Black Flags And Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (Second Edition)

Description

When both levees and governments failed in New Orleans in 2005, scott crow cofounded the Common Ground Collective. Without government, FEMA ot the Red Cross, this volunteer organisation built medical clinics, set up food and water distribution and created community gardens. They resisted home demolitions, white militias, police brutality and FEMA's incompetence. crow's vivid memoir maps the intertwining of his radical experience and ideas with Hurricane Katrina's reality, and community efforts to translate ideals into action and resist indifference.

scott crow is an anarchist activist, a community organizer, a writer, and the founder of social justice groups and education projects throughout Texas and the south, including Common Ground Collective, Dirty South Earth First!, the North Texas Coalition for a Just Peace, Radical Encuentro Camp, and UPROAR (United People Resisting Oppression and Racism). He has also trained and organized for many grassroots organizations, including ACORN, Forest Ethics, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and the Ruckus Society, and is currently collaborating on a number of sustainable cooperative projects. He lives in Austin, Texas. Kathleen Cleaver is a senior lecturer in law at Emory University and was the spokesperson and first female member of the Black Panther Party's decision-making body. She is the author of Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party and We Want Freedom. She lives in Atlanta.

"scott crow's trenchant memoir of grassroots organizing is an important contribution to a history of movements that far too often goes untold." --Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now! "This revised and expanded edition weaves scott crow's frontline experiences with a resilient, honest discussion of grassroots political movement-building." --Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege "It is a brilliant, detailed, and humble book written with total frankness and at the same time a revolutionary poet's passion. It makes the reader feel that we too, with our emergency heart as our guide, can do anything; we only need to begin." --Marina Sitrin, author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina "This book is a key document in that real and a remarkable story of an activist's personal and philosophical evolution." --Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster "This is a compelling tale for our times." --Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days "The story of the Common Ground Collective is that of one of the greatest triumphs of democratic self-organization in American history." --David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years "Can anarchism actually work? Yes, as a matter of fact. scott crow's lucid first-hand account is a story that simply must be told. This book should be read as widely as possible." --Ward Churchill, author of Wielding Words like Weapons "...crow is a puppetmaster involved in direct action." --Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)