by police during the 1973 arrest. In 1979, Assata escaped from prison.

In 1982, radicals from the black liberation and white anti-imperialist movements were indicted for allegedly helping Assata escape. Sekou Odinga and Mutulu Shakur remain in prison today. In 1984, Assata surfaced in Cuba and received political asylum. She is a beacon of hope and power for the international movements for black liberation and to free all US-HELD political prisoners.

ARTWORK: MOLLY FAIR AND LAURA WHITEHORN

The Silent Majority

This poster is a celebration of all those who kept their mouths shut; the people who refused to snitch to the cops, who resisted grand juries, who stood up to torture and kept secrets safe. Without them all our struggles would have ended a long time ago.

ARTWORK: ROGER PEET; IDEA: AVRAM DRUCKER

Informal Recyclers

Garbage rights are human rights. Informal recyclers reuse and resell the world’s garbage as a means of survival. They collect recyclables door to door, in the street, from trash cans, from landfills, and even the canals of untreated sewage. These recyclers are responsible for rerouting a significant portion of the world’s waste from landfills into reuse, but they lack transportation, housing, sanitation, medical treatment, legal rights to garbage, and other basic needs. Informal recyclers typically begin and end life as social outcasts in the poorest economic sector of society. Like garbage, they are discarded and ignored. Instead of finding ways to integrate these workers into effective waste management models, many countries are making access to garbage illegal. With garbage and poverty increasing around the world, it is time to end privatized waste management and move on to inclusive recycling systems.

ARTWORK: KLUTCH AND TAYLOR CASS STEVENSON

Phoolan Devi (1963-2001)

“What others called a crime, I called justice.”

February 1981. A twenty-four-year-old village woman, born into poverty in India, is labeled “the bandit queen.” She is charged with a number of major offenses including murder, kidnapping for ransom, and looting villages. Most importantly, she is accused of killing twenty-two high-caste men in the village of Behmai, a massacre undertaken as revenge for the death of her lover and repeated gang rape against herself. The question was often asked how a poor, uneducated, and illiterate woman became a bandit. But Phoolan Devi’s life and the injustice she suffered because of her gender and her class only make us wonder why other low-caste women (for Phoolan’s experiences were not in any way unique) did not also become bandits.

ARTWORK: MIRIAM KLEIN STAHL AND BOFF WHALLEY

Chico Mendes (1944-1988)

Mataram um lider mas não luta!

They killed our leader but not our struggle!

Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and union organizer deep in the Amazon rainforest, pioneered the combination of environmental and social justice. Chico’s murder brought international attention and worldwide support to the movement to save the Amazon rainforest.

“In leading this struggle to preserve the Amazon, Chico Mendes made a lot of trouble for a lot of powerful people.” —Andrew Revkin

ARTWORK: COLIN MATTHES

Judi Bari (1949-1997)

Environmentalist, labor organizer, Earth First! activist.

“A revolutionary ecology movement must also organize among poor and working people. With the exception of the toxics movement and the native land rights movement most US environmentalists are white and privileged. This group is too invested in the system to pose it much of a threat. A revolutionary ideology in the hands of privileged people can indeed bring about some disruption and change in the system. But a revolutionary ideology in the hands of working people can bring that system to a halt. For it is the working people who have their hands on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction can we ever hope to stop this madness.”

ARTWORK: NICOLAS LAMPERT; PHOTO: EVAN JOHNSON

ADAPT

Since the early 1980s, ADAPT has been a national network of activists with disabilities that employs nonviolent civil disobedience to demand changes in policies that exclude people with disabilities from American society.

After winning “the right to ride”—a national struggle for accessible public transportation—ADAPT is now fighting policies which lock people with disabilities away in nursing homes and other institutions. ADAPT members have helped thousands of people with disabilities get out of institutions to live autonomously in their own homes and communities.

ARTWORK: JEN CARTWRIGHT

The Great Arizona Mine Strike

In 1983, the towns of Clifton and Morence went on strike in opposition to large salary cuts at the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. The strike lasted eighteen months. Due to an injunction filed by Phelps Dodge, employees were not allowed to participate in picket lines. Although there were women miners and had been since before WWII, most of the workers were men. So it was the women of the town who held the picket lines for a year and a half. This legendary strike found law-abiding citizens standing up to the national guard, arrests, circling helicopters, and other violent and oppressive tactics used by Phelps Dodge. The strike came at the end of the copper industry’s profitability in the US. At the end of the eighteen months the company was mere skin and bones and had to close its US facilities, leaving the community jobless, yet strangely victorious.

“Through the strike I learned to appreciate my culture and myself. It’s astonishing even to me how we women changed. We used to just accept authority just because our leadership were authoritarian people. Now we can never take their word at face value.”—a heroine of the strike, Anne O’Leary

ARTWORK: BETH PULCINELLA

Mothers of East Los Angeles

A group of Chicana mothers formed MELA in 1985 to fight the construction of a prison in their East LA neighborhood. Years of community mobilizing and candlelight vigils eventually paid off and the prison project was cancelled. MELA also successfully fought against an oil pipeline and toxic waste incinerator being built in their community. They have gone on to establish programs for scholarship, water conservation, and health education.

“The politicians thought we wouldn’t fight, but we united and said Ya Basta, enough, this is a dumping ground no more. . . . The kids around here were babies when we started. Now they will fight for what they believe in because we showed them their voices count.”

ARTWORK: JEN CARTWRIGHT

ACT UP Philadelphia

Since 1987, ACT UP Philadelphia has been fighting for justice for people living with HIV, and for communities that are most devastated by the AIDS crisis—in Philadelphia, the US, and around the world.

ACT UP Philadelphia is different—it sees the AIDS crisis as a political crisis, a twenty-five-year-old catastrophe that was allowed to happen because of greed, racism, neglect, and bigotry. ACT UP Philadelphia also sees grassroots activists as powerful and effective enough to help bring about an end to the AIDS crisis—through confronting decision-makers and holding them accountable, and through winning policy changes that save lives. ACT UP Philadelphia’s leadership is diverse: black and white, straight and queer, young and old, HIV positive and HIV negative; they are a community united with an array of powerful organizations around the world led by people living with AIDS, driven by the struggle to win access to life-saving treatment and prevention tools for all who need them, breaking down the barriers erected by radical religious ideology, pharmaceutical industry greed, political indifference, and silence.

ARTWORK: COURTNEY DAILEY; TEXT: ACT UP PHILADELPHIA

8.8.88

The democratic uprising in Burma. On August 8, 1988, hundreds of thousands of workers, students, monks, mothers, and children gathered in the streets all across Burma to demand an end to the brutal military dictatorship. As a response the military junta sent troops to quell the uprising and in the following weeks ten thousand people were murdered. Thousands fled to the border into Thailand to gain refuge. Others joined rebel armies and took up arms to protect their people and fight for freedom. 8.8.88 made visible the resistance against the military and has become an enduring symbol of the Burmese struggle for democracy.

ARTWORK: NICHOLAS GANZ

Battle of Tompkins Square Park

New York City. Police riot. August 6, 1988.

ARTWORK: ANTON VAN DALEN

Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945)

Since 1962 Burma is governed and controlled by a brutal military junta. Aung San Suu Kyi is a member of the national league for democracy and a symbol for Burma’s freedom. From 1989 on she has been in and out of house arrest at University Avenue 54 in Rangoon. Cut off from her family, she is holding speeches and supporting the Burmese opposition. Her power and resistance made her legendary in Burma’s struggle and gives the people great courage and hope.

ARTWORK: NICHOLAS GANZ

Jana Sanskriti

Jana Sanskriti (Bengali for “People’s Culture”) mixes Indian folk theater with the political action of Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. Teams of actors perform plays in their villages, enacting the problems of rural society—patriarchy, sexism, alcoholism, religious hegemony, imperialism, political corruption—then each audience member has the opportunity to take the place of an oppressed character onstage, replaying a scene and trying to change the situation by breaking the oppression. This “Forum Theater” is a rehearsal for reality: the entire community sees issues from many perspectives along with their possible alternatives, and ideas that were tested and worked onstage can then be adopted into everyday life. By touring and returning to villages several times, Jana Sanskriti multiplies its movement, fostering more Forum Theater teams who answer the needs of their communities. In this way, millions of people participate in Jana Sanskriti’s work of dismantling oppression and changing society.

ARTWORK: MORGAN F.P. ANDREWS

Narmada Bachao Andolan

In 1989, Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement), or NBA, formed to protest the damming of the Narmada River, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people in India—mostly underprivileged castes and Adivasi tribes.

NBA staged hunger strikes, blockaded freeways, and united thousands in mass procession to the dam site. As part of the struggle, many dam-affected people pledged to refuse to leave their homes and drown their villages.

The strength of NBA’s non-violent resistance compelled the World Bank to withdraw from the Narmada Dam project. Despite the movement’s considerable success, however, the Indian government continues to push for big dam development and NBA struggles to this day.

ARTWORK: ROBIN HEWLETT

The Korean Peasants League

The Korean Peasants League fights in solidarity with the indigenous farmers of the world against the destructive policies of the World Trade Organization. Since its creation, the WTO has forced developing nations like South Korea to import foreign produce such as rice and cut subsidies to their own agriculture. In consequence, hundreds of farmers have lost their land, their livelihoods, and thousands of years of traditions. On September 10, 2003, world attention was focused on the Korean Peasants League when one of their most respected leaders, Lee Kyung Hae, took his own life during a protest at the Fifth Ministerial of the WTO in Cancun. The League continues to struggle against the neoliberal agenda of the WTO and the forces of globalization.

ARTWORK: NICOLE SCHULMAN AND DUSTIN CHANG

Sarah White and the Delta Pride Strike

Sarah White, an African American, thirty-one-year-old single mother, organized a historic and successful labor strike composed of black female catfish factory workers. The company, Delta Pride, was accused of severely underpaying the workers, supporting unsafe working environments, and pushing the women to work unimaginably long hours. This took place in the Mississippi Delta in 1991.

ARTWORK: JOHN JENNINGS

The Red Army Faction Attack on Weiterstadt Prison

In 1993, the guerilla group the Red Army Faction bombed the construction site of a new super maximum security prison in Weiterstadt, Germany. Over $90 million in damage was caused, the opening of the prison was delayed by four years, and no one was seriously injured. This was the final action of the action of the RAF before disbanding.

“For a society without prisons!”—Commando Katharina Hammerschmidt, Red Army Faction, March 30, 1993

ARTWORK: JOSH MACPHEE

EZLN

Tierra y Libertad

ARTWORK: KATE LUSCHER

Mystic Massacre Statue Moved

The Mystic Massacre took place on May 26, 1637, when English settlers under Captain John Mason, and Narragansett and Mohegan allies set fire to a Pequot village near the Mystic River, killing any victims who attempted to escape the wooden palisade. Except for a few survivors, the entire village of six to seven hundred, mostly women and children, were murdered. This was done in retaliation for previous Pequot attacks. The Pequot Indians, once a powerful tribe, controlled all of Connecticut east of the Connecticut River. Mason declared that the holocaust against the Pequot was justified in the name of God. The Narragansett and Mohegan warriors who had fought alongside Mason at Mystic were horrified by the brutality of the Puritan English. This statue of John Mason was erected in 1889 on the site of the Peuquot massacre. The twenty-three-ton monument was relocated to Windsor, Connecticut, in 1996 from Mystic, after a three-year struggle by Native Americans and community groups to have it removed.

ARTWORK: JOS SANCES

Cochabamba Water Struggle

¡El aqua es nuestra carajo! The water is ours damnit! In 1999, under pressure from the World Bank, the Bolivian government sold off the water system of its third largest city, Cochabamba, behind closed doors to multinational investors including the Bechtel corporation. Over night, people were asked to pay 25 percent of their income for water, including collected rainfall and backyard wells. Months of protest ensued. The country was declared under martial law but thousands took to the streets. This, combined with international activist pressure, forced Bechtel to flee the country. Despite subsequent attempts to sue Bolivia for $25 million in loss of “potential profit,” the people of Cochabamba succeeded in defeating a corporate giant and regaining control of one of life’s most necessary resources.

ARTWORK: SWOON

J18 or the Carnival Against Capitalism

In London twelve thousand festive, masked people stormed the city of London (the city’s financial district!). At midday protesters met at Liverpool street station and split into five different processions following different colored flags. Between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. the marches converged on the LIFFE (London International Financial Futures Exchange). A fire hydrant was set off to symbolize the freeing of the Walbrook River. The Lower Entrance to the LIFFE building was bricked up before another group ran in and smashed up the reception area before trying to gain access to the trading floor. The rest of the day was spent running battles with the cops before ending peacefully in Trafalgar Square . . .

