Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

Big time college sports have distorted the intellectual mission of colleges and universities for decades—and we’re in a particularly volatile period as athletes organize themselves into unions and demand a share of the riches that they’ve created with their labor, as well as the fashioning of a system that makes intercollegiate athletics increasingly indistinguishable from professional sports. The...

The mass incarceration system has been dubbed “the new Jim Crow”—there are now more Black men in prison or on probation or parole than there were living in bondage as chattel slaves in 1850. There are significantly more people caught up in the system of incarceration and supervision in America today—over six million—than inhabited Stalin’s gulag at its height. And while the United States constitut...

Thomas Jefferson was the masterly author of the ringing and rousing Declaration of Independence as well as a human trafficker and serial rapist. The second president  embodies James Baldwin’s observation that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” The US is a settler-colonial colossus whose founde...

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) led by Karen Lewis, a charismatic high school chemistry teacher, was elected to lead the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010.  Lewis was a brilliant, transformational labor leader, and CORE developed a forceful form of social justice union organizing they called “organizing for the common good.” They foregrounded the best interests of the child, an...

Solidarity takes on many forms but for over four decades one vivid example rose out of a design and print studio in Havana, Cuba. Born in 1966 out of the Tricontinental Conference the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America ( Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina — OSPAAAL ) strove to unite liberation movements across the th...

Dave Zirin (“Edge of Sports;” and  Under the Tree,  Episode #58 ) gave a delightful and provocative talk at a conference a few years ago called “Will There Be Sports Under Socialism?” The short answer—of course!—human beings have played games and sports from the beginning, and there’s no stopping us. But capitalism has distorted and mangled our natural desire and capacity to play in its...

The Invisible Institute—with its evocative and mysterious name—exists in the proud tradition of “guerrilla journalism,” a difficult to define or pigeon-hole practice of human rights inquiry and documentation. This dazzling collection of journalists, archivists, writers, thinkers, organic intellectuals-without-portfolio, organizers, activists, data analysts and other collaborators pioneer a form of...

Thousands of student visas cancelled by the government! Legal residents snatched off the streets by masked agents, detained and deported! Federal research grants to universities scrapped! The government asserting a special right to oversee academic departments and curriculum decisions! The frequency of events like these across the country are dizzying, and the pace is accelerating. Academic freedo...

To be ruled is to be spied upon and inspected,  quantified, measured, and ranked, and then registered and regulated with all the inherent structural violence packed into those arrangements. To be free is to abolish all of it, to reject that system’s hold over our minds as well as to defeat its power in the world. What kind of society do we want to live in? What world will we build? Today...

What is your North Star? What are you fighting for, and what are you struggling to overcome, or leave behind? The goal is not a precise and detailed roadmap—that way lies dogma, orthodoxy, and worse—but rather a vision and a hope with which to gauge and partially frame our work in the here and now. The great Uruguay revolutionary, Edwardo Galeano, tells a story of being confronted by a person accu...

When a popular leader emerges from the whirlwind of a struggle for justice, power always stands in opposition—ignoring the rising demands where possible, ridiculing and coopting, and eventually fighting with everything in their arsenal. When the popular leader is gone—murdered or passed on—power makes them into a mythical hero while simultaneously working furiously to strip away the radical conten...

James (Jimmy) Soto was released from Stateville Prison in November, 2023, after suffering 42 years and 2 months in custody for a crime he did not commit. A month before his release he had received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. He and his co-defendant, Tyrone Ayala, also exonerated, were the longest serving wrongfully convicted people in Illinois history. At our Homecoming Par...

Barbara Smith is a Movement legend— the kind of courageous activist, powerful thinker, persistent organizer and whole-hearted doer who keeps the Movement moving. She is co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and co-author of the acclaimed 1977 statement that has been one of the most influential Black feminist documents of the twentieth century—“Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ours...

Human beings   are   suspended in webs-of-significance—we make sense and we make meaning—and culture is nothing more nor less than the webs. Those webs-of-significance are alive, forever trembling and vibrating, evolving and regenerating, changing and developing as messages and stories and ways-of-being vibrate across the surface. So culture can never stand still, never sit static or ine...

In  America is in the Heart , Carlos Bulosan describes his good fortune at landing a job in a library where he could be close to books: “I was beginning to understand what was going on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life was lifting.” Ursula Le Guin writes of a library’s sacredness: “its accessibility, its publicness.” She calls the public library a public t...

Comix is a distinct art form—sequential art—that expresses ideas with multiple images, most often combined with text. It's a hybrid (think co-mix) and, importantly, it’s a medium not a genre—don’t confuse the two in the presence of a comix creator or you might get your head bit off (for a real-life dramatization, see the opening of  To Teach:  the journey in comics ). Comics aren’t just...

When Freedom is the Question…  was published on September 10, and we had a book launch that night at our home-away-from-home, Pilsen Community Books, in conversation with Eve Ewing. We traveled to Women and Children First, Seminary Coop, The Wooden Shoe in Philadelphia, Book and Puppet in Easton, PA, Riff Raff in Providence, Firestorm in Asheville, NC, Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Busboys and Poe...

The word “racism” can apply to a specific person or to the social structure, and in our hyper-individualistic culture, the word most commonly devolves to a singular individual who did something obviously prejudiced: Cliven Bundy, the Nevada cattle rancher, Amy Cooper, the New York person who called the cops on a bird-watcher who’d asked her to keep her dog on a leash. Racism is this or that person...

This is the country we live in…no doubt about it: white nationalists well-organized and rising; a fascist in the white house surrounded by his loyal Renfields; a preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza underway, funded and fueled by our taxes; raging, racialized police violence unchecked; capitalist-induced climate collapse on full display; fragile and anemic democratic i...

Let’s talk about teaching, which means let’s also talk about racism—attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices, for sure, and much, much more. Let’s talk about structures and institutions, as well, about laws and legacies, cultures and the dogma of common sense. Co-host Adam Bush and I are joined in conversation with Christopher Emdin and Sam Seidel. After Chris published the wildly successful a...

Abolition can perhaps best be understood as a collection of creative and complex acts of world-building—what kind of world would we need to build in order to have no slavery? our forebears asked. And what kind of world could we begin to create today that would render prisons and police and militarism obsolete, predation and exploitation relics of a cruel past? Abolition is not simply a policy, it’...

We’re in conversation today with Lawrence Grandpre from the group Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), a grassroots think-tank that advances the public policy interests of Black people in Baltimore through youth leadership development, political advocacy, and autonomous intellectual innovation. Founded by young freedom fighters, you can find them and follow their work at lbsbaltimore.com

Amos Kennedy, self-described “humble negro printer” and author of  Citizen Printer , is a visionary treasure, an imaginative freedom-fighter, and the creator of type-driven messages of justice, freedom, and Black Power. He understands that freedom comes to life in action, and that we are most truly (and paradoxically) free when we name the obstacles to our humanity, and then throw ourselves a...

At a time when women’s bodily integrity is under sustained assault, and simultaneously huge numbers of women across a wide political spectrum have rallied, mobilized, ands refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights, we sit down with Alicia Hurtado, a Chicago-based grass-roots organizer, activist, and advocate to discuss the state of the movement and where we need to go...

with Guest Hosts Lisa Lee and Adam Bush interviewing Bill Ayers, and with surprise interventions from Light Ayli, Barbara Ransby, and Tom Morello. What is freedom? What are the "freedom dreams" that encourage us and move us forward? How do we get free? Join our brilliant guest hosts as they chop these questions up in dialogue with Bill Ayers.