How Five Decades of Youth Activists Have Remixed American History
In On the Freedom Side, author Wesley C. Hogan argues that the future of democracy belongs to young people. In order to back up this claim, he cites multiple youth-led organizations throughout American history, starting with Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. He also includes more recent groups, such as the Dreamers who are fighting for immigration reform; the Movement for Black Lives that is demanding a reinvestment in youth of color and an end to police violence against people of color; and the International Indigenous Youth Council, water protectors at Standing Rock who fought to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and protect sovereign control of Indigenous lands.
Hogan reveals how the legacy of the civil rights movement has influenced young people, especially those who are often left at the margins of US society, to take a stand for the causes they believe in. This book centers their stories in an “activist mix tape” that provides lively, fresh perspectives on the promise of twenty-first-century U.S. democracy.
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Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:
“At a time when too many of us are simply cursing the darkness, Hogan has shone the light of history on the often-invisible youth movements that fueled positive change in the past . . . and that continue to energize us today.”—Judy Richardson, SNCC veteran and coeditor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
“Hogan provides a way for us to explore the evolution of social justice movements, revealing how activists take what they learn from the ‘Movement Decade’ of the 1960s and build upon it.”—Tracy E. K’Meyer, author of From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle for School Desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, 1954–2007
“An informed, passionate, and hopeful book that considers the cutting-edge movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hogan introduces us to the multiracial, intergenerational, and intersectional activists at the heart of contemporary freedom movements, noting their own acknowledged debts to the egalitarian spirit of the Black Freedom struggle and its most egalitarian practitioner, Ella Baker.”—Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
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