s most of you know, it’s tough to run a publication, now more than ever. People want to be well informed but they don’t necessarily want to pay for it, and good writing does cost money, as does editing, design, and all the other tasks that go into assembling a publication. Or, as is often the case, people are willing to pay for good writing and journalism, but there are so many outlets that keep so much of their work behind paywalls that we have to make budget-minded decisions about where we spend money on newspapers and magazines. I get it. You get it.

That said, I want to make a pitch for supporting Hammer & Hope, a magazine rooted in Black politics and culture that is in its early(ish) days and needs our help. As we look at the world burning around us, feeling helpless, publications like Hammer & Hope matter more than ever. It’s not that excellent, rigorously conceived and edited writing will save the world (though it might). The pen is not always mightier than the sword (though sometimes it is). BUT. The kind of writing Hammer & Hope publishes does offer us insight into how we got here, what might lie ahead, and how we can fight the rapidly encroaching fascism, segregation, and white Christian supremacy a great many of our elected leaders are welcoming with open arms.

In their most recent issue, there is 

 about how we need to do much more than vote to create change. Lorgia García Peña 

 of the “Latino vote.” There’s also a great essay about the work 

 in North Carolina to support immigrant communities as they move forward from Hurricane Helene. Braxton Brewington argues that 

, not vaguely defined agendas that won’t really serve Black men’s interests. And, of course, there is much more.
Each issue is full of nuanced, elegant writing and thought leadership that is well edited. The work is unapologetically activist-oriented and committed to liberation for Black people, for Latino people, for other POCs, for women, for the trans community, for immigrant communities, for all of us. Hammer & Hope is a real gem, and it is also a necessity. The coming months and years are precarious, particularly for publications like Hammer & Hope, as philanthropic funders tread the new lines being drawn by the Trump regime. These funders don’t really take risks, and anything that challenges the status quo, which is Hammer & Hope’s bread and butter, is seen as a risk.

So. If you can 

, please do so. Any amount helps. The future of Hammer & Hope is in our (broadly speaking) hands. Let’s do what we can to support their bold risk-taking.

— Roxane Gay


P.S. Any time I mention something to which you may want to contribute, do know that I am contributing, too. I support Hammer & Hope with a monthly contribution.

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay: A Great Magazine Could Use Some Financial Support

 have been deeply moved by the existence of Hammer & Hope. It’s one of the few magazines focused on what’s actually happening in the world right now. We’re in the midst of a lot of horrific things — right-wing escalations here at home and around the world. But whenever I turn to Hammer & Hope, I start feeling like people are doing something about these crises.

Hammer & Hope is a place for an expansive Black conversation that can hold our academic, intellectual, political, and cultural concerns. But it’s also a space that makes you feel like more things are possible. As you finish each issue, you know more about how to move forward with integrity and connection, and that’s a great way to show solidarity.

Social media does so much damage to our brains’ capacity to think. It gives the impression that you can think only one thing, or else someone is going to come yell at you. We can forget that we’re meant to have a lot of different positions. We’re meant to have respectful, brilliant, informed conversations, and to struggle and tussle with one another. Hammer & Hope holds room for our differences at a time when very few spaces are trying to do that. It’s a breath of fresh air to slow down and read these issues — it’s actually good for our brains to take the time to read this way.

It felt so important to me to have a Black magazine dedicate 

 to Palestine. This past year and a half has taught me that solidarity looks a lot of different ways. Where do we put our attention and where do we ask our community to put their attention? With so many crises at home, I could imagine it’s very easy to keep our attention here. But Hammer & Hope has a deep commitment to internationalism. Our crises are in relation to all the other crises unfolding around the world. The same people creating crises for us are creating them in so many other places. I want to say thank you publicly to the magazine for that dedication to international perspectives.

I want every single person who’s reading this to join me in 

becoming a paying member of Hammer & Hope

, even if you can make only a small contribution, because I’m so moved by its reporting and storytelling. It’s so important that people understand: We — the readers and the community — decide whether these outlets actually get to keep going. Our support determines whether or not these places survive. And as much as possible right now, we must invest in building the things we want to exist.

