Preordering Organizing America

Well, after a very long time–7 years!!–I finally have the next book completed, edited, and ready to go out. Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice was very much not written with Trump winning again in mind–the manuscript was completed months before that happened, though I made some changes to the intro and conclusion in light of it. But I sure hope reading twenty stories of people who made massive change in this country in conditions at least as bad if not worse than anything we face helps people get their heads around the present moment. If you think things are bad now, be Ida Wells. Or Bob Moses. Or Eugene Debs. The book covers a wide variety of people engaging in American social movements, but not every social movement. It is takes a distinctly and quite intentionally anti-romantic angle on them. Eugene Debs loved to tell racist jokes. Dolores Huerta treated her subordinates like shit. People screw up all the time. But that’s the point. It is my firm belief that we destroy our capacity for change by turning our past of change into a Mt. Rushmore, where we can’t possibly live up to the heroes we look up upon like King and Parks and Malcolm and Milk, or whoever you choose. But these people didn’t much know what they were doing at the time either, they screwed up big time, they lost all kinds of campaigns, they had bad takes and treated other people very badly, they were like us. And I think that’s really important to understand. It’s almost like I feel the need to tear down people’s myths about the past in order to build up something better. That’s as true of the labor movement as anything else, where of course I have a bit more influence on the historical narrative than other places.

In any case, publication is in August and it is now available for preorder. If you don’t want to fund Bezos, I don’t blame you, though it doesn’t much matter either way. But there’s several links for preordering at the link and I will have more on this as things move forward.

….oh and yes, several of these folks were chosen because I had grave posts already written to get me started….