In the shadow of the George Floyd Rebellion, the pandemic, and the rise of the far right, we ask: What does anti-capitalist resistance look like today? What is the current terrain we are organizing on? What are our strategic priorities and challenges?
ML Smith – Co-Director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty (MADP) ML is a criminal punishment system-impacted advocate, abolitionist, and activist who experienced incarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her existence within the intersections of being Black, a woman, disabled, systems-impacted, and experiencing generational poverty are the foundations of her ideological framework, which is rooted in advocating for those suffering & struggling within a society created, built, and carried out to oppress, marginalize, and dehumanize targeted vulnerable communities.
Dylan Rodriquez – Professor, Dept. of Black Study and Dept. of Media and Cultural Studies Co-Director, Center for Ideas and Society. His writing, teaching, and scholarly activism confront the historical regimes of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence that are normalized in everyday state, cultural, and social formations, including policing, incarceration, and domestic war. His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit oppressive circumstances in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, abolition, and radical futurity. Rodríguez is a founding member of the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance. He is the author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide.
Baba Charles Simmons – Emeritus Professor of Media and Human Rights at Marygrove College, Detroit. Eastern Michigan University Emeritus Professor of Law and Journalism, and former Faculty of Journalism Howard University School of Communications. Baba Charles Simmons was a member of UHURU in 1962 in Detroit. He is a former member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and a United Nations International Correspondent for the Muhammad Speaks newspaper, where he covered the wars of national liberation in Africa. He is the Founder and Co-Director of The Hush House Black Community Museum and Leadership Training Institute for Human Rights, located in Detroit
Tracy Rosenthal: Tracy Rosenthal is a co-founder of the L.A. Tenants Union, now the largest dues-funded tenants union in the country. Their writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The LA Times, Jewish Currents, and Commune. Their book Abolish Rent, co-written with their mentor Leonardo Vilchis, is forthcoming from Verso.
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 