J18 was the first in the line of huge anticapitalist protests such as N30 in Seattle, S22 in Prague, and the G8 protests in Genoa.

ARTWORK: EDD BALDRY

Vieques Libre

In 1941, the US Navy expropriated 75 percent of the island of Vieques. The residents were forced to live in a narrow swath of land while the rest was turned into a bombing range. For the next six decades, the Navy launched bombs from ships, dropped napalm from planes, fired depleted uranium shells, staged mock invasions on the beaches, and rented out the island to arms manufacturers to test their munitions.

On April 19, 1999, that all changed when the US Navy dropped a five hundred pound bomb on David Sanes, a Vieques resident who worked on the base, killing him instantly. The next day a group of activists entered the restricted zone as an act of remembrance and resistance. One of them, Tito Kayak, spent the night camped out on the naval base.

Two days later, fifteen boats of protesters returned and built Campamento Monte David, the first of what would be fourteen encampments that shut down the base. Their dislodgement by the Navy launched a campaign of civil disobedience in which over ne thousand were arrested and the largest political demonstration in the history of Puerto Rico. The Navy closed the base in 2003, but the residents are still fighting to have their island fully cleaned of the Navy’s toxic remains.

ARTWORK: DAVE BUCHEN

San Francisco Shutdown

March 20, 2003. As the bombing of Baghdad begins, thousands pour onto the streets of San Francisco to shut down the financial heart of the city.

“When the bombing starts, America stops.”

Organized largely through the coordination of Direct Action to Stop the War—an anti-authoritarian grouping of people from a broad cross-section of communities, social justice groups, and antiwar organizations—the protests filled downtown San Francisco with an estimated fifteen thousand people blockading streets and intersections, targeting war profiteers and government buildings, charging freeway onramps, smashing up military recruitment offices, and much more.

The protests ultimately died out after lasting for days and resulting in over two thousand, two hundred arrests. Although the shutdown of San Francisco ended, the War in Iraq did not, and resistance continues.

ARTWORK: FRIENDLY FIRE COLLECTIVE

Shannon Airport Plowshares

Are ordinary citizens powerless to stop the US-led war machine and the war in Iraq? Not according to two extraordinary acts of resistance by peace activists in Ireland. On January 29, 2003, Mary Kelly, a fifty-one-year-old nurse and mother of four, voiced her objection to Shannon Airport being utilized as a refueling station for the US military by smashing the nosecone and fuel lines of a warplane with an axe. Less than a week later, the Pit Stop Ploughshares, five members of the Catholic Workers, snuck into Shannon Airport and attacked a US Navy plane with household tools, causing an estimated 2.5 million dollars in damages. Deidre Clancy, Nuin Dunlop, Karen Fallon, Ciaron O’Reilly, and Damien Moran were arrested and spent four to eleven weeks in Limerick Prison each. They were tried three times and ultimately acquitted. A Dublin jury determined that their actions were reasonable considering that they were acting to save lives in Iraq and in Ireland.

ARTWORK: NICOLAS LAMPERT

Atenco Aguanta

El pueblo se levanta. San Salvador de Atenco has a long history of resistance to the central government, dating from before Mexico’s Revolution of 1910. In 2001, Atenco villagers, mostly small farmers, organized the Peoples’ Front for Defense of the Land and stopped former President Vincente Fox from grabbing their farmlands for the construction of a new international airport. When they prevailed, a movement was born.

In 2006, this group spearheaded the defense of the flower vendors of nearby Texcoco, who were forcibly removed by police from the streets in order to prepare for the coming of a Wal-Mart store. Wielding their machetes, the people’s resistance became a symbol of popular protest in Mexico. The resisters were targeted by the state and at least fifteen prominent flower vendors and leaders of the Peoples’ Front were sentenced to a combined five hundred years in maximum security prison. Members of the Peoples’ Front and other Atenco activists are determined to fight for their people, and their freedom. Support their struggle!

ARTWORK: MELANIE CERVANTES

Oaxaca Women’s Resistance

En el 2006, el levantamiento que se dió on Oaxaca, México contra el regimen represivo y neoliberal del gobernador Ulises Ruíz ocupó la capital del Estado por más de seis meses. La mujeres jugaron un rol primordial, manteniendo barricadas y organizando acciones espontáneas y directas como las ocupaciones masivas de canales de television y estaciones de radio. Los roles opresivos de género cambiaban, las mojeres oaxaqueñas se organizaban de manera autónoma en la cara del estado y de la violencia de los paramilitares, las violaciones y la oposición de las esferas predominantemente masculinas del movimeiento. Estas revolucionarias desataron un poderoso proceso de transformación personal y colectiva que amenazaba la raíz de su opresión dentro de la casa, el estado, y la economía global. Durante el levantamiento, las mujeres utilizaron tácticas inovadoras como cazuelas y sartenes para hacer ruido así como espejos que sostenían frente a las filas de la policía federal con la leyenda: “Somos violadores” escrito a lo largo del reflejo como respuesta a la policía y su uso de las violaciónes sexuales como táctica represiva.

In 2006, an uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico against the repressive neoliberal regime of governor Ulises Ruiz occupied the state capitol for six months. Women played a key role maintaining barricades and spontaneously organizing militant mass actions such as occupations of TV and radio stations. Oppressive gender roles shifted as Oaxacan women self-organized in the face of state and paramilitary violence, rape, and opposition from male-dominated spheres of the movement. These revolutionaries unleashed a powerful process of personal and collective transformation that threatened the foundations of their oppression within the household, the state, and the global economy. Women in the uprising utilized tactics such as noisy pots and pans, marches, as well as holding up mirrors to federal police lines with “we are rapists” written across the reflections in response to the police’s use of sexual violence as a repressive tactic.

ARTWORK: TIM SIMONS AND BARUCHA CALAMITY PELLER

Shut EDO/ITT

October 2008. Four hundred protesters gathered in Brighton and forced the factory to close down. Marching from the University to the bomb makers, people forced their way through the cops getting to the back of the factory before marching to town.

ARTWORK: EDD BALDRY

Youth-Led Resistance to Immigration Raids and Deportations

¡Alto a las redadas! Stop the raids now! No one is illegal! 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the mass mobilizations that were going on globally in 1968. Looking back at the various liberation struggles within the US at that time, today’s youth take pride in the organizing efforts of their elders—their communities that paved the way for the present youth to continue that same resistance. Youth today are inspired by the works of freedom fighters from the Black Liberation Movement, the Chicana/o Movement, and the American Indian Movement in their fight for land, education, justice, peace, and self-determination. Today, youth continue organizing to keep what has been won and fight harder for their collective liberation.