So many of the problems we’re dealing with are massive. It’s overwhelming. We’re talking about the entire globe, entire species; we’re talking about every system. We have to remember that everything massive starts small and is made up of small acts of support, weaving bravery and consistency. The small projects we are able to get off the ground can ripple out to have a really massive impact. We are all fertile soil, and then these seed packets come along. Hammer & Hope is one of these seed packets. Let’s put it into the soil and see what takes root.

adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown on Hammer & Hope: It’s Stunning, It’s In-Depth, It’s Black, It’s Cool

Start here. Once you cross the threshold, you’re home. The door

is what brings you from out to in. The door:


the only unit of measurement, not how “poor,”

not four walls, not foundation or drywall or chimney or roof. A door


opens a place into home. Remember, on Gorée

Island, they walked us through that unknown mouth, the Door


made our own bodies a home, made doorways

out of our voices in the air, their undeniable treasure.

each other. How a nod can mean you’re home — home in feet planted, freely, on the floor.

My grandmothers made homes out of things that were not houses — the fervor

of their Blackmother spirits filling the Bessemer projects, the Greensboro trailer —

no fireplace but the warm TV set, no yard but the red clay. The splendor

of what lives beyond what you call welfare, inner city, blight. Don’t you know our

words are a way home? We even bend language into a liberating door.

I used to think my proper tongue meant I leaned toward

the thing that stole our culture. But we can’t outgrow our home. Or,

we have never left in the ways that matter — home in our flavors,

our dances, the languages we live. Home is in us, behind a locked door.

We bent the blue cries of this place into full-bodied song, bent frail walls into shelter.

We bent the cast-off portions into a meal, we bent two cents into a dollar.

We bent redlines and tenements into a sanctuary you can’t enter.

If you want to know how Black folks find our way back to heaven, start here. Open the door.

Carrie Mae Weems

Ashley M. Jones

Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, N.Y.

Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems and Jack Shainman Gallery

Issue 1

Come In 

ow do we put back together a society that has broken apart? How do we build solidarity within a culture of individualism, punishment, and accumulation when we are constantly repairing ourselves in the face of various forms of daily heartbreak?

If we lend ourselves to the emergent struggles of our times — against Cop City; for Black history, abortion rights, trans liberation, widespread debt cancellation, climate justice, access to land, and alternative food systems; in solidarity with actors and writers on strike and so many others — drawing connections and showing up is where we should start and return to again and again. Now is a time for experimentation and discipline alike. We need to accept what an activist involved in the fight to Stop Cop City in Atlanta calls 

 rather than demand political, strategic, or tactical purism. We have to allow for different people to show up in various ways in terms of ideology and struggle; in our protests and movements, we need the widest participation possible to win.

The uprisings of 2020 showed serious cracks in the system’s legitimacy. By some estimates as much as 

 participated in the protests in some form, a figure without precedent in U.S. history. Around the world, people held protests in at least 

, embodying the globalized nature of our emerging struggles. Mass social upheavals unsettle the status quo; disruption proves to everyone that “normal” is a product of circumstance and not inevitability, that things might not have to stay the same after all. That revolt sent a flare into the sky: 

Don’t mistake the status quo for daily acquiescence. 

. We’re neither happy nor content with things as they are.

But we need more than protests and temporary uprisings. We must further develop our organizations into social institutions capable of creating new relations in every domain of our lives here and now. Previous generations of struggle led to the 

 to one of the worst epidemics in modern history. This fact is not lost on today’s ruling class, which is hard at work making sure today’s young students don’t know how or even whether these past victories happened — 

At work, let’s fight for strong workers’ movements — not only unions — that recognize and build upon the shared interests of a multiracial working class. At schools, let’s struggle against censorship like the opposition to 

 and Black history in the state of Florida while also fighting for 

 like Planting Justice’s in California, and for expanding access to and resources for public schools 

the way the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil

 does. Let’s push for state accountability by planning and constructing the missing infrastructure of our neighborhoods like the socialist shack dwellers movement 

 in South Africa. Their struggle shows how the democratic input of everyday people shapes the built environment of their community, while also recalling the mutual-aid efforts of organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.

In Atlanta, several formations came together to build independent grassroots power to fight Cop City. They have targeted formal legal and political processes but also organized protests, occupied the forest where the city intends to build the police training facility, held a week of actions, and put on music festivals. In response, they have been targeted with sustained and virulent police violence and repression, tarred as terrorists by the state government.

These examples reveal the strategic importance of stable organizations pursuing long-term projects and programs. Uprisings are not enough — constructing an equal and democratic society requires the sustained participation of the people. They are the legitimate creators of the institutions and defenders of rights central to communal life. Beyond the 

 of direct democracy in protests, assemblies, and occupations, we need people power in practice and not just in slogans.

Hammer & Hope

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times, David Paul Morris/Bloomberg, Andri Tambunan/AFP, George Rose, and Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images.

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs via Getty Images.

Issue 2

Uprisings Are Just the Beginning

he state of the country is dismal. The decline of the United States into a more open form of authoritarianism continues. Donald Trump has escalated a potentially 

 the chief civil servant at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on baseless charges that its economic data was “rigged.” The developments of the Jeffrey Epstein story provoke 

 from the president and his administration officials equal parts farcical and chilling. The Voting Rights Act and other major victories of the civil rights movement are “hanging by a thread,” according to 

. And the administration’s assaults on climate protections threaten 

 of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the privatization of public services in the aftermath. Trump’s big, ugly bill, passed into law on July 4, gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement an additional $75 billion, enabling mass deportation and violent control over migrant workers and 

The damage here is connected to damage elsewhere. The Trump administration’s massive cuts to 

 have contributed to food insecurity and famine in several places, including 

; in the last, aid distribution sites run by a 

 where Israeli soldiers have shot to death dozens of Palestinians seeking food as part of a Trump-backed plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Trump’s illegal use of El Salvador’s inhumane carceral system has strengthened its far-right president, Nayib Bukele, whose party just approved constitutional changes allowing unlimited presidential terms. The Trump administration is threatening a trade war with Brazil and sanctioning one of its judges in order to prevent the country from protecting its democracy from the 

 former president and Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.

But cracks in the right-wing offensive are also starting to emerge. Although chiefly symbolic, promises of recognition of a Palestinian state by 

’s conditional threats to do the same, indicate growing momentum in favor of the global movement for justice in Palestine. Students have endured arrests, expulsions, and systematic persecution in order to denounce Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, which is gaining recognition from new sectors of society, including 

, who cynically denied it for more than a year. Norway’s 

 to begin divesting from some Israeli companies may signal that more material costs for the state of Israel are on the way.

More hopeful is the global movement of workers in solidarity with Palestine, which includes trade unions mounting direct actions against 

 and other shipping companies accused of assisting Israel’s genocide. The Trump regime’s attempt to use the military to intimidate Los Angeles was met by an equally militant response by Angelenos, led in part by 

, and other organizations. In Nevada, the Culinary Workers Union made history by 

 of the entire Las Vegas Strip for the first time in the city’s history. In Ohio, community and church leaders are 

 to protect their Haitian neighbors from the growing mass deportation machine. Meanwhile, the growing electoral momentum of the mayoral candidates 

 within the Democratic Party that could lead to a 

Thank you for reading our work. Please donate generously to these grassroots mutual-aid projects that provide crucial work on the front lines:

 is a binational project created in 2023 to provide food, supplies, and medical care to Sudanese refugees in Adré in eastern Chad fleeing genocidal violence in Darfur, as well as displaced people within Sudan.

 is a donations-based aid initiative led by Palestinians who work to provide emergency shelter and aid to displaced families in Gaza.

 is a rural association based in Haiti aimed at promoting cultural and equitable economic development through cooperatives and popular education.

The Workers’ Center of Central New York

 is a grassroots organization focused on political training and labor rights for low-wage workers, including undocumented people.

Issue 7

It Feels Like Hell on Earth, but Another World Is Possible

he Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion is the climax of a long crusade by reactionaries to vilify antidiscrimination practices designed to compensate for the systematic disadvantages that Black Americans have suffered historically. In its zeal to tear down six decades of civil rights protections and affirmative action policies, the Trump regime has turned reality on its head, claiming that white people, men, and Christians are the true victims of discrimination in the U.S.

There has been less public protest over this than other aspects of Trump’s accelerating fascist program — perhaps because the right named as its enemy DEI policies, which racial justice activists 

 as heavily watered-down versions of civil rights and affirmative action programs that were once robust.

