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Podcast

Police Violence From the Black Panthers to Attica w/ Heather Ann Thompson & more (12-16-20)

Join Heather Ann Thompson, Flint Taylor and Darrell Cannon as they discuss 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. The three panelists will further delve into the events leading up to and the legacy surrounding the 1971 Attica prison uprising when 1,300 prisoners took over the facility. These event will be framed in the context of the paperback release of Taylor’s book Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago and Thompson’s Pulitzer-prize winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Heather Ann Thompson is a Collegiate Professor of History in the departments of Afro- American and African Studies, History, and in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. Blood in the Water won five other major book prizes and was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Silver Gavel Award, and the Cundill Prize in History. The book has also been optioned by Sony Pictures and Thompson is also the lead advisor on Stanley Nelson’s forthcoming Showtime documentary on Attica. Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of protests, policing, prisons, and the current criminal justice system more broadly. On the policy front, Thompson served on the historic National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. She currently serves on the standing Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies. She is currently writing her next book on the MOVE Bombing of 1985. @hthompsn Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He is one of the lawyers for the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, has represented many survivors of Chicago police torture over the past 30 years and is counsel in several illegal search and wrongful death cases brought against the Milwaukee Police Department. Darrell Cannon is a Chicago police torture survivor who was subjected to electric shock and a mock execution at a remote torture site on the far southeast side of Chicago by two of notorious Chicago police commanderJon Burge’s main henchmen. As a result he gave a false confession, was wrongfully convicted, and spent 24 years in prison, 9 in a supermax prison, before he was exonerated in 2007. After his release, he became a powerful leader in the successful movement to obtain reparations for 60 Chicago police torture survivors. ---------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of Flint Taylor's book , The Torture Machine: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1642-the-torture-machine Order a copy of Heather Ann Thompson's book, Blood In The Water: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781400078240 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/neXDQiYTpns Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

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May 18, 2026

Ukraine’s Anti-Imperialist Struggle

February 24th marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Right now, it is bombing the country’s energy system, cutting off heat and electricity for millions in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to bully Ukraine into a land for peace settlement that rewards Putin’s aggression and, with the willing collaboration of Ukraine’s oligarchs, puts the country up for sale to Western multinationals. Join this webinar to hear about Ukraine’s struggle.

Speakers:

Artem Chapeye is the author of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Guns (Washington Post 2025 best non-fiction) and The Ukraine. He is a writer, translator, activist, and, after the 2022 invasion, an enlisted member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine .

Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, Vermont State Senator, member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, and also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Denys Bondar is a native of Ukraine and an associate professor of physics at Tulane University as well as a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.

May 18, 2026

We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities

Join editors and contributors of We Are Each Other's Liberation, a major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

Get a copy of We Are Each Other's Liberation from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2519-we-are-each-other-s-liberation

Speakers:

Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.

Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.

TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organizer, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures. Pratibha is a published author and editor of of several anthologies. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and Sming Sming Books published, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar in 2025.

Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator working on issues of militarism for over 30 years. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, with Du Re Bang and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, its US group. She also hosts feminist radio program Women’s Magazine, broadcast on KPFA Berkeley California station of the Pacifica Radio network, and is known as DJ MOR Love and Joy, transnational feminist virtual dance party DJ.

Dr. Beverley Bryan is a lifelong educator and political activist, who is co-author of the classic book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) which detailed the experiences of Black women and their fight for equality from post-war up to 1980s Britain. Dr. Bryan was a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD); a Saturday school organiser, a mainstream primary school teacher who pioneered Black history teaching in her classroom in the 1970s and a member of the British Black Panther Movement. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bryan is a retired Professor of Language Education from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

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