Testimonies to Political Repression in America: The Price of Dissent

Bud Schultz & Ruth Schultz

ISBN 10: 0520224027 / ISBN 13: 9780520224025

Published by University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA, London, 2001

About this Item

468 pp. Clean, fresh copy with very light shelf wear, crisp pages and clean text.

Seller Inventory # 2iDc0048

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Testimonies to Political Repression in America: The Price of Dissent
• Publisher: University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA, London
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520224027
• ISBN 13: 9780520224025
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Like New
• Seller catalogs:
  • History, American & US History
  • Academic, Scholarly, Research
  • Social Studies & Sciences, Sociology, Social Work

About this title

Synopsis

Bud and Ruth Schultz's vivid oral history presents the extraordinary testimony of people who experienced government repression and persecution firsthand. Drawn from three of the most significant social movements of our time--the labor, Black freedom, and antiwar movements--these engrossing interviews bring to life the experiences of Americans who acted upon their beliefs despite the price they paid for their dissent. In doing so, they--and the movements they were part of--helped shape the political and social landscape of the United States from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century.

The majority of the voices in this book belong to everyday people--workers, priests, teachers, students--but more well-known figures such as Congressman John Lewis, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Abbie Hoffman, and Daniel Ellsberg are also included. There are firsthand accounts by leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, active early in the century; Southern Tenant Farmers Union of the 1930s; Women's Strike for Peace, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; and the Hormel meatpackers' Local P-9 in the 1980s. Lively introductions by the authors contextualize these personal statements.

Those who tell their stories in The Price of Dissent, and others like them, faced surveillance and disruption from police agencies, such as the FBI; brutalization by local police; local ordinances and court injunctions limiting protest; inquisitions into beliefs and associations by congressional committees; prosecution under laws that curbed dissent; denaturalization and deportation; and purges under government loyalty programs. Agree with them or not, by dissenting when it was unpopular or dangerous to do so, they insisted on exercising the precious American right of free expression and preserved it for a new century's dissenters.

About the Author

Bud Schultz is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Trinity College, and Ruth Schultz is an independent scholar. They are the authors of It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (California, 1989).