A New Left Forms, June and July sessions on the 1960s

with Jenny Brown and others
6 Tuesdays, 7:30 – 9:30pm: June 13, 20, 27 & July 11, 18 and 25 (no class July 4)

June 13-27. The music didn’t die.
We will consider the many cultural influences of the first generation born who at day one were facing the bomb and the looming threat of mutually assured destruction. Reading and discussion of Jeff Nuttal’s Bomb Culture, and Tariq Ali’s Street Fighting Years, where Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical.
July 11. Mexico’s 68 Experience. Tlatelolco.
A look at the 1968 student movement in Mexico and the Tlatelolco Massacre in which a popular uprising was attacked by the Mexican military killing nearly 400 students, sympathizers and bystanders, just weeks before the 1968 Olympics.
July 18 and 25. 60s Women’s Liberation Movement
July 18 Origins & Theory: The Women’s Liberation Movement is rooted in the Black-led Southern Civil Rights Movement and most of its theory pioneers, white and Black, were full-time workers in that movement. They also drew from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. As the Black Freedom movement turned to Black Power, feminists took theory from Black Power and applied it to their newborn movement. We’ll read original sources from both the Black-led and majority-white branches of women’s liberation.
July 25 The Power of History: This class will analyze what made the 1960s Women’s Liberation Movement spread fast and win victories, and also what made it vulnerable to watering down and liberal takeover. We will read analyses from Women’s Liberation Movement organizers written after the height of the movement’s power.

Jenny Brown is an organizer with National Women’s Liberation and has been involved in feminist theory and organizing since 1988, first with Gainesville Women’s Liberation in Gainesville, Florida and then with the Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action, a movement think-tank and archive based in New York. She co-authored the Redstockings book, Women’s Liberation and National Healthcare: Confronting the Myth of America and the Labor Notes book How to Jump Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers along with numerous essays and articles. She was also a co-chair of a Labor Party Local Organizing Committee in Gainesville, Florida and is a former editor of Labor Notes.

Those who have enrolled in the ongoing New Left series are already registered for these two sessions