Best of
Activism

1996

Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900


Ida B. Wells-Barnett - 1996
    Wells was an African-American woman who achieved national and international fame as a journalist, public speaker, and community activist. This volume collects three pamphlets that constitute her major works during the anti-lynching movement: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans.

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 1996
    Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This reader, edited by the principal founders and leading theoreticians of the critical race theory movement, gathers together for the first time the movement's most important essays.

Dead Meat


Sue Coe - 1996
    A nationally prominent, politically oriented artist offers an unsparingly critical view of the meat industry in scores of illustrations, documenting the skewing, flaying, dismembering, castrating, debeaking, electrocuting, and decapitating of animals.

Returning To The Teachings: Exploring The Aboriginal Justice


Rupert Ross - 1996
    Returning to the Teachings takes this exploration further still. During a three-year secondment with Justice Canada, Ross travelled from the Yukon to Cape Breton Island, examining—and experiencing—the widespread Aboriginal preference for “peacemaker justice.” In this remarkable book, he invites us to accompany him as he moves past the pain and suffering that grip so many communities and into the exceptional promise of individual, family and community healing that traditional teachings are now restoring to Aboriginal Canada. He shares his confusion, frustrations and delights as Elders and other teachers guide him, in their unique and often puzzling ways, into ancient visions of Creation and our role with it.Returning to the Teachings is about Aboriginal justice and much more, speaking not only to our minds, but also to our hearts and spirits. Above all, it stands as a search for the values and visions that give life its significance and that any justice system, Aboriginal or otherwise, must serve and respect.

Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography


Nelson Mandela - 1996
    Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most inspiring political drama in the world. Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography tells the extraordinary story of Nelson Mandela's life, an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. With nearly 200 stunning photographs - many of them published here for the first time - and with text adapted from his remarkable memoir Long Walk to Freedom, this moving book captures the indomitable spirit of a moral giant and dramatically portrays his struggle toward freedom. Mandela's journey is vividly and eloquently recounted: the development of his political consciousness, his pivotal role in the formation of the African National Congress Youth League, his years underground - which led to a sentence of life imprisonment in 1964 - and his twenty-seven years behind bars. He also movingly recounts the momentous events leading up to his victory in South Africa's first-ever multiracial elections in 1994.

Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992


Adrian Piper - 1996
    Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years. Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in Out of Order, Out of Sight trace the development of her thinking about her artwork and the art world, and her evolving awareness of herself as a creative, racial, and gendered subject situated in an often limiting and always absurd cultural and social context.

Long Shot


Craig Hodges - 1996
    W. Bush demanding that he do more to address racism and economic inequality. Hodges was also a vocal union activist, initiated a boycott against Nike, and spoke out forcefully against police brutality in the wake of the Rodney King beating.But his outspokenness cost him dearly. In the prime of his career, after ten NBA seasons, Hodges was blackballed from the NBA for using his platform as a professional athlete to stand up for justice.In this powerful, passionate, and captivating memoir, Hodges shares the stories—including encounters with Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King, Jim Brown, R. Kelly, Michael Jordan, and others—from his lifelong fight for equality for African Americans.

Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement


Gary L. Francione - 1996
    Francione argues that the modern animal rights movement has become indistinguishable from a century-old concern with the welfare of animals that in no way prevents them from being exploited.Francione maintains that advocating humane treatment of animals retains a sense of them as instrumental to human ends. When they are considered dispensable property, he says, they are left fundamentally without "rights." Until the seventies, Francione claims, this was the paradigm within which the Animal Rights Movement operated, as demonstrated by laws such as the Federal Humane Slaughter Act of 1958.In this wide-ranging book, Francione takes the reader through the philosophical and intellectual debates surrounding animal welfare to make clear the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Through case studies such as campaigns against animal shelters, animal laboratories, and the wearing of fur, Francione demonstrates the selectiveness and confusion inherent in reformist programs that target fur, for example, but leave wool and leather alone.The solution to this dilemma, Francione argues, is not in a liberal position that espouses the humane treatment of animals, but in a more radical acceptance of the fundamental inalienability of animal rights.

Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations


Toni Cade Bambara - 1996
    Included are tales of mothers and daughters, rebels and seeresses, community activists and aging gangbangers, as well as essays on film and literature, politics and race, and on the difficulties and necessities of forging an identity as an artist, activist, and black woman. It is a treasure trove not only for those familiar with Bambara's work, but for a new generation of readers who will recognize her contribution to contemporary American letters.

The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment


William N. Eskridge Jr. - 1996
    Presents evidence from other cultures, responds to objections expressed by both straight and gay opinion, and argues that forbidding marriage is a denial of civil rights.

Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History & the Smithsonian Controversy


Kai Bird - 1996
    Essays and memoirs discuss the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945.

The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era, Volume 1


Murray Bookchin - 1996
    The author starts with a look at the peasant wars that preceded the modern era, then gives accounts of the English Revolution of the mid-17th century, the American Revolution of the 1770s-1780s, and the French Revolution. The work emphasizes the popular movements that propelled the great revolutions to radical peaks, the little-known leaders who spoke for the people, and the liberatory social forms to which the revolutions gave rise.

Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life


Joan Tollifson - 1996
    She embraces Zen Buddhism and then a very bare-bones spirituality that has no form. Bare-Bones Meditation reveals the inner process of the mind in a new way, and Tollifson's account is beautifully written--intense and from the heart.

The Way of Council


Jack M. Zimmerman - 1996
    

People of the Seventh Fire


Dagmar Thorpe - 1996
    Through dreams and "circles", they learned to live in harmony, without conflict among themselves or other tribes.