Since the nationwide mobilizations of May 1, 2006, the conditions in immigrant communities have worsened. The repercussions of mobilizing have resulted in more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) raids than ever before to instill fear and prevent people from speaking up against these injustices. In 2007 alone, 276,912 US residents were deported. In October 31, 2008, youth decided to show their power and shut down the I.C.E. offices in San Francisco for the day. Using civil disobedience, the youth demonstrated that direct action can stop the terrorization of immigrant communities if at least one day.

ARTWORK: JESUS BARRAZA

Artist Biographies

(Numbers in parentheses give page numbers on which the artists’ work appears)

MORGAN F.P. ANDREWS (213)

Morgan F.P. Andrews makes prints and puppet shows, teaches yoga and Theater of the Oppressed workshops, and runs a vegan luncheonette when he feels like it. He’s contributed writings and art to Puppetry International, Globalize Liberation, Reproduce & Revolt, and Realizing the Impossible. Morgan is interested in hearing from other artists whose work is shaped by eye diseases and visual impediments.

SANTIAGO ARMENGOD (51)

Santiago Armengod is a Mexico City-based printmaker who attempts to communicate the urgency of radical change through his artwork. He enjoys and spends most of his time working with projects and collectives he is part of, such as Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, La Furia de las Calles, Zona Autonoma Makhnovtchina, and Colectivo Cordyceps.

JANET ATTARD (69)

In a world of computer cut and generated images, Janet Attard continues (since 1995) to cut and individually print bicycle historic stencils by hand. Her work is displayed in several books and group shows around the world. Her latest body of work is Cycling Legends, which includes Major Taylor.

EDD BALDRY (229, 241)

Edd Baldry is a radical illustrator based in London, who draws under the moniker Hey Monkey Riot. He started writing punk zines in 2001, first with Rancid News, and more recently Last Hours. He has been active in London political organizing since 2002, focusing on social center projects and antiwar activities. He helped start the London Zine Symposium in 2005 to try and grow the zine community.

JESUS BARRAZA (243)

Jesus Barraza is an activist printmaker from California. Using bold colors and high contrast images, his prints reflect both his local and global community and their resistance in a struggle to create a new world. Barraza has worked closely with numerous community organizations to create prints that visualize struggles for immigration rights, housing, education, and international solidarity. Printmaking allows Barraza to produce relevant images that can be put back into the hands of his community and spread throughout the world.

BRANDON BAUER (147, 179)

Brandon Bauer is a multidisciplinary artist based in Wisconsin. His practice involves a critical engagement with the media, experimental mapping projects, and collaborative work. Brandon’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, produced in DVD editions, used as illustration for various publications, and has been published in poster editions. Brandon received his BFA in painting from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 1996, and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010.

DAN BERGER (129)

Dan Berger is a Philadelphia-based writer, activist, and scholar. He is the author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, the editor of The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, and co-editor of Letters from Young Activists. He is the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

ERIC “EROK” BOERER (59)

Erok has spent the greater part of his adult life working for the bicycle revolution in his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When he’s not thinking about riding or figuring out how to make everyone else get on a bike, he takes in a lot of history, and sometimes makes art to represent it.

FRANK BRANNON (39)

Frank was born in Maryville, Tennessee, and currently lives near Dillsboro, North Carolina. He is a resident papermaker and printer at Asheville BookWorks and graduate of the MFA in the Book Arts Program at the University of Alabama. His most recent monograph focuses on research into the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper of northern Georgia, 1828-34. He is currently developing a letterpress studio with the Oconaluftee Institute for Cultural Arts in Cherokee, North Carolina.

DAVE BUCHEN (231)

Dave Buchen lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. At the age of twenty-one he stumbled into a life of theater. At the age of twenty-nine he received a set of wood-carving tools for his birthday and found some old linoleum in the garbage. Since then he has tried to merge these two paths into some combination of storytelling, book making, poster printing, etc. His five-year-old daughter would like him to convert their apartment into a bookstore, which seems like a fine idea.

CHRISTOPHER CARDINALE (73)

Christopher Cardinale is a cartoonist and community muralist with a social justice message. He has painted large-scale murals opposing war and corporate globalization and promoting community values and social economic justice in New York, Italy, Greece, and Mexico. He lives in Brooklyn.

JEN CARTWRIGHT (203)

Jennifer Cartwright is a grad student in biology and teaches a course in ecology at Tennessee State University, an HBCU in Nashville, her hometown. She lives on a small farm where she’s learning to keep bees and helps her husband tend pigs and chickens. In the past, she’s worked as a community organizer on issues ranging from immigrants’ rights to homelessness to ending the death penalty. She also makes paper, creates more CPH posters in the future, because she thinks they are just about the greatest idea anybody ever had.

MELANIE CERVANTES (237)

Melanie Cervantes is a Bay Area, Xicana artist who translates the visions of justice movements into images that agitate, motivate, and inspire. Her work includes illustrations, paintings, and stencils, but she is best known for her political posters. Employing vibrant colors and hand-drawn illustrations, her work moves those viewed as marginal to the center. Melanie views her purpose as an artist to make art that can be put into the hands of the communities who inspire it.

DUSTIN CHANG (217)

Dustin Chang was born in South Korea and immigrated to the US in 1990. Against his parents’ wishes for him to go to a culinary school, he dabbled in filmmaking and literature. He is now a part-time artist and full-time designated cook at home. He also makes films and writes.

TOM CIVIL (185)

Tom Civil works as a graphic designer for independent artistic, community, and activist organizations. He has a strong interest in street art and murals, and the role they play in creating community. He has self-published posters, zines, stickers, and newspapers, and speaks publicly about the political nature of street art. His stencil work has been featured in various publications and films. Civil is co-founder of Breakdown Press, radical publishers from Melbourne, Australia.

PETER COLE (85)

Peter Cole grew up in suburban Miami, Florida. He studied at Columbia and Georgetown Universities, and is an associate professor of history at Western Illinois University. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia and Ben Fletcher: The Life and Writings of a Black Wobbly. His current research examines the influence of militant dockworkers on social movements in Durban, South Africa, and Oakland, California. He’s a longtime vegan and bike commuter.

