Jim Brown reviewed Assata Taught Me by Donna Murch
Channeling the Black Radical Tradition to address our current moment
I learned a lot from this book, too much to condense into a single sentence or paragraph. So, I'll make not of this quotation from the essay "Ferguson's Inheritance" as a reminder to myself and others that corporate social media is toxic and terrible but also has been essential to international solidarity and social movements:
"As this mosaic of struggle indicates, over the past year Ferguson and the greater St. Louis metro area has become a laboratory and genesis point for a new generation of activists against state-sanctioned violence. It has also helped inspire a new wave of twenty-first-century iterations of Black Power both for local youth and for those across North America. These efforts, and the national and international press and social media coverage they generated, marked a turning point, a before and after, in which perception changed. Solidarity protests in New York, Los Angeles, and smaller cities throughout …
I learned a lot from this book, too much to condense into a single sentence or paragraph. So, I'll make not of this quotation from the essay "Ferguson's Inheritance" as a reminder to myself and others that corporate social media is toxic and terrible but also has been essential to international solidarity and social movements:
"As this mosaic of struggle indicates, over the past year Ferguson and the greater St. Louis metro area has become a laboratory and genesis point for a new generation of activists against state-sanctioned violence. It has also helped inspire a new wave of twenty-first-century iterations of Black Power both for local youth and for those across North America. These efforts, and the national and international press and social media coverage they generated, marked a turning point, a before and after, in which perception changed. Solidarity protests in New York, Los Angeles, and smaller cities throughout the country immediately followed, and in the process, a national collective memory was forged. This is not to say that what happened in Ferguson was something entirely new; it certainly was not. Anti-police brutality protest has a long history, and a small segment of its most recent past could be traced as far back as the late 1970s and 1980s, to the police murders of Eula Love, Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Stewart, and many, many others.
But to understand the social dynamics of Ferguson and the many months of protest that have followed in an era of both cybernetic networks and of the “Arab Spring,” we need to look to more recent struggles."