Struggle On Their Minds

American political thought has been shaped by those who fought back against social inequality, economic exclusion, the denial of political representation, and slavery, the country's original sin. Yet too often the voices of African American resistance have been neglected, silenced, or forgotten. In this timely book, Alex Zamalin considers key moments of resistance to demonstrate its current and future necessity, focusing on five activists across two centuries who fought to foreground slavery and racial injustice in American political discourse. Struggle on Their Minds shows how the core values of the American political tradition have been continually challenged—and strengthened—by antiracist resistance, creating a rich legacy of African American political thought that is an invaluable component of contemporary struggles for racial justice. Zamalin looks at the language and concepts put forward by the abolitionists David Walker and Frederick Douglass, the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, the Black Panther Party organizer Huey Newton, and the prison abolitionist Angela Davis. Each helped revise and transform ideas about power, justice, community, action, and the role of emotion in political action. Their thought encouraged abolitionists to call for the eradication of slavery, black journalists to chastise American institutions for their indifference to lynching, and black radicals to police the police and to condemn racial injustice in the American prison system. Taken together, these movements pushed political theory forward, offering new language and concepts to sustain democracy in tense times. Struggle on Their Minds is a critical text for our contemporary moment, showing how the political thought that comes out of resistance can energize the practice of democratic citizenship and ultimately help address the prevailing problem of racial injustice.

A revolutionary call to overthrow society’s mental controls and expand consciousness for the greater good of humanity • Explores the tactics used to control consciousness, such as misinformation, debt systems, fear conditioning, and the distraction of entertainment and technology • Reveals the emerging mechanisms for neurogenetic evolution within our brains that will enable us to throw off the shackles of mental control • Explains how to break through the barriers inhibiting conscious evolution and restore our connection with Nature and the Divine Within society there exists a silent war. The battlefield is our everyday lives: our education, our work, our leisure, our emotional and spiritual well-being, and our thinking and perceptions. Our very sense of “reality” is deliberately engineered to work against conscious evolution and preserve social norms. In short, we are all part of a war of consciousness. And the opportunity is at hand for us to win. Assessing the ways modern societies limit consciousness and keep humanity obedient and distracted from their inner lives, Kingsley Dennis presents an eye-opening investigation of the way our minds have been programmed to preserve incumbent power structures and their rules. He exposes the tactics employed for thousands of years by the elite to control our minds, including misinformation and propaganda, debt systems, consumerism, religious doctrine, scientific authority, economic “uncertainties,” fear of terrorist attacks and armageddon, distraction through entertainment and technology, as well as the false belief that we are separate from Nature and the Divine. Despite these obstacles, humanity is awakening to culture’s imposed limits on perception through an accelerating rise in collective empathy and awareness. Exploring the biology of consciousness, Dennis reveals the emerging mechanisms for neurogenetic evolution within the brains of gifted individuals, psychics, and visionaries and the coming increases in solar and magnetic energies that will activate them within all of us. Explaining how we can free up mental and emotional energy to break through the barriers inhibiting conscious evolution, he shows that by taking back our minds and changing the way we think, we can restore our connection with Nature and the Divine and lead humanity into a new age of harmony and awareness.

During the Vietnam War, the United States embarked on an unusual crusade on behalf of the government of South Vietnam. Known as the pacification program, it sought to help South Vietnam's government take root and survive as an independent, legitimate entity by defeating communist insurgents and promoting economic development and political reforms. In this book, Richard Hunt provides the first comprehensive history of America's "battle for hearts and minds," the distinctive blending of military and political approaches that took aim at the essence of the struggle between North and South Vietnam.Hunt concentrates on the American role, setting pacification in the larger political context of nation building. He describes the search for the best combination of military and political action, incorporating analysis of the controversial Phoenix program, and illuminates the difficulties the Americans encountered with their sometimes reluctant ally. The author explains how hard it was to get the U.S. Army involved in pacification and shows the struggle to yoke divergent organizations (military, civilian, and intelligence agencies) to serve one common goal. The greatest challenge of all was to persuade a surrogate--the Saigon government--to carry out programs and to make reforms conceived of by American officials.The book concludes with a careful assessment of pacification's successes and failures. Would the Saigon government have flourished if there had been more time to consolidate the gains of pacification? Or was the regime so fundamentally flawed that its demise was preordained by its internal contradictions? This pathbreaking book offers startling and provocative answers to these and other important questions about our Vietnam experience.

Minds Stayed on Freedom is a vivid portrait of the civil rights struggle in one Mississippi county. While the national Movement has been painted in broad strokes by journalists and scholars, here the experiences of ordinary people bring definition to the lived texture of the Civil Rights Movement. Interviewed by local youths, Movement veterans recount how they overcame their fear in the face of terrorist resistance and collectively transformed the political and social fabric of their community. Their stories were repeated across the rural South, although seldom with the force and vigor experienced in Holmes County, located in the Mississippi plantation country. The teenagers who conducted this oral history project strike a rare balance between poignant prose and pathbreaking research. The detailed picture that emerges from the interviews brings into sharp relief issues that remain hazy in studies of national scope: the crucial resource of black land ownership, the limited extent of church involvement, the commitment to armed self-defense, the role of women, divisions of social class within the Movement, the range of white response and retaliation, and the interplay between direct action and legal tactics. Minds Stayed on Freedom provides plenty of fodder for academic analysis, but the interviews retain a raw, dramatic power. As project advisor Jay MacLeod of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center writes in his introduction, "The drama in Holmes County began when a group of black farmers attempted to register to vote. Whites retaliated, pitting themselves directly against a small group of courageous black activists. The two sides battled each other. But they also battled for the hearts and minds of the black population. The tiny local Movement, armed with a vision of the future, tried to draw its people off the sidelines and into active involvement. Whites ntried to keep Holmes County blacks in their 'place' with a campaign of terror and intimidation. Minds Stayed

The Struggle for Peace of a Gullah Mind captures every aspect of American life and its diverse cultures. This first small volume of poetry reflects Greens passionate and encouraging words to not only survive, but to taste the rich heritage of Gullah storytelling. He establishes himself as a vivid poet by introducing readers to the precipitous characters he has known. Al developed his keen insights from observing the quilting patterns his mother would use when making gifts for family and friends, and by accompanying his father on walks down long dirt roads and winding creek bends. Through these experiences, Al illustrates how poets, like abstract artists, depict life through myriad images, shapes, and colors.

Struggle on Their Minds shows how the American political tradition have been continually challenged--and strengthened--by antiracist resistance, creating a rich legacy of African American thought. Alex Zamalin focuses on five activists across two centuries who fought to foreground slavery and racial injustice in American political discourse.

"Compelling, powerful and necessary." --Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The story of our most fundamental human right - and why it is in grave danger Without a moment's pause, we share our most intimate thoughts with trillion-dollar tech companies. Their algorithms categorize us and jump to troubling conclusions about who we are. They also shape our everyday thoughts, choices and actions - from who we date to whether we vote. But this is just the latest front in an age-old struggle. Part history and part manifesto, Freedom to Think explores how the powerful have always sought to influence how we think and what we buy. Connecting the dots from Galileo to Alexa, human rights lawyer Susie Alegre charts the history and fragility of our most important human right: freedom of thought. Filled with shocking case-studies across politics, criminal justice, and everyday life, this ground-breaking book shows how our mental freedom is under threat like never before. Bold and radical, Alegre argues that only by recasting our human rights for the digital age can we safeguard our future.

The 'rule of law' is more than the mere existence and application of law within the sphere of state activity. Contemporary Chinese debate on the 'rule of law' underlines the limiting of arbitrary government, the materialisation of 'human rights', legal protection of 'rights and interests' and the principle of equality in the impartial legal mediation of conflicts within society's 'structure of interests'. Based upon China interviews and a comprehensive survey of the domestic press and Chinese-language legal journal materials, this book places pre- and post-Tiananmen Square legal reform in political context. The evolving contents of specific laws across the departments of constitutional, administrative, criminal, civil and economic law are assessed in light of the politics and intellectual dynamic of China's legal circles in their struggle to create a 'rule of law'.