Wednesday, October 12, 6pm – Non-Fiction
Annie Sonnie & James Tracy
authors of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times ($16.95 Melville House)

The story of some of the most important and little-known activists of the 1960’s, in a deeply sourced narrative history. The historians of the late 1960s have emphasized the work of a group of white college activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by. James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups:

• JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .
• The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .
• In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .
• In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor.

Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.

Amy Sonnie is an activist, educator and librarian who has worked with U.S. grassroots social justice movements for the past seventeen years. She is co-founder of the national Center for Media Justice. Her first book, Revolutionary Voices, an anthology by queer and transgender youth (Alyson Books, 2000), is banned in parts of New Jersey and Texas. Her work has appeared in the San Franscisco Bay Guardian, Alternet, Philadelphia Inquirer, Clamor, the Oxygen

James Tracy is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. He has edited two activist handbooks for Manic D Press: The Civil Disobedience Handbook and The Military Draft Handbook. His articles have appeared in Left Turn, Race Poverty and the Environment, and Contemporary Justice Review.

Thursday September 8, 5:30 – exhibit opening, film, panel discussion

Class Warfare in Philadelphia, Part 1- The Financial Sector

Class Warfare in Philadelphia is a five part series of educational programs that look at aspects of the current economic condition of America as reflected in Philadelphia. The last several decades have seen a steady increase in the attack on the middle and lower classes. Not only has the disparity between the rich and poor increased dramatically but the disparity between the rich and the superrich has undergone the same process. In the middle of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, the rich are getting much, much richer while everyone else sinks toward the economic bottom.

David Harvey in Enigma of Capital proposes that the crushing of labor in the 1980’s resulted in the freezing and decrease in real wages. Capital’s response to labor’s lack of ability to purchase was the creation of the debt (credit card) economy, the “ownership society” which created “no-doc” mortgages and the predatory lending practices that lead to the economic crises we are still in.  While millions of properties have been foreclosed on and people evicted from their homes, these homes have been bought up by the rich as investments properties. Abandoned homes have been turned into vacant land which is also sold to investors.  Financial institutions have gone from predatory lending to little lending. Public Sector Unions, the last bastion of unions since NAFTA exported industrial jobs, is under attack. Communities struggle with how to respond to all of this.

This is a frontal attack by the rich on the rest of us. What can we call it except Class Warfare? We are under attack and have not recognized it; we are headed back to the “Gilded Age” of the 1890’s. But the Gilded Age gave rise to the Progressive Age, the rise of Unions, and Social Welfare. We can learn from the past and create solutions to the present problems.

Each of the five programs will look at an aspect of the current economic situation. They will take place every other Thursday from September 8 until November 3. Each program will put the issue into historical context, look at the national picture and at what is happening here in Philadelphia. We will start each program with the showing of David Harvey’s animated lecture The Crises of Capitalism (11 minutes). Mr. Harvey, a Marxist scholar who heads CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture & Politics, describes not just the failures that caused the ongoing fiasco, but the failure of how we’ve explained it.

Program 1 – The Financial Sector

5:30pm – Reception and Opening of the Class Warfare Photography Exhibit

The current economic hard times Philadelphians and other Americans are experiencing share many features with earlier times like the Great Depression. In other respects, today’s problems are very different. During the Depression era, there was great interest in discovering how the hard times affected real people, which led to the rise of programs such as The Farm Security Administration, whose Photo Department became famous for thousands of images that profoundly changed how Americans looked at themselves and at the poor in their midst. This photography exhibition evoking today’s economic hard times will be a backdrop to the five-part series of educational programs called Class Warfare In Philadelphia.

7:00pm: The David Harvey animated lecture The Crises of Capitalism (11 minutes)

“If you watch just one funny and handsome Marxist critique of the financial crisis, make it the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’s animated version of David Harvey’s RSA speech “Crises of Capitalism.” It’s been making the rounds this afternoon, and for good reason: Mr. Harvey, a Marxist scholar who heads CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture & Politics, describes not just the failures that caused the ongoing fiasco, but the failure of how we’ve explained it. “It’s crap,” he says. “You should know it’s crap, and say it is. And we have a duty, it seems to me, those of us who are academics, and seriously involved in the world, to actually change our mode of thinking.” Max Abelson

7:15pm: An Overview Panel Discussion on the On-going Financial Crisis, the Financial Sector and Predatory Lending

Irv Acklesburg is a lawyer who has practiced for 30 years with Community Legal Services. He is an expert in the areas of consumer credit, foreclosure defence, bankruptcy, and consumer fraud.

Sanford Schram teaches social theory and social policy at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Brywn Mwar College, and is an affiliate to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor.