¡A las barricadas!*
Remembering the teenage Black Communist organizer Angelo Herndon, and a look at the struggle within the US climate movement
Given the wanton destruction of a once-mighty platform, I'm surprised anyone still tweets anymore. That a few have kept it up is a testament, I think, to the power of habit and to our desperate thirst for human interaction, even in its most meager, debased and diluted forms.
Apart from lurking a bit when the age-old question—How fares the discourse?—once again nags at me, I keep my X account for the sole purpose of tweeting out my links. It’s part of the job. You write an article, you tweet it out.
Anyway, I did that last week with my latest piece, my first for The New Republic, about the battle brewing within the climate movement about whether to trumpet Biden's accomplishments and risk helping Trump or to pummel the administration for its failures. Not a retweet was had. Likes hovered around…er, zero, I think? I've only got a couple thousand followers, and naturally I lost my blue check in the purge. Worse, I rarely tweet; no doubt the algorithms are set to punish this sort of reticence. My expectations of virality have always been minimal, but zero is a new low.
It's also a message: pack it up, buddy. And probably a blessing. I started out in the old days, when you published a story on paper and it never occurred to you to wonder what happened to your work thereafter. It was great and if we’re doing that again, I’m all for it. Here’s to not giving a shit about numbers.
Meanwhile, there’s this newsletter. Like many of my fellow writers, I am inclined to join the great Substack Exodus, but I don't intend to charge money for these semiannual missives and very much doubt that my presence on the platform greatly enhances its prestige among the nazis and creeps who have set up shop there. I’ll probably dip when I get a minute to check out the alternatives, but I just devoted my monthly allotment of tech frustration into building a new website for myself. Maybe next month.
Anyway, here's what I've been working on:
For The Baffler, I wrote about Angelo Herndon, a once-famous African-American Communist organizer who led a multiracial march on the Atlanta Court House in 1932 demanding welfare relief for the poor. He was convicted of insurrection, a capital charge in Georgia at the time, and his case wound up before the US Supreme Court. Herndon’s story entered my consciousness during the early days of Covid—probably via a Tweet, sad to say—and I became a little obsessed with this teenage kid whom I soon came to regard as a hero. I spent two years researching his life, reading everything I could find in the Tamiment Library and the Schomburg Center, and waiting for the FBI to release a copy of his file, which had never been made public. I was new to archival research, but it’s really fun! Still, I suspected I’d never manage to publish anything (the market for lengthy yarns about forgotten historical figures written by talented but virtually unknown writers without Twitter followers being little sleepy lately) until I stumbled on an interesting detail: Herndon was tried in Fulton County, Georgia—the same jurisdiction that recently brought a ludicrous but terrifying RICO case against the Cop City protesters and another against Donald Trump. A peg!
I’m very, very grateful to The Baffler for publishing it and to Harrison Carter for this gorgeous art, which would make a hell of a tote bag.
The Red and the Black
What the case of Angelo Herndon tells us about Cop City
As mentioned above, I also just published a long reported feature in TNR. It focuses on Climate Defiance, the plucky year-old activist group that has made its name plaguing Democrats (mostly) with noisy disruptions. I also talked to members of more established advocacy orgs, lobbyists and other establishment types, and ultimately to Roger Hallam, the radical figure behind Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, who offered a bracing and terrifying perspective on the looming crisis: “The liberal, white middle class is desperately trying to pretend that we don’t actually face a crisis which will destroy the carbon state in the next 20 years,” he told me. “We all know what’s going to come afterwards, which is fascism. So, you know, wake-up time, isn’t it?”
Damn, bro.
Sadly, he’s right! Here’s the piece, also with lovely art, courtesy of Jovana Mugosa.
The Election Is Heating Up. So’s the Planet.
In the run-up to a presidential election with dire climate implications, can activists afford to demonize Democrats? Can they afford not to?
By the way, if you have a following and want to tweet either story, it’s a free country**. I won’t judge.
As ever, thanks for being a subscriber to Dread & Distraction.