Nevertheless, the wider implications of the assault on DEI are obvious. Though there is very little new in what MAGA is saying and seeking, the reactionaries have now amassed vast powers to dismantle hard-won policies designed to ensure dignity, fair treatment, and equitable access to good jobs for all people.

To succeed, they are counting on public amnesia about why these transformative policies were needed in the first place and how they were won. So there is no more important memory to revive today than the story of the fight over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — especially

its contentious Title VII section outlawing employment discrimination on grounds of race, color, sex, national origin, and religion.

hy was stopping employment discrimination so important to the movement that fought for the Civil Rights Act — and so appalling to those who resisted it?

The ruling ideology of the Jim Crow era treated policies that advantaged whites and excluded Blacks as simply the natural order of things. The all-pervasive, habitual employer preference for whites was invisible to those who benefited from it. Employers simply assumed white superiority over unqualified Black people. In 1963, the 

, an Atlanta-based interracial reform group, released a survey detailing corporations’ attitudes about discrimination in hiring practices. Many of those interviewed could not imagine hiring African Americans in sales or service, let alone technical work. A manager for Kaiser Aluminum said it would be “rather ridiculous” to hire a Black salesperson for a company serving mostly white customers.

Because of such biases, it was nearly impossible for African Americans to get better jobs. Across the South in 1960, Black people had “almost all of the household jobs and nearly half the laborers jobs,” human rights activist and economist 

 Breaking into any other kind of work was nearly impossible.

In Atlanta, ministers learned from their parishioners that “it is often necessary for Negro girls with one or more years of college training to work as maids. Negro men must take their college diplomas to the Post Office to work sorting mail.”

As a North Carolina Black woman told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1961, no matter “how much education you might have they won’t give you a chance at a job. It makes you feel awful.” And these experiences weren’t confined to the South. Black Americans had voting rights and access to public accommodations in the North, but not access to good jobs and promotions, outside the few and often struggling Black businesses.

This system of white preference and Black exclusion depended on property rights trumping human rights.

The unquestioned prerogative of employers to do as they wished with their businesses was backed up by a legal system that upheld the so-called freedom of contract — based on the fiction that both parties to a contract were equal under the law, when in fact capital had all the power and hence the true freedom. Workers’ only freedom was to accept or reject what they were offered, a pattern made worse in a region whose rulers crushed union organizing as ruthlessly as Black people’s attempts to vote.

The courts and most of the country’s white citizens believed that employers had “a right to discriminate.”

Black workers had always understood their worth, but their anger grew more acute in the years after World War II, particularly among those who had risked their lives in the war. They had believed they were waging a 

 for victory over fascism in Europe and America, but veterans came home to a country that still failed to honor its founding declaration that “all men are created equal.”

By the mid-1950s, the hypocrisy of a nation that fought fascism overseas but allowed racial terrorism and legal segregation at home set off an explosive contest between the Black freedom struggle on one side and reactionaries, North and South, on the other.

The version of history that most of us were taught about the civil rights movement fails to recognize that economic justice was core to the struggle. The sheer drama of the climactic showdowns to end Jim Crow in public accommodations (most famously lunch counters and buses) and for the right to vote (the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign of 1964 and Selma in 1965) drew attention away from the centrality of the fight to secure access to good jobs.

 who became the first Black woman hired at a local textile mill, which paid much better than the poultry processing plan job she left: “The best thing that has ever happened to black women in the South in my lifetime is a chance to be full-fledged citizens. And that comes from their work. You can’t even pretend to be free without money.”

Demands for jobs were part of even the most iconic movement struggles. The 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott included a now-forgotten demand for, as one participant put it in 

, “a handful of jobs for Negro [bus] drivers.”

Throughout the country, activists inspired by the struggle in the South began calling for access to jobs on a fair basis with whites.

Also in 1955, however, conservatives throughout the U.S. joined forces to rally opposition to civil rights. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review magazine became their mouthpiece.

It may have been based in midtown Manhattan, but its editorial team sided with the

Mississippi-born White Citizens’ Councils, elevated the arguments of militant segregationists, and argued relentlessly against civil rights. So avid was conservative hostility to equal citizenship for Black Americans that the National Review denounced the unanimous Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination in public schools as a “rape of the Constitution.”

