Install
Protest & Resistance blog
The Jane Collective and Chicago's Underground Abortion Service How a group of Chicago women ran an underground abortion service before Roe, what happened when police arrested seven of them in May 1972, and what their story teaches organizers now. ACT UP Storms the FDA and Changes How Drugs Get Approved How a 1988 protest outside the FDA in Rockville, Maryland pushed regulators toward faster access to experimental AIDS drugs, and why those rules still shape medicine today. Attica in September 1971 and the Prisoners' List of Demands What the men who took D Yard at Attica asked for in September 1971, how the state answered with gunfire, and why the lawsuits and cover-up fights lasted into this century. Compton's Cafeteria and the Trans Uprising Before Stonewall In August 1966 trans women in San Francisco's Tenderloin fought back against a police sweep at an all-night cafeteria. Here is what happened, why it was nearly forgotten, and what it built. Coxey's Army and the 1894 March of the Unemployed on Washington In 1894 an Ohio businessman led the unemployed to the Capitol to demand public works jobs and was arrested for walking on the grass. Forty years later his idea was federal policy. Diane Nash and the Nashville Sit-Ins That Desegregated Lunch Counters How a Fisk student's question to Nashville's mayor helped end lunch-counter segregation in 1960, and how the same students kept the Freedom Rides alive the next year. Frank Kameny's Long Fight Against the Government That Fired Him An astronomer fired by the Army Map Service in 1957 refused to go quietly, petitioned the Supreme Court, picketed the White House and spent fifty years making the federal government apologize. How to Ask a Question at a Town Hall and Get a Real Answer How to find a town hall, write a question short and specific enough that a politician has to answer it, ask it well under pressure, and follow up so the answer goes on the record. How to Call Your Member of Congress So the Staff Tally Your Call What happens to a phone call after a congressional staffer picks up, how calls are logged by issue and position, and how to make a ninety-second call that lands in the count. How to Meet Your Senator's Staff at a District Office Visit How to request, prepare for and run a constituent meeting with a senator's staff back home, from the scheduling email to the one-page leave-behind and the follow-up that keeps the door open. How to Testify Before a State Legislative Committee How statehouse committee hearings work, from bill numbers and witness registration to written testimony and the two minutes at the table, and how ordinary people use them to shape a bill. Love Canal, Lois Gibbs and the 1980 Law That Created Superfund How a mother in Niagara Falls organized her neighbours over chemical waste buried under their school, forced two emergency declarations, and helped push Congress to pass the Superfund law in 1980. Sharon Lavigne, St. James Parish and the Fight Against a Plastics Complex A retired special-education teacher in Louisiana built a faith-based group that took on one of the largest proposed plastics plants in the country. How she did it, and what it teaches organizers. The 1991 Summit That Wrote the Principles of Environmental Justice In 1991 grassroots leaders adopted 17 principles of environmental justice. What they said, why big green groups were unsettled, how organizers use them. The Night at the Stonewall Inn and the Movement It Started How a routine police raid on a Mafia-run Greenwich Village bar in June 1969 turned into nights of resistance, and how organizers turned that anger into the first Pride marches. Warren County, 1982, and the Protest That Named Environmental Racism In 1982, residents of a mostly Black county in North Carolina lay down in front of trucks carrying PCB-laced soil. How their protest gave a movement its name and its first national evidence.