American Protest Literature

<p>"I like a little rebellion now and then"--so wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. This is the first anthology to collect and examine an American literature that holds the nation to its highest ideals, castigating it when it falls short and pointing the way to a better collective future.<p>"American Protest Literature" presents sources from eleven protest movements--political, social, and cultural--from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. Each section reprints documents from the original phase of the movement as well as evidence of its legacy in later times. Informative headnotes place the selections in historical context and draw connections with other writings within the anthology and beyond. Sources include a wide variety of genres--pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, legal documents, poems, short stories, photographs, posters--and a range of voices from prophetic to outraged to sorrowful, from U.S. Presidents to the disenfranchised. Together they provide an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.

Foreword by John Stauffer
Introduction

1. Declaring Independence: The American Revolution
THE LITERATURE
"A Political Litany" (1775)
Philip Freneau
From Common Sense (1776)
Tom Paine
From "The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men" (1776)
John Witherspoon
The Declaration of Independence (1776)
From Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur
THE LEGACY
"The Working Men's Party Declaration of Independence" (1829)
George Evans
"Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments" (1848)
From "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849)
Henry David Thoreau
From "Provisional Constitution" (1858)
John Brown
"Declaration of Interdependence by the Socialist Labor Party" (1895)
Daniel De Leon

2. Unvanishing the Indian: Native American Rights
THE LITERATURE
Speech to Governor William Harrison at Vincennes (1810)
Tecumseh
"An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" (1833)
William Apess
"Indian Names" (1834)
Lydia Sigourney
From From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916)
Charles Eastman
From Black Elk Speaks (1932)
Black Elk and John G. Neihardt
THE LEGACY
From Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)
Dee Brown
"What Is the American Indian Movement?" (1973)
Birgil Kills Straight and Richard LaCourse
"American Indians and Vietnamese" (1973)
Roland Winkler
From Lakota Woman (1990)
Mary Crow Dog
"The Exaggeration of Despair" (1996)
Sherman Alexie

3. Little Books That Started a Big War: Abolition and Antislavery
THE LITERATURE
From Appeal to the Coloured Citizens (1829)
David Walker
From Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
From "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" (1852)
Frederick Douglass
Prison Letters (1859)
John Brown
From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Harriet Jacobs
THE LEGACY
The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution (1863, 1865-70)
"Solidarity Forever" (1915)
Ralph Chaplin
From "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949)
James Baldwin
From The Defiant Ones (1958)
Stanley Kramer
From Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999)
Kevin Bales

4. This Land Is Herland: Women's Rights and Suffragism
THE LITERATURE
From "Shall Women Have the Right to Vote?" (1851)
Wendell Phillips
From "Women and Suffrage" (1867)
Lydia Maria Child
From "Declaration and Protest of the Women of the United States" (1876)
National Woman Suffrage Association
"Solitude of Self" (1892)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
THE LEGACY
"Frederick Douglass" (1908)
Mary Church Terrell
From "Why Women Should Vote" (1910)
Jane Addams
From Herland (1915)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Nineteenth Amendment and Equal Rights Amendments (1920, 1923, 1943)
"Now We Can Begin" (1920)
Crystal Eastman

5. Capitalism's Discontents: Socialism and Industry
THE LITERATURE
From Life in the Iron Mills (1861)
Rebecca Harding Davis
From Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)
Edward Bellamy
From How the Other Half Lives (1890)
Jacob Riis
From The Jungle (1906)
Upton Sinclair
"Sadie Pfeifer" and "Making Human Junk" (1908, 1915)
Lewis Hine
THE LEGACY
"The People's Party Platform" (1892)
Ignatius Donnelly
Food and Drugs Act and Meat Inspection Act (1906)
Statement to the Court (1918)
Eugene V. Debs
"Farewell, Capitalist America!" (1929)
William (Big Bill) Haywood
From Nickel and Dimed (2001)
Barbara Ehrenreich