The right saw no contradiction between claiming to stand for liberty and opposing the Black freedom movement, because its leaders identified with a conservative tradition that silenced and subordinated Black Americans, based on a definition of liberty crafted by slaveholders who cared about property rights first and foremost. They were unable to imagine African Americans as legitimate members of the electorate, much less qualified for positions of authority. Again and again, conservatives argued that the government should not ensure that African Americans had the same life chances as whites, because Blacks lacked either the ability or the will to succeed.

he conflict reached a new level with the civil rights movement’s Birmingham campaign of spring 1963, in which the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., joined with local activists in a vast direct action campaign.

Most people learn that Birmingham was a fight to gain access to public accommodations and be treated with dignity, one that was answered by beatings by racist mobs,

bombings, and the public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, setting police dogs on nonviolent activists. It was those things, of course. But the campaign vividly fused antidiscrimination demands with calls for economic justice.

Many people know about King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but fewer remember his best-selling book,

, in which it was included. A key theme of that book was access to better jobs. King told America to notice “the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” He had already been insisting to allies that “we must get better jobs in order to help our children to better education and housing, and in order to enjoy some of the entertainment and eating facilities that are now open to us.” King said that “the Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life.”

In the settlement negotiated in Birmingham, local business leaders pledged not only to desegregate Jim Crow lunch counters, restrooms, fitting rooms, and water fountains but to hire “Negroes on a nondiscriminatory basis throughout the industrial community” of the city, including in downtown retail jobs that had been a white monopoly.

Inspired, activists elsewhere took up the fight, including for better jobs, in what the scholar Harvard Sitkoff called “a brushfire of ‘little Birminghams’” — more than 2,000 demonstrations across the nation in 1963. James Farmer, co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, told Congress in 1963 that “unless we establish the right of individuals to gain full employment in keeping with their ability and their qualifications, I think that the other victories which we are winning in places of public accommodations and housing will be hollow victories. It is all right to fight for and win the right to spend money, but it is more vital to win the right to earn it.”

 had put it in 1960, the civil rights protesters were “concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger.”

Big public construction projects paid for with tax dollars but practicing Jim Crow became highly visible targets for protest in the North. NAACP and CORE branches in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Newark, New York, and Pittsburgh organized campaigns for the hiring of Blacks and Puerto Ricans.

Sometimes activists practiced civil disobedience with sit-ins and “lay-ins.”

In the summer of 1963, thousands of demonstrators joined a 

 for jobs for Black New Yorkers in building the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, blocking deliveries and singing freedom songs. In Deep South communities 

, activists organized Black citizens to boycott stores and firms that refused to hire them.

The young Jesse Jackson brought this tactic to Chicago as part of an SCLC initiative called 

, which eventually became a national campaign.

The business press recognized the newly confident struggle: Birmingham had radicalized working-class Blacks across America. “With a forcefulness few businessmen ever expected,” wrote the editors of Business Week, “Negroes nationwide are pressing, individually and in well-organized groups, for more jobs and better jobs. In its drama and impact, the campaign is comparable to the American worker’s drive to unionize at the turn of the century.”

King was always clear about the reasoning behind the campaign for economic justice.

 — a speech from which conservatives love to quote 

 to claim King’s legacy as their own — he made the case for affirmative action before the concept was in common use. “It is impossible to create a formula for the future,” King wrote in 

, “which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special 

 the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something 

 him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis?”

The same question applied doubly for Black women, who experienced the 

intersectional exclusions of race and gender

, pushing them into still worse jobs at lower wages, even as many were heading households. The logic of the campaign for economic justice was that success must be measured not by empty verbiage but by action and results.

The leaders of all wings of the civil rights movement hoped to win a national law, with penalties for continued discrimination and pathways to inclusion. The need for federal intervention and proactive approaches was clear from the antidiscrimination laws that already existed in 28 Northern and Western states by 1964. None were very effective; some even lacked any enforcement mechanism. Their passage was an acknowledgment that discrimination was a problem only government action could solve. But without serious penalties for violations, they achieved only meager results. New York had passed the first employment discrimination law in 1945. But white employers and even union members, especially in construction, soon learned that they could avoid opening jobs to Black people by claiming the pressure to practice equal opportunity was “discrimination in reverse.”

That claim pointed to the second reason for national legislation with enforcement power. Whitney M. Young Jr., head of the National Urban League, confronted white citizens with a simple truth:

“Whites themselves have been the beneficiaries of a preferential system — and nobody really wants to admit this.”

