Issues of entrenched, systemic and institutionalized racism have long been matters of great concern in America. While progress was undeniably made for many black and minority Americans in education, employment, housing and other areas of social advancements since the '60s, deep and enduring remnants of racial injustice, police brutality and…

Heggert and Flowers (2019) offer important insights into how social media provides students with important opportunities to engage in meaningful civic engagement and political activism. They argue that students are more politically active than some recent studies would have us believe because they are utilizing social media platforms, methods not…

While Muhammad Ali has been the subject of countless articles and books written by sports historians and journalists, rhetorical scholars have largely ignored him. This oversight is surprising given both the tradition of social movement scholarship within rhetorical studies and Ali's influential eloquence as a world renowned celebrity espousing…

As of late, it would seem that the commonly sought after concept of collaboration has lost its appeal and, arising in its aftermath, is a reconfigured front of conflict between the public and private spheres of American life. In this current attack on the public, the stage is ripe for disobedience in all its various forms and functions to stand up…

Over forty years ago, Howard Zinn identified the problem as not one of civil disobedience, but of civil "obedience". He confronted the problem of remaining obedient to laws and rules even "in the face of the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty." Framed in an early childhood context, this article explores the value of…

Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into…

Uses Kenneth Burke's "comic frame" to interpret and assess Gandhi's leadership of the Indian civil rights movement and to maintain the relevance and usefulness of the civil disobedience to other movements. (JD)

Examining the nascent rhetoric of the Young Lords Organization's (YLO) 1969 "garbage offensive," this essay argues that the long-standing constraints on agency to which they were responding demanded an inventive rhetoric that was decolonizing both in its aim and in its form. Blending diverse forms of discourse produced an intersectional rhetoric…

A reporter gives her personal impressions of the Seneca Falls Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice and the march by members of the encampment to the Seneca Army Depot. Confrontations between the demonstrators and conservative counterdemonstrators and the army response are also covered. (IS)

In recent decades many people came to know Howard Zinn for his outspoken advocacy on a wide range of progressive causes, including civil rights, free speech, workers' rights, education reform, and opposition to U.S. imperialism. The author's own first encounter with Howard Zinn's special combination of scholarship and activism occurred several…

Excerpts from speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., are reprinted. Topics discussed include discrimination, the South, education, nonviolent resistance, poverty, economic opportunity, and world peace. (LH)

Through catalytic issue management, corporations proactively seek to affect resolutions of issues in which they have some interest. Corporations now catalyze legal changes by purposely disobeying existing law, facing the associated consequences, and lobbying for desired changes. (Author)

An email calling for support against racism during the late 2005 Cronulla riots left some wondering about the incapacity of critical intellectuals to consider the riots and revenge attacks which followed them in the same light--as an instance of inter-communal strife. The author of this article argues that the call for support against racism was…

This article, was written shortly after the death of Rosa Parks, as her body was lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC. It discusses the significance of her legacy as the first woman, among the 29 Americans to be so honored. Although Parks was an ordinary citizen, she helped bring about the civil rights movement in the U.S. after…

Contemporary university administrators are usually wimps, and timidity in facing easily enraged campus radicals only invites outrageous demands which, in turn, subvert intellectual life. This must be changed. For much of human history leaders had to display physical valor and this trait should be restored to the college administrator job…