JULIO CORDOVA (139)

Julio Cordova is an artist born and raised in Milwaukee. Currently a student at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, he works in a variety of media, including printmaking, drawing, painting, installation, and video. His community involvement and commitment to social justice is reflected in his art. His current focus is on Milwaukee, examining how the city works (or doesn’t), the racial divides, the choices people make about where to live, and how that choice affects them.

MARK CORT (31)

Mark Cort received his BFA from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He has worked for CNN, taught at the Academy of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and currently does graphic design and illustration for various projects. Mark finds inspiration for his creations via his love of nature and his keen eye for near-perfect shape and form in the living world.

BOBBY CORTEZ (133)

In their first poster for the Celebrate People’s History project, Bobby Cortez and Blake Riley honor the sustaining influence of Dolores Huerta’s activism on behalf of California farm and food workers. They live in San Francisco and benefit daily from her collective work.

LARRY CYR (45)

Larry Cyr’s stencils are informed by his backgrounds in graphic design and photojournalism. Much of his subject matter deals with politics, social issues, the working class, and war. In 2006 he served as an infantryman in Iraq. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and white boxer, Buckey.

COURTNEY DAILEY (205)

Courtney Dailey is a maker of objects and projects and exhibitions, currently from her new homebase of San Francisco.

JARED DAVIDSON (79)

Jared Davidson is an anarchist, screen printer, self-described history geek, and author of “This is not a Manifesto: Toward an Anarcho-design Practice.” In 2010 Jared helped organize the first ever Celebrate People’s History poster shows in his home country of New Zealand. He is the designer for the Labour History Project, other projects include research on Joe Hill’s ashes, and the Industrial Workers of the World in New Zealand, as well as the odd woodcut.

ERIC DROOKER (53)

Eric Drooker is a painter and graphic novelist, born and raised on Manhattan Island. He’s the award-winning author of Flood! A Novel in Pictures, and Blood Song: A Silent Ballad. He designed the animation for the recent film, Howl, a movie based on the epic poem by Allen Ginsberg, who collaborated with Drooker on the book Illuminated Poems. His paintings appear on covers of the New Yorker, and hang in numerous collections. He regularly draws from the figure, and is working on a series of nude paintings for an upcoming book.

ALEC ICKY DUNN (67)

Alec Icky Dunn is an illustrator and printer who has designed book and record covers, political graphics, and punk fliers.

ALEXANDER DWINELL (167)

Alexander was born and lives on the East Coast of the United States. He works to share radical words and encourage social change as an editor/ publisher in the South End Press collective, a member of the Lucy Parsons Center, and with a variety of activist/social formations. His art/ design can be found on walls, record jackets, and books.

MOLLY FAIR (187)

Molly Fair is a New York-based artist and a member of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.

ADAM FANUCCI (55)

Adam is a lifelong Chicagoan (until recently) who uses software to make images appear more aesthetically pleasing than they truly are for various publications. He enjoys veganism, hockey, kettlebells, animal rights, fair trade, the h.c., quiet, and the edge.

KAREN FIORITO (175)

Karen Fiorito is originally from Philadelphia and currently resides in Los Angeles. She has exhibited her art nationally and internationally, and her work has appeared in such publications as Art in America, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hustler, LA Weekly, and URB Magazine. She currently owns and operates Buddha Cat Press, her own fine art printmaking studio and publishing company.

FRIENDLY FIRE COLLECTIVE (233)

The Friendly Fire Collective was founded in 2008 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Seeking to provide radical popular education capable of breaking out of current confines of “the fringe” and reaching new audiences and movements, it has begun to develop a network for the production and distribution of media and the creation of spaces in its community to present and examine issues regarding the construction and support of a strong and dynamic radical Left.

DARRELL GANE-MCCALLA (47)

Darrell Gane-McCalla is an artist in the movement for radical social change. She was born in Boston in 1978 to a white South African mother and black Jamaican father. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also spent time with family in Jamaica, England, and Swaziland during his childhood. Her main work has been as a sculptor, art teacher, and muralist. She hopes to take art off its pedestal and use creativity to celebrate life, transgress boundaries, and resist hierarchy and oppression.

NICHOLAS GANZ (117, 207, 211)

Nicholas Ganz is a freelance photographer, author, and artist based in Essen, Germany. In 2004 his first book Graffiti World was published, followed in 2006 by Graffiti Woman, and in 2008 with the book Burma: The Alternative Guide with co-author Elena Jotow. His photographic work is concentrating on the life of ordinary people and the resistance movements.

JOHN GERKEN (157)

John Gerken lives in New Orleans, plays in the band Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship?, and is the author of the long-running zine I Hate This Part of Texas.

SHAWN GILHEENEY (81)

Shawn Gilheeney is a painter and a printmaker from Providence, Rhode Island. The decaying environments that he studies are relics of the American Industrial Revolution. He intertwines nature and man-made structures to form his abstracted landscapes. The social and environmental factors are inevitable and form this constant deterioration of our systems and society.

ART HAZELWOOD (16, 103)

Art Hazelwood is a printmaker, curator, and instigator. He co-organized a nationwide political art coalition called Art of Democracy in 2008. In 2009 he curated the traveling exhibition on artists’ responses to homelessness. His works are political, satirical, and sometimes literary, created in a range of forms from posters to fine press artist books. His prints appear in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress, and the Street Sheet in San Francisco.

ROBIN HEWLETT (215)

Robin Hewlett is an artist and organizer from the beautiful hills of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Over the past few years, Robin has worked to bridge her commitments to artistic practice and social justice through projects such as Backstory Cafe & Social Center and AREA Chicago in Chicago, Illinois; The Howling Mob Society in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and One Mile Garden in York, Alabama.

RUSSELL HOWZE (31)

Russell Howze has collaborated with Mark Cort since childhood, and was honored to create the Stono poster with him. A South Carolina native, Russell lives in San Francisco, California, and works on many creative projects. He currently curates the painted exterior walls of CELLspace, painting some of them when he gets the chance. He also runs www.StencilArchive.org and wrote Stencil Nation, now in its third printing from Manic D Press.

SANYA HYLAND (167)

Sanya Hyland was born in Petaluma, California. She lives and works in Boston as a letterpress printer and illustrator.

JOHN ISAACSON (177)

John Isaacson is the author of Do-It-Yourself Screenprinting, and has designed posters for the Prisoner’s Literature Project, the Portland Zine Symposium, and a few rock shows. He self-publishes the mini-comics Pyromania, and Feedback, a concert review comic. In 2009 he toured the East Coast with Microcosm publishing, giving screen-printing workshops. He continues to teach screen-printing and comics-writing in Portland, Oregon.

