Dani Gabriel, Jessica Huang Zachary Rogow
This Unruly Witness was curated for people who see love as a life force, who seek a community that can sustain us, who know that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Celebrating the life and legacy of the poet activist June Jordan, this collection illuminates why we need Jordan more than ever.
Mary Anne Trasciatti
In this session I propose to explore the connection between civil liberties and collective action, as presented in my recently published book, Elizabeth Gurley Fynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution (Rutgers UP). As a socialist, then a Wobbly/syndicalist, and then a Communist, Flynn organized workers into unions, led strikes, championed women’s rights, supported anti-imperialist movements around the globe, protested deportations, advocated for prison reform, and fought for Black liberation. Through all these campaigns, she was an ardent and active defender of the right to hold and express one’s political views and to associate with like-minded people in pursuit of economic, social, and political change. Rather than a matter of individual rights, Flynn’s understanding of civil liberties was inseparable from her socialism, a position that caused her to be expelled from the ACLU, an organization that she helped found. She believed that freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to a fair trial by jury are necessary for democracy in a capitalist state where material resources are unevenly distributed. The only way to remedy the imbalance between “haves” and “have nots” is collective action by the latter, and collective action is impossible without civil liberties. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn belongs at the heart of labor and civil liberties history: her life is a wellspring of inspiration for contemporary activists who wish to fight supremacy in all its nefarious forms.
