(For a while there I was seeing more places than I could write about. Trying to catch up now.)
Do you know what happened in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in May of 1886? Or from what Arizona town 1,100 striking (or allegedly striking) copper-mine workers were “deported” in 1917? Or where the first prolonged sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter was? Or the address of the Maryland draft board that was “raided” by the “Catonsville Nine” in 1968?
Those radical history stories and 52 more from all over (all over the United States, anyway) have just been published in a collection of political landscapes, The Path of Most Resistance: A U.S. Radical History Tour, the War Resisters League 2009 Peace Calendar.
I edited it. And wrote a number of the stories. It was inspiring to work on, and it’s inspiring to read.
Don’t take my word for it. Historians Howard Zinn and Robin D. G. Kelley say so too.
I’m gonna lay down my stylus and palm pilot and study anti-war and more … Thank you War Resisters League for this remarkable calendar, our daily reminder that peace, real freedom, the preservation of humanity and the environment, justice, and more of the fruits of our labor were won by collective struggle alone. We are inheritors of a tradition of resistance, the source of light in dark times, and if we forget, each page of this calendar will remind us of our real daily agenda.
—Robin D. G. Kelley
Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The 2009 Peace Calendar is wonderful, truly inspiring. These are unknown moments in history, and the best moments, because they show resistance to war, courage, and comradeship. It is not only a calendar, but a piece of literature.
—Howard Zinn
Author of A People's History of the United States
I didn’t create the calendar alone, of course. There were the radical historians whose work we built on—historians like Zinn, Kelley, and Charles E. Cobb Jr., who wrote the foreword for the calendar. There was the hard-working committee that included WRL staffer Liz Roberts and editors Wendy Schwartz and Ellen Davidson; they collaboratively conceptualized it, critiqued early drafts, proofread it, and helped find graphics for it. There were journalist Erin Thompson, writer/editor Ethan Young, and activists Mike McGuire and R. Stokes, who contributed calendar entries. And there were small labor museums and radical history sites all over the country, including the wonderful Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, whose staffs gave unstintingly of time and research to help us collect the exciting graphics that illustrate the entries.
Together, we compiled this specific record of exactly where dozens of acts of resistance—and a few acts that evoked resistance—happened. Collecting and writing down these accounts was a little like going to those places and seeing those things happen.
So is reading them—you’ll see.
©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