JOHN JENNINGS (37, 107, 123, 219)

John Jennings is an associate professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research and teaching focus on the analysis, explication, and disruption of African American stereotypes in popular visual media.

SABRINA JONES (125)

Sabrina Jones created her first comics for World War 3 Illustrated, and contributes to this day. She wrote and illustrated Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography. She has created nonfiction comics for FDR and the New Deal For Beginners; Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World; Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation; and The Real Cost of Prisons Comix. She lives in Brooklyn and paints scenery for Saturday Night Live and other shows.

SAM KERSON (43)

Sam Kerson is an itinerant multimedia artist. He was born in North Adams, Massachusetts in 1946 and is a graduate of Goddard College. He studied drawing with Robert Fisher and worked with Norman Briski in New York and Buenos Aires. Sam founded Dragon Dance Theatre in 1976 in Worcester, Vermont, and is the artistic director of Dragon Dance. He holds artist residencies in Slovakia, Finland, Argentina, Mexico, France, and Finland. He is a muralist, book artist, and theater director, and is also involved in book production at Atelier Presse Papier in Quebec.

KLUTCH (191)

Klutch, best known as the cranky old punk responsible for the worldwide vinyl record-painting movement, has been creating visual mischief for over two decades. Some people just don’t know when to quit.

MARA KOMOSKA (183)

Mara Komoska is an educator and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has been volunteering with the Co-Madres since 2008 in El Salvador and from Brooklyn. Her continuing work with them is focused on solidarity and fundraising. The Co-Madres have named her one of their “official representatives” in the United States. She is available to give talks to groups about this inspirational and historical grassroots organization.

NICOLAS LAMPERT (61, 75, 197, 235)

Nicolas Lampert is a Milwaukee- and Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and author whose work focuses on themes of social justice and ecology. He co-curated the traveling DIY political art show Drawing Resistance (2001-2005) and works with the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.

DAVID LESTER (77)

David Lester’s artwork appears weekly in MAGNET Magazine online (with text by Jean Smith). His book The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism has gone into a revised second edition. He plays guitar in the underground rock duo Mecca Normal (Kill Rock Stars). David created the Inspired Agitators poster series and is working on a graphic novel.

DAVE LOEWENSTEIN (93)

Dave Loewenstein is a muralist, writer, and printmaker based in Lawrence, Kansas. Examples of his community-based murals can be found across the United States. Dave’s stencil prints are exhibited nationally and are in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of Kansas Murals: A Traveler’s Guide, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book Award Winner.

DAMON LOCKS (29)

Simply put, Damon Locks’ work is layered, dark, and involves people and their literal and psychological cityscapes with themes of protest, unrest, and tension woven throughout. The more complex look at the work reveals an attempt to respond and communicate to culture and, specifically, community. The processes used to reach these ends are a combination of, but not limited to painting, drawing, photography, digital manipulation, relief printing, and silkscreen.

KATE LUSCHER (223)

Kate Luscher graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2008 with a degree in Printmaking and a Spanish minor. She has been recognized with scholarships and awards for her prints and has exhibited work most recently in Paper Politics and Manifest Hope, which led to the printing of a Celebrate People’s History poster, and the publication of Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change. After briefly living in Mexico, she returned to live and work in Milwaukee, then moved to San Francisco until recently making plans to move to Portland, Oregon.

JOSH MACPHEE (33, 91, 113, 131, 153, 163, 221) Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator, and activist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. His work often revolves around themes of history, radical politics, and public space. His most recent book is Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures (co-edited with Dara Greenwald). He also organizes the Celebrate People’s History Poster Series and is part of the political art cooperative.

FERNANDO MARTÍ (155)

Fernando Martí is an artist, writer, community architect, and activist in San Francisco. His prints, installations, and constructions explore the clash of the Third World within the heart of empire, and highlight the tension between inhabiting place and reclaiming space to build something transformative. In between deconstructing storybooks with his son, he makes posters with the SF Print Collective and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.

COLIN MATTHES (135, 195)

Colin Matthes lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and works across a range of media including drawing, sculpture, installation, public art, print, and zine-making. He works on collective art projects including Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Street Art Workers and Cut and Paint zine.

IAIN MCINTYRE (185)

Iain McIntyre is a radical historian from Melbourne. His most recent book is How To Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief Making From Across Australia. He is currently collecting material for a US edition of similarly seditious material as well as finishing work on an anthology of hobo writing (1870-1940).

SARA MEISTER (83)

Originally from Pittsburgh, Sara Meister is a recent graduate of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. As a student, she studied critical pedagogy, social and political philosophy, gender and sexuality, immigration theory, avantgarde poetry, oral history, and archival studies. Currently, Sara works at a French bakery and as a nanny. She hopes to become a middle school language arts teacher.

DYLAN A.T. MINER (27, 63, 111)

Dylan A.T. Miner is an assistant professor of transcultural studies at Michigan State University. A Métis artist, activist, and intellectual, Miner has published articles in several academic journals, as well as exhibited his visual art globally. He is a member of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.

CLAUDE MOLLER (149, 151)

Claude Moller is an artist/community organizer who cut his first stencil in 1985 to protest America’s bloated war spending. He makes street art for housing justice groups and fantasizes about anti-yuppie lynch mobs.

RICARDO LEVINS MORALES (143)

Ricardo Levins Morales was born into the Puerto Rican independence movement and has been engaged in struggles for social justice since he was young. His art developed within these struggles. He was a member of the art/ organizing group the Northland Poster Collective for thirty years and now works out of a storefront studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He practices what he calls “medicinal art,” art to help people recognize and exercise their power.

JAMES DAVID MORGAN (145)

James David Morgan is a co-founding member of the Groundswell Collective, a loose affiliation of critical cultural producers who work at the intersection of art and activism.

MARC MOSCATO (89)

Marc Moscato is an artist, curator, and activist living in Portland, Oregon, where he directs the creative cultural center, The Dil Pickle Club. He has more than ten years of experience in marketing and communications, and has worked for Museum of Contemporary Craft, City Club of Portland, Microcosm Publishing, Peripheral, Produce and Squeaky Wheel, in addition to directing DIY arts center My House in Eugene, Oregon from 2001 to 2003.

CARRIE MOYER (169)

Carrie Moyeris a painter and writer. She is also one half of Dyke Action Machine!, a public art project she founded with photographer Sue Schaffner in 1991. Her paintings and public interventions have been widely exhibited and reviewed nationally and internationally. She is a regular contributor to Art in America, Artforum, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. She teaches painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

KEISUKE NARITA (95)

Keisuke Narita (AKA Kei) is a DIY artist and activist designer who has self-published zines and posters. He is also running an infoshop called Irregular Rhythm Asylum in Tokyo.

MARC NELSON (85)

Marc Nelson was born and raised in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. He earned a BA in Fine Arts from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and an Art Education Teaching Certificate from Western Illinois University. Marc’s paintings and drawings have been featured in exhibitions across Iowa, Illinois and New York, and his work appears in public and private collections throughout the country. Marc and his wife live and work in Kewanee, Illinois.

ROGER PEET (49, 189)

Roger Peet is an artist and printmaker currently in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and the Flight 64 print cooperative. His art focuses generally on issues of ecological collapse and extinction.

BARUCHA CALAMITY PELLER (239)

Barucha Calamity Peller is a writer and photographer, anarchist, and organizer. Her photographs and analysis have been widely distributed through alternative media outlets such as CounterPunch and the Independent Media Center. Peller reported from Lebanon during the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war just before entering Oaxaca. She is known for getting herself into very dangerous situations and then escaping with photographs that depict both old women and young anarcho-punks fighting in the streets.

ANDRE PEREZ (137)

Andre Perez is a transgender community organizer and youth media worker living in Chicago. He is the founder of the Transgender Oral History Project, a collaborative community initiative to gather and share stories from within the trans community. Andre presents workshops on a variety of transgender themes at colleges and conferences. He is currently working on an anthology about trans masculinity and sexuality.

BETH PULCINELLA (201)

Beth Pulcinella is committed to building community arts infrastructure, using her creative energy and multifaceted skills to move resources. She has facilitated workshops and classes in partnership with the Attic Youth Center, Spiral Q Puppet Theater, Fleisher Art Memorial, Southwest Community Enrichment Center, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Beth has invested much of her creative resources to unpacking what she believes is an oppressive educational model that is a cornerstone of our society.

DEAN RANK (89)

Dean Rank is a designer and filmmaker living in Chicago. He has collaborated with many musicians, curators, and film and video makers on projects of all mediums. His personal film/ video work has screened internationally at festivals, arts spaces, and micro-cinemas including the European Media Arts Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Minicine, and the Aurora Picture Show.

REDEYE (95)

RedEye is an illustrator who works for Anarchism Magazine, as well as other publications. He also makes tracks in an experimental noise band called GuelhuCthu.

ALLY REEVES (181)

Ally Reeves is an artist from Tennessee who now lives and works in Mumbai, India. Reeves’ work addresses issues of information-sharing, empowerment, and alternative economies.

AARON RENIER (35)

Aaron Renier won an Eisner Comics Industry Award for his first book Spiral-Bound, and his second book, The Unsinkable Walker Bean, comes out in the fall of 2010. His illustrations have appeared in a wide variety of places including Punk Planet magazine, Nickelodeon magazine, and work for Microcosm publishing, where he designed their chain ring heart logo. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his dog Beluga.

BLAKE RILEY (133)

In their first poster for the Celebrate People’s History project, Bobby Cortez and Blake Riley honor the sustaining influence of Dolores Huerta’s activism on behalf of California farm and food workers. They live in San Francisco and benefit daily from her collective work.

CRISTY C. ROAD (109)

Cristy C. Road is a twenty-seven-year-old Cuban-American illustrator and writer who’s been contributing to punk rock, literature, and radical organizations since 1996. Road published an independent zine, Greenzine, for ten years, and has released three books—Indestructible, Distance Makes the Heart Grow Sick, and Bad Habits. She’s currently working on paintings, a new novel, and her punk band The Homewreckers, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

BEN RUBIN (65)

Ben Rubin was born and raised in New York City. He currently resides in Chicago with his wife, Jessica, and son, Leo. He teaches art and humanities at Malcolm X College. He attended Hiram College in Ohio where he got a BA in psychology, took art classes in Rome and New York, and then got an MFA in painting at the University of Iowa. His current focus is learning to play guitar like Robert Johnson.

ERIK RUIN (25, 101)

Erik Ruin is a printmaker, shadow-puppeteer, and editor, most recently of Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority. His recent theatrical work focuses on creating “epic theater” projects (such as the dystopian allegorical musical The Nothing Factory) that incorporate dramatic performance, live music, projections, and banner shows to create a total experience. As a visual artist, he frequently works collaboratively with other artists and activist campaigns.

JOSHUA KAHN RUSSELL (129, 161)

Joshua Kahn Russell supports communities impacted by resource extraction to fight and win campaigns for ecological sanity and racial justice. He is a strategy and direct action trainer with the Ruckus Society and currently works as Rainforest Action Network’s Grassroots Actions Manager, campaigning to end our addiction to coal and oil. He participates in international networks like Climate Justice Now! and others.

JOS SANCES (225)

Jos Sances was born John Joseph Sances in Boston on August 18, 1952. For over the past thirty years he has made his living as a designer/ printmaker/muralist. Jos is founder and art director of Alliance Graphics. Begun in 1989, it has grown into a successful, union screen print and design shop. Over the years, Jos has designed and printed thousands of posters and t-shirts for hundreds of progressive causes. Before Alliance Graphics, he co-founded Mission Grafica at the Mission Cultural Center in 1980.

NICOLE SCHULMAN (183, 217)

Nicole Schulman wears many hats. She is mostly known for her comics, posters, and illustrations which have appeared in the New York Times, the Progressive, New Politics and Inguine Mah!gazine (Italy), as well as in World War 3 Illustrated, where she also serves on the editorial board. She has never made much of an attempt to break into the gallery world, yet through the prodding and hard work of other people, Nicole’s work has been exhibited in the 3 Cities Against the Wall exhibition (shown simultaneously in New York, Tel Aviv and Hebron), in the Municipal Art Museum of Ravenna, Italy, and many other venues.

TIM SIMONS (239)

Tim Simons is a self-taught graphic artist based out of Oakland, California. He has been creating propaganda for social movements and cultural projects since 1999 and specializes in design for print, including publication production, poster art, and logo design. Tim studied political economy and communications at Evergreen State College and continues to explore projects where radical political organizing and creative graphic arts intersect. He is a former collective member of Inkworks Press and works as a freelance designer and illustrator.

