Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice

Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice, by Erik Loomis (New York: The New Press, 2025)

Erik Loomis is “sad, horrified, and outraged” by the second presidency of Donald Trump, an “authoritarian imbecile.”   Desperate for improvement, he has issued a call for Americans to organize.  Building on his A History of America in Ten Strikes, he now turns to individuals. In Organizing America: Stories of Americans who Fought for Justice, he tells “twenty stories of great American organizers and activists” whose experiences he hopes will inspire action. Written in a personal, informal style, supported by endnote source citations, his book discusses activists from the eighteenth century to the present, beginning with Pennsylvania Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay and concluding with California farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta. 

Loomis is interested in human beings rather than heroes, including “failures as well as . . . successes.”  Accordingly, “they tried and failed,” and sometimes “screwed up.”  As imperfect human beings they could be contradictory.  For example, the legendary Eugene V. Debs believed in democratic unionism but also told racist jokes, and the American Railway Union that he headed denied membership to Blacks.

On the other hand, Maggie Walker is not as well-known as Debs and was an incredible force for the advancement of Blacks in late nineteenth century Richmond, Virginia.  In an era of rampant anti-Black violence and racial segregation, she epitomized Black self-help in several areas.  She actively championed economic self-sufficiency via a fraternal society, the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL), a newspaper, the St. Luke Herald, a financial institution, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, and numerous other organizations.  All were aimed at improving the lives of Black people, especially women, in business and politics.  According to Loomis, the white suffragists “wanted their movement to have nothing to do with Black women,” but she refused to let them.

Considered individually or as a group, the biographical subjects in this book are often overwhelming and herein rescued from oblivion.  They were fighters for social justice who should be household names.  For example, we should not forget Clara Lemlich, who was born in the Ukraine.  Speaking in Yiddish before a crowd at Cooper Union in New York, she ignited the “Uprising of the 20,000” shirtwaist workers in 1909.  Coal miners should recall Frank Little.  A prominent, outspoken organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in 1917 Little arrived in Butte, Montana during a strike of copper miners and shortly after the United States entered the European war, an act the union bitterly condemned.   Striking IWW miners in Bisbee, Arizona had just been brutally deported and left to languish in the desert of New Mexico.  Now, in Butte, Little denounced the war, contending that the United States had “no interest” in it, and was lynched by being dragged behind an automobile and then left hanging from a railroad bridge. Hated by many transit straphangers, Mike Quill, the symbol of New York’s Transport Workers Union, made his organization a force that could not be ignored.  In the 1960s many people condemned Robert Williams for his advocacy of armed Black self-defense against racism, support for revolutionary Fidel Castro in Cuba, and protest against involvement of the United States in the war in Vietnam.  Though out of the mainstream of the civil rights movement, his presence could not be ignored, and now it is recalled.

Loomis’s activists are intriguing.  In addition to those cited above, the book includes Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee, labor feminist Lucy Randolph Mason, Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizer Ella Baker, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Bob Moses.  The list is remarkably eclectic, also featuring mine worker organizer Clint Jencks, late-life organizer Yuri Kochiyama, anti-war Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, and gay rights advocate Barbara Gittings.  All told there is much to savor, providing evidence if it is ever questioned that the United States has a sturdy radical tradition.

Nevertheless, could this book actually help achieve Loomis’s goal, which is to counteract Donald Trump?  Are yesterday’s tactics relevant today amidst Trump’s rampant nativism, foreign policy isolationism, hyper patriotism and rejection of civil rights and other social justice advances of the past half century?  Has the activism of the past laid a solid foundation for the present and future?  Or have other considerations, such as immigration, employment, inflation, abortion, gun control and gender identity now become too dominant?  If past causes have remained relevant and can be welded into a positive force while acknowledging and addressing legitimate contemporary concerns, there is hope for us.

Reviewed by Robert D. Parmet, York College of The City University of New York

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