Refuse to stand silently by : an oral history of grass roots social activism in America, 1921-64

All the men and women who tell their stories in Refuse to Stand Silently By played critical roles in some of the first--and most decisive--struggles for social justice America has experienced in this century. Yet none of them were elected or otherwise sanctioned to act on behalf of others. These are people who faced injustice and refused to stand silently by and allow it to continue. In this engrossing oral history they give not only firsthand reminiscences of seminal events in the American labor and civil rights movements, but forthright narratives of their lives, their family and educational backgrounds, their early influences, and the unlikely roads that led them to activism. Through their words, a history of grass roots social activism in America emerges. Rosa Parks tells of the days preceding the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, precipitated by her refusal to give up her seat on a city bus.

At that time she was a member of the Montgomery NAACP, struggling to help blacks register to vote in the face of poll taxes, racist registration committees, and the Ku Klux Klan at the polls. Her memories detail the period that would, in many ways, fuel blacks' outrage in the South during the decades that followed. Pullman-car porter Edgar Daniel Nixon remembers how a boyhood exposure to integration in a Northern train-station cafeteria set him on a course that would one day compel him to defy a Southern white passenger who demanded, "Go get that bag, boy!"--And to dedicate his life to the causes of labor and civil rights. Julian Bond recollects his experiences as a Northern-born middle-class black who organized student protestors in the strife-ridden South of the early 1960s. And Studs Terkel recalls his beginnings as a writer and social observer, and reflects on what we can learn from both the labor and the civil rights movements.

These remarkable individuals are among the many here who recount risking arrest--and often their lives--in order to battle the societal, political, and corporate institutions, laws, and philosophies that oppressed the common people. In the process, they chronicle how their actions resulted in the formation of unions, in the abolition of segregation laws, and in a living legacy of reform. Refuse to Stand Silently By is also the remarkable story of the Highlander Center, the renowned institution in rural Tennessee that, for the past sixty years, has educated adults from all races and walks of life in how to fight injustice with grass roots activism. Indeed, it was the Highlander Center that empowered many of the individuals in this book with the knowledge and skills to fight and win crucial battles for human rights.