SHAUN SLIFER (41, 83)

Shaun Slifer is a multidisciplinary artist currently working in Pittsburgh. He works both alone and collaboratively with the Howling Mob Society and the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, practices organic plant and mushroom gardening, has a penchant for researching radical North American history, and is a decent bicycle mechanic.

MIRIAM KLEIN STAHL (119, 193)

Miriam Klein Stahl is an educator, artist, gardener, and mother.

CHRIS STAIN (97)

Chris Stain was born in 1972 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a self-taught artist working in the medium of printmaking, and his techniques are based on stenciling and screen printing. He was first inspired by NYC subway graffiti and poster design, and many working class and urban themes can be found in his work. Chris has shown in museums and galleries internationally and locally. He has also been published in several books, magazines, and websites on the subject matter of street art and urban contemporary culture.

LINDSAY STARBUCK (105, 115)

Lindsay Starbuck is a Midwesterner transplanted to East London. At a young age, she was fooled into thinking she had to give up art to be an activist. Over the past ten years, she has reintroduced art into her life as a remedy for the nonsense she encounters while working in the nonprofit sector. She is the founder of the Caged Bird Club and works as a street artist under the name Pivo.

JEFF STARK (171)

Jeff Stark is the editor of Nonsense NYC, a weekly email list and discriminating resource for independent art and senseless culture in New York City.

MEREDITH STERN (99, 159)

Meredith Stern seeks to unify the universe through peace and harmony through linoleum block printing. She also attempts to create chaos when she plays drums, and get people dancing when she DJs. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her two cats and sweetheart Peter Glantz. She is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, forages for mushrooms, and tends a garden when she has the time.

TAYLOR CASS STEVENSON (191)

Taylor Cass Stevenson’s artwork pays homage to all things rejected and discarded by society. Interested in reuse primarily as a tool for social integration and economic development, her work tends to be meticulously crafted with completely discarded materials. Artistically, she has been most influenced by South American craft, Islamic design, and graffiti. But, socially, she is compelled by people around the world who survive from garbage or who, similar to garbage, are rejected by society.

SWOON (227)

Swoon is a Brooklyn-based artist whose life-sized woodblock and cut-paper portraits hang on walls in various states of decay in cities around the world. She has designed and built several large-scale installations, most notably the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Projects in 2008. Her pieces have been collected by of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern. Major pieces have appeared at PS1, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Black Rat Press. Swoon has been traveling for the past several years creating exhibitions and workshops in the United States and abroad.

APRILLE THURHEIMER (87)

Aprille Thurheimer lives in Seattle, where she is a printmaker.

ROCKY TOBEY (173)

Rocky Tobey began installing anonymous street art as a shoeshine boy in the 1970s. He has bolted books, copper plaques, concrete reliefs, xerox posters, and agitprop billboards on street poles and abandoned buildings in Toronto. For over twenty years Rocky has also produced posters within the anarchist community.

ANTON VAN DALEN (209)

Anton Van Dalen was born in 1938 in Amstelveen, the Netherlands. He currently lives in the East Village of New York City.

EIAN WEISSMAN (127)

Eian Weissman is an illustrator and writer. He currently lives in Philadelphia.

BOFF WHALLEY (193)

Boff Whalley was born in Northern England and has spent almost his entire life as a punk refugee. He has made his living (and lived a wonderful life) singing in a band, writing, designing, and running up and down mountains. He is currently writing a comic book about Bono called The Twat in the Hat along with a self-help book called All Self-Help Books Lie.

LAURA WHITEHORN (187)

Laura Whitehorn, a leftist radical since the Civil Rights Movement, worked in the 1970s in an anti-imperialist women’s art collective, the Madam Binh Graphics Collective. She later spent fourteen years in prison for militant acts of protest against US racism and colonialism. Released in 1999, she lives with her partner, writer Susie Day, in New York City, works at an HIV/AIDS magazine, and advocates for release of other political prisoners.

PETE YAHNKE (57, 71)

Pete Yahnke was raised in the north woods of Wisconsin, taught himself printmaking, and now spends his time carving large pieces of linoleum into images.

BEC YOUNG (121, 141)

Bec Young is an artist with a diverse range of skills including printmaking, puppet making, fibers, and illustration.

RYNE ZIEMBA (165)

Ryne Ziemba began painting at age eleven. In the tenth grade, a friend gave him a copy of ABC’s of Anarchism, which changed his life. Through writing, visual art, music, and film, Ryne attempts to bring a non-compromised political edge to the world of pop culture. Ryne is currently working on a short documentary about the killing of a boy by a police officer in Pensacola, Florida and trying to finish his second screenplay.

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Dara Greenwald, for everything, especially right now. I’d like to thank Amy Scholder and all at the Feminist Press, for believing in this project and bringing it to fruition. The original idea to create these posters was as much Liz Goss’s as mine, and this book wouldn’t exist without her. Lindsay Caplan, Heather Rogers, and Eric Triantafillou provided hours of idea generation and/or editing—all intellectual and cultural work is collective. Claude Moller, Ben Ruben, Shaun Slifer, and Daniel Tucker all worked hard with me to get posters up on walls around the country; I want to thank them for all the hours of guerilla accompaniment. Hundreds of hands have drawn, designed, printed, and pasted these posters the world over, I look forward to working with hundreds more in the future.

1

After some research, it turns out this quotation is most likely a paraphrase from the political statement of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity: “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.”

2

The initial dozen posters were printed at a small left-wing print shop in Chicago called C&D. The two owners, Don Hammerquist and Janeen Porter, trained me in the basics of offset printing, an initial education that has been instrumental in building the knowledge necessary to bring a poster from initial idea to finished page. The vast majority of the posters since have been printed at the worker-owned and operated Stumptown Printers in Portland, Oregon.

Published in 2010 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Compilation and introduction copyright © 2010 by Josh MacPhee

Foreword copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Solnit

Individual copyright retained by the respective artists

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any

information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the

City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing, September 2010

The pages of this book are printed on

100% post-consumer recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacPhee, Josh.

Celebrate people’s history : the poster book of resistance and

revolution / by Josh MacPhee.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-558-61678-3

1. Social problems—Posters. 2. Social action—Posters. 3. Posters—

20th century. 4. Posters—21st century. I. Title.

NC1849.S54M33 2010

741.6’74—dc22

2010027099