6. Strange Fruit: Against Lynching
THE LITERATURE
From Southern Horrors (1892)
Ida B. Wells
"Jesus Christ in Texas" (1920)
W.oE.oB. Du Bois
"The Lynching" (1920)
Claude McKay
"Strange Fruit" (1937, 1939)
Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday
From "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1936)
Richard Wright
THE LEGACY
"Bill for Negro Rights and the Suppression of Lynching" (1934)
League of Struggle for Negro Rights
"Federal Law Is Imperative" (1947)
Helen Gahagan Douglas
"Take a Stand against the Klan" (1980)
The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee
From "AmeriKKKa 1998: The Lynching of James Byrd" (1998)
Michael Slate
"The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930" (2000)


7. Dust Tracks on the Road: The Great Depression
THE LITERATURE
"Migrant Mother" (1936)
Dorothea Lange
"Farmer and Sons" (1936)
Arthur Rothstein
From The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
John Steinbeck
Hale County, Alabama (1936, 1941)
Walker Evans
From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) James Agee
THE LEGACY
"Tom Joad" (1940)
Woody Guthrie
From 12 Million Black Voices (1941)
Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam
From The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955)
Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes
From The Other America (1962)
Michael Harrington
"Poverty Is a Crime" (1972)
Malik

8. The Dungeon Shook: Civil Rights and Black Liberation
THE LITERATURE
"Montgomery: Reflections of a Loving Alien" (1956)
Robert Granat
"My Dungeon Shook" (1962)
James Baldwin
From "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Marion Trikosko, "Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C." (1963)
From "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964)
Malcolm X
THE LEGACY
"On Civil Rights" (1963)
John F. Kennedy
"The American Promise" (1965)
Lyndon B. Johnson
"Black Art" (1966)
Amiri Baraka
"Panther Power" (1989)
Tupac Shakur
"Ten Point Program" (2001)
New Black Panther Party

9. A Problem That Had No Name: Second-Wave Feminism
THE LITERATURE
"I Stand Here Ironing" (1956)
Tillie Olsen
From The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Betty Friedan
"Statement of Purpose" (1966)
National Organization for Women
"Women's Liberation Has a Different Meaning for Blacks" (1970)
Renee Ferguson
"For the Equal Rights Amendment" (1972)
Shirley Chisholm
THE LEGACY
Letter to Betty Friedan (1963)
Gerda Lerner
"Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (1977)
Audre Lorde
"The Female and the Silence of a Man" (1989)
June Jordan
From The Morning After (1993)
Katie Roiphe
"Women Don't Riot" (1998)
Ana Castillo

10. The Word Is Out: Gay Liberation
THE LITERATURE
From "Howl" (1956)
Allen Ginsberg
Stonewall Documents (1969-1970)
From "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto" (1969)
Carl Wittman
"The Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements" (1970)
Huey P. Newton
From Street Theater (1982)
Doric Wilson
THE LEGACY
Still/Here (1994)
ACT UP * "Read My Lips" (1988)
Bill T. Jones
From Angels in America (1990, 1991)
Tony Kushner
"Dyke Manifesto" (1993)
Lesbian Avengers
From Stone Butch Blues (1993)
Leslie Feinberg
Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003)

11. From Saigon to Baghdad: The Vietnam War and Beyond
THE LITERATURE
"I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag" (1965)
Country Joe and the Fish
"Advent 1966" (1966)
Denise Levertov
From Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967)
Norman Mailer
"Saigon" (1968)
Eddie Adams
"Napalm" (1972)
Nick (Huynh Cong) Ut
From Dispatches (1967-1969, 1977)
Michael Herr
THE LEGACY
"April 30, 1975" (1975)
John Balaban
From "How to Tell a True War Story" (1987)
Tim O'Brien
"Speak Out" (2003)
Poets against the War: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Poem of Disconnected Parts" (2005)
Robert Pinsky

"Poem of War" (2003)
Jim Harrison
"Who Would Jesus Torture?" (2004)
Clinton Fein
From Born on the Fourth of July (1976, 2005)
Ron Kovic

Afterword
by Howard Zinn
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index