Overview

This book tells the story of Ivory Perry, a black worker and community activist who, for more than thirty years, has distributed the leaflets, carried the picket signs, and planned and participated in the confrontations that were essential to the success of protest movements. Using oral histories and extensive archival research, George Lipsitz examines the culture of opposition through the events of Perry's life of commitment and illumines the social and political changes and conflicts that have convulsed the United States during the past fifty years.

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9781566393218

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Reviews

This powerful book tells of Ivory Perry's choice of a life of protest not in splendid isolation, but in intimate conversation with our world Perry knows and can tell us what it is to be poor and black in America. His story assigns our task. --William S. McFeely, University of Georgia A very rich history of a rank and file leader of the black movement... Hopefully it will be a prototype for books that emphasize the fact that social movements put up their own leaders whose qualities of leadership are precisely the same as the values and aspirations of the members of the movement. --George Rawick, University of Missouri at St. Louis More than a simple biography, this compelling portrait tells the ways in which Afro-Americans' long history of a culture of resistance is passed on and reinterpreted in a people's ongoing struggle against a racist and class-based society. Scholars will find this invaluable text a model work in the tradition of intersecting history, society, and biography. --Melvin L. Oliver, UCLA Those who would understand the changed realities of racial politics in St. Louis and ponder what might lie ahead should not ignore this thoroughly researched, well-written, persuasive book. --St. Louis Post-Dispatch Lipsitz may be the first American historian of radical social protest who gives full range to the psychological complexities of the historical actors, without either scolding or essentially lionizing the chief protagonist. The narrative, which unravels almost like a novel, is both stirring and immensely tragic. --Mari Jo Buhle, Brown University

Author Information

George Lipsitz is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. The author of six books, he most recently published Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s.

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