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The political solution to street crime does not lie in mystifying its reality by reactionary allusions to banditry, nor in reducing it to a manifestation of lumpen viciousness. The former is utopian and dangerous because it defends practices that undermine the safety and solidarity of the working class; the latter objectively legitimates the bourgeoisie's attack on super exploited workers, especially black and brown workers. While street crime is associated with the most demoralized sectors of the working class, people must be careful about making mechanical and a historical generalizations about the lumpen and dangerous class. As Paul Hirst has correctly pointed out, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took a very harsh and uncompromising attitude to street crime, not from a moralistic perspective, but out of concern for building a disciplined and principled workers' movement. Their standpoint, notes Hirst, was uncompromisingly political and based on the proletarian class position. Adapted from the source document.

This article presents the conversation between Erica Huggins and Tony Platt. Platt says he wanted to get as far away from his patriarchal father as possible. He wanted to travel and was attracted to the beat movement and the cultural movements on the West Coast. England is the place that he wanted to leave forever, but he finds himself going back and revisiting like one does with a homeland. Huggins said when she left Washington, DC, she did not ever want to go back, because it so reminded her of a plantation. Before she went to Lincoln, she attended Cheney State Teachers College for a year. She found out much later that Cheney, Lincoln, and Wilberforce University in Ohio were black colleges, but she didn't know that history. Those three were the first of the 103 historical black colleges to open during slavery. So it was a conscious choice that she made unconsciously. Adapted from the source document.

Introduces a special journal issue devoted to the subject.

In an interview, Angela Davis, an activist, talked about how she became an activist. She said she grew up in what was at that time the most segregated city in the South, she couldn't avoid thinking about race. Race was literally everywhere. Her mother had become involved before she was born in an organization called the Southern Negro Youth Congress. It was an organization created by Black communists who had come down from the Northeast, primarily from New York, to organize in the South. The first organization she can remember being involved in was an interracial discussion group that took place at the church she attended. She didn't think of herself as an organizer, but she knew there was something very different about doing that work because the church got burned as a result of their meetings. She was fortunate because her mother stayed in touch with the Burnham family and other people who had come from New York to Birmingham to organize. Adapted from the source document.

A year ago, Social Justice sent out a call to people who have worked with writer-activist Betita Martinez since 1960, asking for their recollections and assessments of her contributions. The result is this extraordinary collection of essays and memoirs, plus a chronology of Martinez's important life events, a complete bibliography of her published writings, representations of her by artists and photographers, an anthology of some of her unpublished and out-of-print work, and a political biography based on research in her personal papers. Special thanks to Tessa Koning-Martinez, who was involved in this labor of love from the very beginning and who as Betita Martinez's only child is her primary caretaker. Adapted from the source document.

If Betita Martinez's commitment to 'destroy hatred and prejudice' was her 'sacred duty,' as she put it in a manifesto written when she was sixteen, it was language and writing -- the ability to 'tell people what I wish to tell them' -- that was her passion. Today, she rises to the occasion of her 87th birthday, blowing air kisses to a small gathering of well-wishers, and singing along with Barbara Dane on 'We Shall Not Be Moved,' just as she had done in Cuba in 1966 with hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters. While most of the people licked their wounds and picked up their interrupted lives, she protested alongside anybody who would march in 1990 and was never without a sheaf of leaflets in 2000. Martinez had lived, as she puts it, through five international wars, six social movements, and seven attempts to build socialism around the world. Adapted from the source document.