Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley

Eighty years of lessons from the Black freedom struggle, labor movements, and internationalism.

Raised among the entrails of chattel slavery in Durham, North Carolina, Walter shares political reflections and lessons from decades of movement experience. This includes 1950s and early 1960s mobilizations against Jim Crow apartheid laws and welcoming Freedom Riders to Durham, followed by later 1960s student and labor organizing with the Progressive Labor Party, early Black Panther Party formations, anti-war activities, and co-leading the Peace and Freedom Party’s Black Caucus.

In the 1970s, Walter became a leader in the national Progressive Labor Party and led labor and welfare organizing in Chicago and Detroit. In the 1980s he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer and organized against South Africa’s apartheid system. His more recent work supporting infrastructure for Haitian movement-building and confronting police violence in Oakland allowed him to draw parallels between the dangers of international structural adjustment programs abroad, and the pitfalls of the nonprofit industrial complex at home.

This text is a multi-generational conversation between legendary Civil Rights organizer Walter Riley and longtime friend and Oakland organizer, Jesse Strauss. Together, they reflect on the importance of political action as the primary venue for learning and reflection. Walter Riley has a never-ending commitment to building a better world and he’ll challenge readers to avoid the paralysis of analysis that slows movements down and to avoid getting caught in the missives of ego. Includes a foreword by Walter Riley's son, Boots Riley.

Jesse Strauss is an anti-imperialist and abolitionist cultural worker, community organizer, musician, and journalist born and raised in Oakland and Berkeley (unceded Ohlone/Chochenyo land). He is an anti-zionist descendent of Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide and was raised by parents engaged in radical queer healthcare and immigration asylum access work in the Bay Area. As a journalist, Jesse has a long working relationship with KPFA Radio, where he co-created the first-ever daily abolitionist radio show, Law & Disorder. He was a producer for Al Jazeera during the so-called “Arab Spring” and “Occupy” movements.

Walter Riley grew up as a civil rights activist in the Jim Crow South, chaired Durham, North Carolina’s Young Adult NAACP, organized voter registration, sit-ins, job campaigns, and was a Field Secretary for CORE in the Southeast Region. He became a San Francisco State University activist for ethnic studies, and was a member of the Black Student Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Riley has worked as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer since the 1980s. He is a loving father and grandfather.

Boots Riley is a writer, director of the film Sorry to Bother You, musician, rapper with The Coup, and producer from Oakland, CA.