To break down that habitual, unthinking preference, binding legislation with penalties for violating the right to equal employment was essential.

Conservatives would have none of it: They clung to white privilege and the belief in Black inferiority with which they justified it. The National Review made James Jackson Kilpatrick, the intellectual architect of the South’s “

” to Brown v. Board of Education, its primary spokesperson. The Civil Rights Act must not pass, Kilpatrick wrote in late 1963, because it “would undermine the most precious rights of property.”

If “the citizen’s right to discriminate” is destroyed, “the whole basis of individual liberty is destroyed.” Kilpatrick was channeling the century-old “economic liberty” argument against abolition advanced by militant enslavers. Indeed, Kilpatrick quipped that he was “only a little to the south of John C. Calhoun,” the antebellum slaveholding class’s leading antidemocratic theorist.

Conservatives were defending the indefensible.

And thanks to a decade of civil rights protests, lawsuits, books, articles, debates, powerful speeches, and private conversations, most other whites now recognized that. By the time the 1964 Civil Rights Act came before Congress, 85 percent of white Americans supported equal employment opportunity for Black Americans. That was an epic shift. The right had lost a huge battle for the hearts and minds of the voters, owing as much to the repulsiveness of its practices as to the moral power of the movement it fought.

But conservatives wielded outsize power in Congress, not least because of the continuing disenfranchisement of Black voters. Southern segregationists had allied with Northern business conservatives since the late 1930s to block economic and civil rights reform. Now these allies fought the Civil Rights Act.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce portrayed Title VII as the road to dictatorship.

In a style of red-baiting picked up by other opponents, North and South, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which Kilpatrick belonged to, squealed that it should be called the “Socialist Omnibus Bill.”

Had John F. Kennedy still been president, he might not have prevailed with a strong bill against fierce opposition from both Southern segregationists and Northern corporate interests. But his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a New Deal Democrat from Texas whose years as the Senate’s most effective leader had taught him how to get things done.

“I’m shoving in all my stack on this civil rights bill,” said the wily poker player as he worked the phones and twisted arms to get votes. “Politics,” Johnson wrote, in words that remain true today, “goes beyond the art of the possible. It is the art of making possible what seems impossible.”

Yet to win its passage, Johnson had to get the votes of enough pro-business conservatives to overcome the opposition of Southern segregationists. Congressional sponsors of the act had to accept amendments that limited its Title VII employment section outlawing employment discrimination. The enforcement powers of the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were weakened, and businesses with fewer than 100 employees were exempt for a year after the law’s passage. Most damaging, the act as amended prohibited “preferential treatment,” or proportional hiring and quotas. Right-wing critics would use the amended language in the future to insist that nearly all antidiscrimination efforts were really illegal “quotas.”

Activists were left with a vital yet flawed tool to achieve what the act had promised.

Nevertheless, victims of discrimination and their allies achieved a transformation that would have been impossible without the Civil Rights Act and the affirmative action policies adopted in its wake that included benchmarks to judge progress.

 concluded as early as 1975 that “perhaps the most dramatic and largely unnoticed change brought about by the civil rights revolution was a massive transformation in the composition of the black work force.” Millions moved from poverty into the stable working class and middle class, and the numbers of African Americans surged in professions such as law and medicine.

That upgrading meant the ability to buy homes and cars and to send their children to college.

Other oppressed groups also benefited from these reforms. From assembly lines and union halls to college lecture podiums and corporate boardrooms, Latino and Asian American men, women of all groups, 

, and persons with disabilities used the Civil Rights Act to fight discrimination and win fair treatment. Work-related struggles for equality transformed not only individual lives but American culture. As the economic historian 

, by opening up a rigged market that was hurting most Southerners, civil rights reforms enabled the economic development of the South, with white men also gaining significantly. As Wright wrote, “this was a revolution in which almost all parties gained.”

his ongoing transformation toward a fairer, more inclusive America is what Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and their donors and allies want to abort and roll back.

They want to force us back to a time when white, male, and Christian preference was unquestioned.

They believe that property rights should be held sacred, as did James J. Kilpatrick and John C. Calhoun, and that corporations and schools should be denied the ability to practice even the watered-down version of affirmative action that goes under the heading of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Indeed, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing of highly qualified military officers who are not white men demonstrates, this regime actively discriminates against Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and women under the bogus rubric of “merit.”

(How dare Pete Hegseth, whose main “qualification” to run the Pentagon was being a pro-Trump blowhard on Fox News, even as he 

 for poor performance, talk about “merit” in hiring?) The right wing found it terrifying that so many whites also reacted to the shocking murder of George Floyd with a determination to root out institutional racism, so MAGA has made the 

war on critical race theory and DEI practices

But they can take us back to the past only if we allow them to erase its memory. If our silence enables them. If we forget how so many fought so long and so hard to open good jobs to all. If we lose sight of the life-changing transformations that came from the hard-won reforms of this multiracial struggle for economic justice.

As Toni Morrison observed in her brilliant 

, to authoritarians, “truth is trouble.”

In their fear lies a precious power for our side — if we put it to use.

Nancy MacLean

Issue 11

The Forgotten History of the Civil Rights Movement’s Fight for Economic Justice

n Minneapolis this winter, families went into hiding. Federal agents stalked the streets, the drugstores, the bus stops for their next catch. They brought hell.

But Minnesotans have shown us what you do in hell.

You carry a whistle. You patrol your block for ICE, or walk kids to school, or deliver groceries to those who are trapped. Every neighborhood is on a local Signal chat, and upwards of 20,000 people have been trained as legal observers. Volunteers brew tea for the observers, drive home families released from lockup in the middle of the night.

Civil society formed a front, a rapid-response army on the streets and a supportive underground. People who had never organized or demonstrated before took up constructive forms of resistance. Previous waves of protest over the years sometimes felt like marches to nowhere, with no clear entry point for activism. Minnesota has modeled a movement that anyone — everyone — can join.

No movement ever appears from nowhere. It has been seeded by earlier campaigns and by painstaking organizing work. In Minnesota, it was preceded by years of 

multiracial, interfaith coalition building

 and was supported by a robust institutional left that had already developed muscles coordinating among one another and with the grassroots. And it was inextricable from the movement for Black lives.

A decade ago, in 2015, activists held an occupation outside Minneapolis’ Fourth Precinct for more than two weeks after cops killed a 24-year-old Black man named Jamar Clark. The next year, school cafeteria worker Philando Castile was shot point-blank by police during a traffic stop with his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter in the car. When the officer was acquitted, thousands took to the streets, and protesters blocked the interstate. Then, in 2020, Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd. The Twin Cities came out first, in force, taking tear gas and rubber bullets; the rest of the country followed.

People faced these atrocities, according to Marcia Howard, president of the teacher chapter of Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59, “by actually sitting down and talking to each other — the connections forged from organizations, communities, church homes, neighbors, sitting together and having conversations about how we got to the place we were in.”

“And those conversations, though they were difficult, actually tilled the ground and gave us the opportunity to plant the seed of coalitions that we are now seeing, the tendrils, the growth that has led to the resistance movement,” she told the journalist Luis Feliz Leon in an interview for Hammer & Hope.

Darnella Frazier, who filmed Floyd’s murder, had been one of Howard’s students. The protests pulled Howard into organizing. She ended up spending years at George Floyd Square.

“People do not understand that the current regime has picked the wrong city and the wrong state to fuck with,” she said.

“Operation Metro Surge” was pitched as a horror story starring Somali immigrants, a pornographic right-wing welfare-fraud revenge fantasy against people Trump in December referred to as “garbage.”

Hammer&Hope

NO. 11

Summer 2026

The Battle to Tell Black History

The Forgotten History of the Civil Rights Movement’s Fight for Economic Justice

The Supreme Court Blesses the Destruction of Black Electoral Power

Israel’s New Lynching Law Was Inspired by America’s Death Penalty

Archive

Spring 2026

Winter 2025

Fall 2025

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NO. 11

Summer 2026

The Battle to Tell Black History

The Forgotten History of the Civil Rights Movement’s Fight for Economic Justice

The Supreme Court Blesses the Destruction of Black Electoral Power

Israel’s New Lynching Law Was Inspired by America’s Death Penalty

Archive

Spring 2026

Winter 2025

Fall 2025

FREE TO READ

SIGN UP TODAY

FREE
TO READ

SIGN UP
TODAY