Beacon Press

07/01/2025

173 years later, the truth of Frederick Douglass’s indictment of July 4th rings true yet again, this time from the immigrant perspective.

By Kavita Das | On July 5, 1852, brilliant orator, fierce abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, gave an impassioned speech entitled “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” In his speech, Douglass interrogated and excoriated the hypocrisy of Americans to celebrate the seventy-si...

07/01/2025

Becoming disabled forced Jessica Slice to look at the awful truth of our frailty and temporality. It was then that she started to live her actual life.

What it looks like to parent with acute aliveness

07/01/2025

It’s important for today’s young protesters and activists to learn strategies for making social movements happen. Author Gloria Browne-Marshall says looking to our protest history will teach them.

A hard-hitting reminder that protest must be paired with strategic action to shape our democracy:🔥 “Protesting and not voting is just going for a walk.”🔥 “...

06/30/2025

When it comes to poetry, W. J. Lofton thinks of queerness as a politic and queerness as s*xuality. Q***rness breaks the binary and proclaims liberation.

Beacon Press / Wulf Bradley Born in Chicago and raised in Alabama, WJ Lofton’s creative work breathes life into the intricacies of identity, race, grief,

06/30/2025

The domestic, agricultural, and industrial labor the undocumented community provides comes at the very cost of their wellness.

Early one Friday morning in the spring of 2022, I get in my car while the sky is still gray. The directions I received the night before take me forty minutes south as I follow the turn-by-turn step…

06/30/2025

What kind of progress do you make when the people most affected by the exploitation of our society, like the poor and the homeless, are also the people who change the systems under which we live?

An Interview with Rev. Liz Theoharis & Noam Sandweiss-Back

06/27/2025

🚨GIVEAWAY ALERT!🚨

Margaret Grace Myers’s THE FIGHT FOR S*X ED is the first comprehensive history of s*x ed in US schools—and an impassioned call to reform s*x ed into a power tool for reproductive justice and social equality. Enter our Goodreads giveaway by July 11 for a chance to win a copy!

Enter to win one of 25 free copies available. Giveaway dates from Jun 12-Jul 11, 2025. Enter for a chance to win 1 of 25 first edition copies of The Figh...

06/27/2025

Do you know your trans ancestors? Work in the 1850–1950 period may have been divided by gender, but many trans workers like Josephine Robinson still found ways to creatively navigate the economy. Josie landed in the lap of luxury as a maid for high society women. A Black trans woman living in the early 1900s, she worked for several houses belonging to some of Chicago’s wealthiest women. When she was outed, she stood her ground in court, explaining that she had no intention of detransitioning. Josie’s legacy, told in Eli Erlick’s BEFORE GENDER, is one of determination to be the best woman she could be.

06/27/2025

There’s this idea that LGBTQ communities have one vision for freedom, one vision for liberation, and they’re all solidified together against gender and s*xual tyranny. But that’s not the case.

The Black Feminist in Public series continues with a conversation with Kaila Adia Story, professor of women’s, gender and s*xuality studies at the University of Louisville, co-host of the award-winning podcast Strange Fruit and is the author of the recently published The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been...

06/26/2025

The Salem Witch Trials were as much about settler colonialism as they were about patriarchy and religious fundamentalism. Look no further than Tituba as proof.

By Carlos Cueva Caro | One of my main interests throughout my four years as a history major was colonial history. As I researched different narratives of colonial America, it became evident that these stories tended to focus on the white male settlers as the protagonists, erasing other groups of peo...

06/26/2025

When you make art your life, signs become very important—little signs that arise from the universe that say you’re on the right path. Stephanie Elizondo Griest calls them angel screamers.

Most Institute of American Indian Arts students, teachers, and staff do what they do because they have a calling, despite having no idea what the outcome will be.  Stephanie Elizondo Griest, in her upcoming book, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torme

06/26/2025

As we saw in Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS, Black music is always a force to be reckoned with. Maybe it’s apropos that we celebrate Black Music Month at the start of summer.

By Rashod Ollison | Fresh-cut watermelon smelling like rain and ribs sizzling on a grill bring the music back. The songs complement the food and the weather and Technicolor the memories of when we were all just kids with nothing in our pockets but waxy penny candy. We thought we knew everything. We....