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Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have a unique position in the academy and have a distinct place within the current political moment. The whole world is in transition and embodies an irreversible capitalist crisis, intensifying state violence, white supremacy, xenophobia, patriarchy, homophobia, ecocide, political polarity, and struggle from below. The political climate ushers in an intensification of the polarization of wealth and poverty, democracy for billionaire capitalists, and fascism for the masses. The underlying cause of these crises and motions is rooted in the revolutionary process - of economic revolution, social destruction and upheaval, and political revolution that qualitatively transforms power relations in society. The corporate university exists within this global transition in society and is deeply impacted by the current crisis and developing social motion. HBCUs are susceptible to the change in the climate and their resources are affected more than its counterparts. Scholar activists working in and matriculating through HBCUs, lack the privilege of resources and many times recognition from outside institutions. How the academy and research are funded, the quality of jobs and student (undergraduate and graduate) support and who benefits, the subtle (and not so subtle) forms of censorship of the content of our teaching, research and publications, and more effect all within the corporate university. In this paper we will explore how the historic lack of resources and racial polarization within the academy, coupled with the current intensifying crisis of capitalism, influence the political activity of scholar activists from HBCUs. We share this analysis and these tools to inform conversations across generations, institutions, time, and space about the intellectual and political practice of scholar activists in relation to 21st century transformative movements and the corporate university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic, political and social crises are deeply affecting communities throughout the world. In the U.S. the long history of genocide of Indigenous peoples, enslavement of African peoples, the economic exploitation of working people including many immigrant communities, the inequality of women of these communities and classes, wars of conquest and expansion of the continental U.S., and ecocide have shaped the economic and political system of global capitalism in the United States for over five centuries. This system is rooted in white supremacy and gender oppression as part of the overarching domination of society and the state by the rich and powerful - by those who own the economic resources across the country and the globe and form today's global corporate class. These forms of injustice and inequality have been reproduced in every century since the late 1400s. In each century resistance and resilience have been a consistent part of daily life. Those communities and classes most adversely affected have organized and struggled against their oppression and exploitation, seeking freedom, liberation, justice, and equality. The work of our communities, organizations, and struggles exist within the objective realities of social history - the electronic revolution, the transformation of work, and destruction in every aspect of social life and the environment; a powerful global capitalism and its repressive and deadly neoliberal policies; and a violent U.S. empire spreading war, militarism, rape and violence against women, and abusive prison systems at home and abroad. In today's movement building moment, the United States Social Forum offered the space to grow our bottom-up justice and equality movement deeper and stronger, and to vision the world we are fighting for. We are using this process to build a movement worthy of uniting with our sisters and brothers in the Global South. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that today's bottom-up movement needs its own southern strategy to challenge white supremacy at its core, with regards to the capitalist private property, and concerning male domination in the U.S. The ruling class in the U.S. has always controlled the citizens through a southern strategy rooted in superexploitation, white supremacy, male privilege, division, and brutal repression. The article raises several questions related to the use of southern strategy by Democrats and Republicans in the past and its implications for a bottom-up southern strategy.

This interactive presentation will share the participatory action research project that we have been involved in since 1999. The first phase was completed by a partnership between Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, a community-based movement building organization, and a group of grassroots and scholar activists representing Trinity Towers residents, including the Trinity Towers Tenant Association, and several Howard and American University graduate student volunteers. The project explored the housing crisis in Columbia Heights and Trinity Towers intensifying in 1999-2000 as the gentrification process spread throughout northwest Washington, DC. We sought to uncover the root causes of gentrification and the housing crisis and to ensure that the community's voice was heard and is part of the solution. The second phase was collaboration between CoRAL/Georgetown University and Project South that developed from conversations between Walda Katz-Fishman and Sam Marullo, scholar activists teaching and working on issues of social inequality and social justice at Howard and Georgetown Universities. Four undergraduate students enrolled in The Contemporary City, a course taught by Professor Marullo, joined a Project South team composed of a sociology doctoral student/community activist and a grassroots community activist to design and implement a participatory action research follow-up -- 2000 to 2002. It documented the organizing success of the Trinity Towers Tenant Association and the deepening housing crisis in the Columbia Heights neighborhood because of ongoing gentrification. The documentation from the first phase was published as a pamphlet The People's Story -- Trinity Towers & Columbia Heights… Gentrification and the Struggle for Housing in our Neighborhood.. The second phase documentation is a web page that is temporarily located at: www.projectsouth.org. The text from the pamphlet and the web page are attached and... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a powerful and challenging historical moment: the deepest economic crisis and meltdown of global capitalism since the Great Depression; election of Barak Obama, the first Black US President; ongoing social destruction of huge proportions; an ecological crisis that threatens survival of the planet; all while war, militarism, and repression intensify at home and abroad. Working class women and children, indigenous peoples, peoples of color, and immigrants are, as always, most adversely affected. This is also a moment of broadening social struggles on all fronts and rising social movements that are questioning the viability of global capitalism and looking for alternatives in socialism for the 21st century.Teaching and learning and the struggle for social justice and transformation in every space and context are essential in this moment. For those of us who are scholar and student activists, it is especially important to bring this home to our classrooms - our students and colleagues - and the larger communities we are part of. Schools and universities are not themselves revolutionary institutions (they tend to reproduce the social relations of society and the ideological hegemony of the ruling class). Nevertheless, they can be sites of consciousness raising and struggle given the intentionality of professors and students to create critical classrooms and connect to today's rising social movement and the world social forum process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, two years into the deepest global crisis of capitalism the world has ever experienced, the question is how to move politically to secure the basic necessities of life for all humanity and to protect the earth. For the first time in US history the capitalist crisis is creating the objective conditions for social struggles to take a leap forward, to make real and concrete the connection between day-to-day social activity and the larger political struggle for socialism on the path to communism. In the U.S., social movements and revolutionaries are analyzing, envisioning, strategizing, and converging. An important process where this is happening is the US Social Forum, first organized in Atlanta in 2007 and in Detroit in 2010. We discuss our experiences organizing the USSF: 1. The strategic importance of holding the first USSF in the US South; 2. This historical moment - today's economic meltdown centered around the technological revolution and auto and related industries in Detroit and the Rust Belt, and the power of this context for the second USSF in 2010 as the crisis of capitalism, the social destruction it brings, and the resulting political struggle deepen and broaden in the U.S. and globally. We share ways for scholar and student activists to participate in building US social movements, and the edited volume, The US Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement, telling the stories of organizing the first USSF, convergences and alliances, triumphs, challenges, and lessons learned for local-national-global movement building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's globalization and neo-liberal policies mean the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - in the developing world and in the United States and the "developing world within." We locate the struggle for basic human needs and collective human rights - economic, political and cultural - in the context of corporate globalization and the emerging bottom-up movement for global justice and equality. Within the U.S. - the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world - the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance has stepped forward as part of the leadership in building the local-global justice movement. GGJ emerged out of the World Social Forum process beginning in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. As grassroots and people of color activists from the U.S., they looked around and saw that the U.S. global justice movement was represented primarily by big NGOs and foundations - mostly middle class and white. A core of these activists and their organizations came together in 2002 to bring a delegation to the WSF that represented their voices and constituencies and to build the global justice movement in the U.S. We share their story and plans for the U.S. Social Forum in summer 2007 as part of the world social forum process and the movement for another world where human needs are put before maximum profits and market economics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We locate DuBois--his intellectual work and his political activism and their interrelationship--within the social history of the last 100 years. We identify the economic, political, racial and social forces that shaped DuBois' scholar activist project over the course of his life, focusing on THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK as well as the changes during his life and after. Finally, we derive lessons learned from his life's work and activism and their relationship to his times to our reality today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]