Beginning with the "ghetto riot" at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village in 1969, an open gay rights movement emerged and had been a significant force in the larger people's movement. Before the Stonewall uprising, however, an instrumental figure in the movement for lesbian and gay rights was Harry Hay, a one-time member of the Communist Party USA, a trade unionist and cultural activist. Hay helped found the first gay liberation group in the US, laid a theoretical basis for gay rights, and helped pave the way for the rebellions of the 1960s and beyond.

If she had been a partisan of capitalism, Louise Thompson Patterson would have been a Horatio Alger heroine, lionized today as a pioneering woman of the Harlem Renaissance and a role model for both African Americans and women.

The classic epic labor epic film Salt of the Earth, filmed on location by blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers, immortalized the strike for the benefit of all who seek to throw off their chains. Salt of the Earth Labor College was founded in the early 1990s in Tucson, Arizona in the copper mining belt.

I was introduced to Abraham Polonsky through two films on late-night television that aired around 1957. The films were Body and Soul and Force of Evil. Both starred John Garfield at the peak of his powers, both were written by Polonsky, and he directed the second, darker film as well. Abraham Polonsky was a filmmaker and novelist whose work consistently critiqued the violence and corruption of capitalism.

We have been too long deluded by those who live in ease and grow rich by our productions, and have been blindly led to support men for office whose interest in the present state of society is directly opposed to our own. All our legislators and rulers are nominated by the accumulating class and controlled by their opinions. We have too long been deceived by designing men of both political parties … How long, my fellow workingmen, will we allow ourselves to be deceived?

So spoke William Heighton in an address to workers at a Universalist Church in Philadelphia in 1827.