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An interview with Walda Katz-Fishman, a U.S. scholar activist and educator is presented. She talks about her struggles and how they relate to the Seattle movement and the mobilizations during the height of the global justice movement. She also discusses the connection between her experiences of working class folks of color in the U.S. South and global struggles.

This article presents a critical pedagogy for a racially oppressed working-class community, situated in this current moment of capitalist crises. In the aftermath of the police killing of Mike Brown and militarized police occupation in St. Louis, MO, students from a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) employed a Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) module with African American high school students, during Alternative Spring Break 2015. The political education tools were grounded in Historical Materialism and Critical Race Theory. This was rooted in a movement-based praxis by and for the most affected persons (people of color, women, indigenous, immigrants, and queer populations). The PIC module informed this pedagogical process of raising consciousness, creating a vision, and strategizing toward long-term social change. Here, we discuss how this module enabled students to begin to grapple with the root of systemic racism, by connecting theory to their lived experiences. We understand this process as contributing to scholar activism, rooted in transformative public sociology. The modifications are discussed for implementation within future curriculums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on political biographies of the authors and on the Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide. The authors' political biographies give an overview of why they became political and how experiences shaped them to be sociologists, activists and movement builders. The authors made use of popular education to be able to develop new leadership in scholar activism. The project has helped them in their political work in communities. The aim of the project is to build relationships among organization in the U.S. for a united movement for justice and equality.

This article presents the authors' comments on Michael Burawoy's call for a critical and transformative public sociology. Burawoy's call for a public sociology, whose goal is realizing the real utopia of democratic socialism, is welcome. Burawoy argues--and we agree--that change flows from outside the university. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s--black liberation, national liberation and anti-imperialist/anti-colonial struggles, women's equality, sexual equality, environmental justice struggles, etc.--created the conditions for a radical sociology. The question and challenge for today's generation of public sociologists and scholar activists is can we stay connected for the long haul and become one with today's bottom-up movement? Are we willing to come to the table as equals with those most adversely affected by the exploitation and multiple oppressions of global capitalism and U.S. empire and to celebrate our diversity? Will we use the popular communication and popular education necessary for building a broad and deep popular movement? Can we develop the consciousness, the bold vision and the long term strategy needed to win? Finally, can we walk the talk--can we unite theory and practice in the dialectics of our historic struggle for human life and human rights, human spirit and human liberation and for the very survival of our planet?

From the inception of the emerging American nation, the South is a central battleground in the struggles for freedom, justice, and equality. It is the location of the most intense repression, exploitation, anti reaction directed toward Africans Americans, as well as Native Americans and working people generally. At the same time the South is the site of the most heroic resistance to these oppressive conditions of class domination, of white supremacy, and of sexist social relations in the public and private sectors. The institution of chattel slavery thrusts the Black radical tradition into the forefront of these early struggles. Today's globalization in the electronic age and neoliberal policies - the attack on the New Deal and Civil Rights reforms of the past era again place the Black radical tradition at the center of the struggles for Freedom, justice, and equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the inception of the emerging American nation, the South is a central battleground in the struggles for freedom, justice, and equality. It is the location of the most intense repression, exploitation, and reaction directed toward Africans Americans, as well as Native Americans and working people generally. At the same time the South is the site of the most heroic resistance to these oppressive conditions of class domination, of white supremacy, and of sexist social relations in the public and private sectors. The institution of chattel slavery thrusts the Black radical tradition into the forefront of these early struggles. Today's globalization in the electronic age and neoliberal policies — the attack on the New Deal and Civil Rights reforms of the past era — again place the Black radical tradition at the center of the struggles for freedom, justice, and equality.We present a historical materialist analysis of the Black radical tradition in the South, from slave resistance and rebellions in the 1500s through the Civil War to the economic and political justice struggles in the current period. Black women — often working class — are always at the core of the Black radical tradition and are frequently in its leadership. Black radicals in each period make revolutionary demands that challenge state policy and/or capitalist property relations. But history reveals that each victory, hard fought and won, merely reforms capitalism and is only temporary. We conclude that the Black radical tradition in America calls for the liberation (i.e., the full economic, political and social equality) of the black masses. Permanent victory means that the Black radical tradition is at the heart of a working class-based movement to bring an end to the global capitalist system and to the class, color, and gender oppression that is its cornerstone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discussions of diversity, multiculturalism, and democracy often neglect the historical and structural economic and political inequalities embedded in these racial/ethnic/cultural differences among peoples in America. In this article we present a historical materialist analysis of African Americans and other oppressed peoples within the context of capitalist development. The current period of the electronic revolution and the labor displacing technology of the postindustrial era is creating the conditions for the erosion of the reform based social contract, and for heightened degrees of economic and political polarization, often expressed as racial polarization. At the same time, the abundance created by the high technology revolution contains the possibility of realizing equality and democracy for African Americans and for all of the American peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]