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By the mid s, the tides had begun to change in how scholars told the history of slavery. For generations, historians propagated the narrative that slavery benefited people of African descent because they were innately indolent, inferior, and in need of white supervision. Beginning in the s, scholars began to challenge that view by uncovering accounts of slave revolts as well as compelling evidence of everyday acts of resistance and defiance. This scholarship found its audience not among academics but in the general public. These new interpretations also helped galvanize the civil rights movement, uncovering a tradition of black resistance that inspired a range of other social movements. There, historians who had been blacklisted from the academy taught working-class adults about the history of slavery.

On the morning of August 28, , Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While King spoke as the face of the civil rights movement , another man stood behind the scenes, an indispensable force within the movement. He was Bayard Rustin, a man whose life was shaped by the very prejudices the movement fought against, not only because of his race, but also because he was gay. Rustin would spend his life fighting for the rights of others, even while facing discrimination of his own. To the hundreds of thousands who were bused to Washington for the march, Rustin was synonymous with the movement.

The book compiled essays Trotsky wrote in the s and s criticizing Social Democrats and Stalinists for failing to interpret correctly the capitalist character of fascism and its imminent threat to the German working class. Broadly, Trotsky argued that the failure to understand and fight fascism could cripple both working-class struggles and the capacity of Communist organizations to transform society. But what were the costs to American writers who themselves held radical commitments and considered themselves revolutionaries?

W hen civil rights leaders met at the Roosevelt Hotel in Harlem in early July to hammer out the ground rules by which they would work together to organise the March on Washington there was really only one main sticking point: Bayard Rustin. Rustin, a formidable organiser and central figure in the civil rights movement, was a complex and compelling figure. Raised a Quaker, his political development would take him through pacifism, communism, socialism and into the civil rights movement in dramatic fashion. In , after refusing to fight in World War Two, he had been jailed as a conscientious objector. It was primarily through him that the leadership would adopt non-violent direct action not only as a strategy but a principle.