Who Will Speak for the Voiceless?

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The forest sways in ripples of green. Wind sends the dappled sunlight sparkling through the branches. These are the things we forget in the heat of the political season. There are few politicians who will speak on behalf of all people . . . and even fewer who will speak for the beings that comprise […]

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Vote Fear and Fear Wins

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Watching the electoral cycle this year is like watching an old movie from a warped film reel with the sound out of sync. The puppet figures of politicians go through the meaningless gestures. The familiar slogans and catch phrases groan from twisted mouths, distorted and odd. A maniacal fervor pulses in the expressions of the […]

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South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Port Elizabeth Boycott Begins

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On July 15th, 1985, South Africans in the Port Elizabeth Township began a boycott of white-owned businesses to undermine the legitimacy of apartheid. A group of women suggested the idea of the consumer boycott, which was met with a 100% compliance rate.  Within five days of the boycott, a Member of Parliament noted that the […]

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Women’s Draft? Sign Me Up To Abolish War

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For too long, the women of this nation have been complacent while our brothers, sons, husbands, and fathers are sent to kill, maim, brutalize, destroy and even die in defense of our alleged liberty. But now, the Senate has passed a $602 billion defense bill that includes an amendment for drafting women. If this bill […]

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Celebrating Grace Lee Boggs

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On June 27th, 1915, Grace Lee Boogs was born in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father’s restaurant.  Grace later said, “because I was born to Chinese immigrant parents and because I was born female, I learned very quickly that the world needed changing.” Over her 100 years of life, she would, indeed, change the world […]

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Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

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In June 1942, a pair of German university students formed The White Rose, a German resistance movement that used a series of leaflets to decry Nazi militarism and call for an end to the war. Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell wrote the first four leaflets between the end of June and beginning of July.  In […]

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Teach-Ins and Nonviolent Movements

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We should celebrate the effective and versatile tactic of the teach-in. One of the largest teach-ins during the Vietnam War, for example, was held on May 21st-23rd, 1965 at UC Berkeley with 10-30,000 students attending. The State Department was invited to send a representative, but declined. An empty chair was set on the stage during […]

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Mother Jones and May Day

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“In all my career I have never advocated violence. I want to give the nation a more highly developed citizenship.” – Mother Jones This week commemorates the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair, International Workers’ Day, and the claimed birthday of Mother Mary Harris Jones.  While the United States’ official Labor Day falls in September, the […]

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The Frontier Gandhi: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

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Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born on Feb 6th, 1890 in the Peshawar Valley of British-controlled India. At the age of twenty, Ghaffar Khan founded a village mosque school, and began his revolutionary work against British colonial control with what his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi was calling “constructive programme”. He worked tirelessly for independence and […]

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Helen Keller: Socialist, Pacifist, Women’s & Workers’ Rights Advocate

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The name Helen Keller conjures up, for most people, a deaf-blind-mute girl learning to communicate via sign language. It’s a scene straight out of The Miracle Worker, the biographical play recounting Anne Sullivan’s role in reaching young Helen Keller. But the miraculous part of Keller’s story is not that the way she learned to fingerspell […]

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Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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On April 16th, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was sitting in a stark jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, where he had been arrested for engaging in nonviolent direct action. An ally had smuggled a newspaper into the jail that contained the recently published piece, A Call To Unity, written by eight local white clergymen […]

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Cesar Chavez

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“Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak… Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.” – Cesar Chavez Cesar Chavez was born on March 31st, 1927 in Yuma, Arizona. When his family lost their land and farm during […]

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Celebrating Boycotts on St. Patrick’s Day

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St. Patrick’s Day is nearly here, and while many will be headed to pubs with shamrocks pinned to their jackets to celebrate all things Irish, there is one contribution from Ireland that bears a toast (or two!): the boycott. Coined in 1880 during the Irish Land Wars, the phrase refers to Captain Charles Boycott, a […]

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Midwife to the Coming World – an excerpt from The Dandelion Insurrection

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This is an excerpt from Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, featuring a moment when Zadie Byrd Gray commits to being a love-motivated changemaker and living up to her inner potential. Find the whole novel here. That afternoon, Zadie’s mother had delivered an ultimatum to her girl. “There is a whole new way of life […]

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Bloody Sunday and the Selma March

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By the time the historic Selma March occurred on March 21st, 1965, more than 3,000 protesters in Selma, Alabama had already been arrested, and demonstrators had twice begun the fated march, once to be turned back by heavy repression in an event known as “Bloody Sunday”. On March 7th, 1965, a group of marchers organized […]

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Norwegian Teachers’ Defense of Education

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In April 1940, the Nazis invaded Norway and occupied the country. In 1942, as part of an attempt to implement a fascist curriculum in the schools, Minister-President Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian collaborator, disbanded the existing teachers’ union and required all teachers to register with the new Norwegian Teachers’ Union by February 5th. Between 8,000-10,000 of […]

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The Women of Berlin, Rosenstrasse Protest

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In 1943, Joseph Goebbels promised Adolf Hitler that Berlin would be Judenfrei – Jew free – in time for Hitler’s birthday. On February 27th, without warning, Jews were snatched off the streets and from workplaces, and held in buildings temporarily before being loaded onto trains to be sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. […]

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The Silent Sentinels

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On January 10th, 1917 the American Women’s Suffrage Movement began a two and a half years long Silent Sentinels protest in front of the White House. They were organized by Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and the National Woman’s Party. The women protested for six days a week until June 4, 1919 when the Nineteenth Amendment […]

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

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The third Monday in January is honored as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States, a day when we commemorate the legacy of one of the great leaders of our time, and also remember the long road ahead of us toward racial justice in our country. The King Center says, ” During […]

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Nonviolence vs. Nazis: Five Lessons to Trounce Trump

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US politics are enough to give everyone nightmares of Donald Trump as Hitler minus the mustache. He’d drop a nuke on ISIS. He wants a registry of all Muslims. He decries economic inequality while profiting from and being the epitome of the problem. He’s white, male, and millions of prejudiced, mass media skewed Americans seem […]

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Without Kindness, We Lose Our Common Dignity

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As I’m riding the overnight train from Chicago to New Mexico, an elderly African-American man in a wheelchair is taken off the train by paramedics, police, and the conductor. Earlier, I had heard the car attendant say something about a minor heart attack. The man, a double amputee, shivers in the cold night air as […]

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Life of a Novelist … Rivera Sun in the Earthship House in New Mexico

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The day begins with the sun rising over the Sangre de Christo Mountains, which stretch from the distant southwest horizon clear to the northeast corner of the round bowl of our sagebrush mesa. Snow clouds gather, grey and heavy, draping a mist over the mountains as the light slides into the glass bottle walls of […]

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We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For! A talk by Rivera Sun

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Please enjoy this 1:30min excerpt from Rivera Sun’s talk at Unity of Taos on the stepping into the lineage of nonviolent struggle.

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Extinction Is No Joke

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Extinction is no joke. Climate scientists say we have ten years, at most, to make a massive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. If we do not, climate change will signal lights out for the human species. I am thirty-one years old. Climate change and global warming have been making headlines since I was […]

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