Five books that reveal the true source of collective power

Daisy Pitkin has spent more than twenty years as a community and union organizer, working first in support of garment workers around the world, and then for US labor unions organizing industrial laundry workers. Her essays have been awarded the Montana Prize, the Disquiet Literary Prize, the New Millennium Award, and the Monique Wittig Writer’s Fellowship. She grew up in rural Ohio and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. Today, Pitkin lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she works as an organizer with an offshoot of the union UNITE.

Pitkin's new book is On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union.

At Lit Hub she tagged five "books that illuminate the lives and communities and worlds that are built inside movements of resistance, books that center on what it is possible to build, even as we act to dismantle." One title on the list:

Martin Duberman, Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising That Changed America

“They did something few of us ever attempt. They named what a better society might look like,” Martin Duberman writes of the Gay Liberation Front, one of the organizations built in the wake of the Stonewall rebellion. This landmark book follows the intertwined lives of six people as they help to build the movement for gay and lesbian rights that was sparked, in part, by the June 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn. In vivid, urgent detail, activist and historian Martin Duberman reconstructs the sweltering nights of the spontaneous protest at Stonewall and the often-violent repression of the cultural moment that surrounded and led to it. More importantly, the book vibrantly illustrates what happened after the rebellion ended; the piece-by-piece process by which a movement was formed that, only a year later in 1970, demonstrated its newly built strength and numbers in the first Gay Rights March.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue