PRINCIPLED UNITY TOUR - Building Unity in Times of Division

Authors Hy Thurman & Kwame Shakur will be in conversation with an introduction by James Tracy.

What does it mean to build unity in times of division and fragmentation? What lessons can we take from past struggles for liberation? Where must we walk without a map? The Principled Unity Tour 2022 brings together two dynamic working-class author-activists to explore these questions in conversation with each other and local audiences.

Hy Thurman is a co-founder of the Young Patriots Organization. Based in Chicago the Young Patriots mobilized poor whites against racism and poverty. Together with the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, they organized the First Rainbow Coalition. Hy remains active today with the Northern Alabama School for Organizers. His book Revolutionary Hillbilly: Notes From the Struggle at the Edge of the Rainbow was published in 2021.

Kwame Shakur is the Minister of Culture for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. His book My Search for Answers, Truth and Meaning has been compared to the work of George Jackson. Formerly incarcerated for bank robbery, Shakur speaks to his own politicization and “breaking the criminal mentality."

James Tracy is a Bay Area-based author, organizer, and teacher. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power; No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements; and the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars.