‘The Government is Trembling’: Protests Erupt in France, Spreading to 140 Cities

“For years we’ve had climate, economy, and equality problems, but the government is not doing anything about it,” said one protester.


A protester holds a sign in front of a police officer in Nice, southern France, on October 17, 2026.
(Photo by Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Oct 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Protests erupted throughout France on Saturday, with demonstrators citing a wide variety of grievances including inequality, the high cost of living, and poor conditions in the nation’s schools.

As reported by Agence France-Presse, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Paris and other cities to protest what they said was inaction by the French government on the biggest problems facing the country.


‘This Is Going Global’: Anti-Austerity Protests Spread From Spain and France to Chile, Belgium, and Beyond


‘Savagery’: Horrific Injuries as French Police Crack Down on Nationwide Student Protests

“For years we’ve had climate, economy, and equality problems,” one protester identified as Agnes told AFP, “but the government is not doing anything about it.”

18-year-old student Kamil Alahyan told AFP that there are “so many reasons” to protest, including “the elections coming up in 2027, politicians who lie, the ultra-rich who’ve been taking more and more wealth over the past 10 years.”

A 19-year-old protester identified as Lola expressed a similar view in an interview published by The Guardian on Saturday.

“We are fighting because the cost of living is too harsh,” Lola said, “because the price of fuel is too high, because high school pupils are being violently attacked and hurt all over the country just for trying to protest and ask for more teachers and decent learning conditions.”

Student organizer Ryad Rani told AFP that “the government is trembling and it’s right to tremble because when the French people are angry, they never let up.”

Saturday’s demonstrations mark the expansion of a movement that began last month when students blockaded their schools to protest staffing shortages, dilapidated buildings, and a widely criticized university application system.

According to The New York Times, demonstrations took place in at least 140 cities across the country.

Some of the protests did turn violent in major cities including Lyon, Marseille, and Paris, AFP reported. A Saturday BBC report claimed that more than 270 protesters have been arrested nationwide.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused “ultra-left groups” of inciting violence at the demonstrations.

“To those who clearly want to use these acts of violence as a ‘warm-up’ ahead of the presidential election, let me be clear: we will not be intimidated,” Lecornu wrote in a social media post. “No one will impose their political agenda through violence.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader the left-wing France Unbowed party, slammed the media for focusing too much on the isolated incidents of violence and not reporting on the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the demonstrations.

“Crowds of people everywhere, calm and joyful everywhere when the police aren’t around,” Mélenchon wrote in a social media post that featured photos of peaceful marches from across the country, which he described as “images you won’t see in the official media.”

Student Protesters Inspire One Another—and Should Inspire All of Us

When high schoolers in the US protest, they demonstrate our historic connection to the recent uprising in France.


Students raise their hands in front of Police officers as they demonstrate outside Sciences Po during a protest over school overcrowding and decay on October 7, 2026 in Paris, France.
(Photo by Tom Nicholson/Getty Images)

Jon Hale
Oct 17, 2026

Common Dreams

High school students in France have captured international attention by protesting essential conditions of schooling—too few teachers, too many funding cuts, and a crumbling infrastructure. After nearly 7,000 arrests—more than 85% of whom were under 18—French education minister Edouard Geffray conceded to some of their demands and offered to hire 3,000 more teachers.

The role of high school students is clearly impactful, but we need not look to France to understand the power of student-led activism. The United States, in fact, is rich with examples.

Protestors have made reference to May 1968 protests in France, when 10 million workers, about two-thirds of the workforce, went on the largest general strike in French history. Students in France inspired a transnational movement that galvanized millions around decolonization, national liberation movements, and the rights of students in a new social order.

Those 1968 uprisings were also informed, most likely, by high school student activism in the United States.

As I explore in my book in 2022, “A New Kind of Youth,” high school students were agents of social change in the U.S. for more than 100 years. The NAACP, the oldest longstanding civil rights organization, began mobilizing high school students in 1921, where they challenged many of the same schooling conditions that French high schoolers protest today. More than a century earlier, the first NAACP youth chapters rejected textbooks with racist histories and demanded more equitable investments in segregated Black schools, for instance.

The NAACP was not the only organization to see the potential of youth activism. Radical organizers Esther Cooper Jackson, James E. Jackson, Edward Strong and others who worked in solidarity with interracial and international working-class coalitions formed the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937 in order to mobilize youth to actualize full citizenship rights for all, including equitably funded education.

By the Second World War, thousands of high school youth formed local organizations and joined national and international conferences in calling on state and federal agencies to alleviate discriminatory schooling conditions, end police brutality, build international solidarity, and promote pacifism in the face of wars for empires, all the while illuminating the links between racism and capitalism.

In 1946, activist scholar W.E.B. DuBois spoke to hundreds of young people assembled in South Carolina, and delivered a stirring speech he titled “Behold the Land.” As an elder in the Black freedom struggle, Du Bois charged the youth movement he saw unfolding before him. He observed that young people, many of whom were in high school, were “embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, the upbuilding of democracy, the breaking down…of forces of evil.”

Du Bois’s words, not surprisingly, were prophetic.

High school students emerged as overlooked progenitors of key Civil Rights Movement victories. Robert Russo Moton High School student Barbara Johns orchestrated a student walkout in 1951 in Farmville, Virginia. She led her classmates in a schoolwide walkout and marched downtown. Facing expulsion, she reached out to Oliver Hill, a Virginia-based attorney with the NAACP.

The NAACP responded to Johns’ call and organized the small but committed Black community in the heart of Virgina to file a suit that demanded desegregation. The court case became Davis v. Prince Edward County, Virginia (1951)—one of the five court cases behind the Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Students turned out in larger numbers and provided needed momentum in other parts of the Civil Rights Movement. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tackled segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, he called for massive nonviolent protests. It was youth from elementary to high school, not local adults, who responded to the call.

An estimated 4,000 students participated in the Birmingham Children’s Crusade. They prompted the iconic photographs of the notoriously racist police commissioner Bull Connor who turned police dogs and fire houses on children. When the dust settled, more than 2,000 students were arrested and expelled from school.

Moderate segregationists listened in the wake of the offensive. State and federal governments conceded basic points and desegregated public spaces in Birmingham. During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, promising anti-discriminatory protections for all.

Historic student activism led to historic liberal milestones that protected basic civil rights and made the United States more inclusive.

To be sure, such concessions fell short in enacting a genuine collective and participatory democracy. But youth activists were quick to respond to its shortcomings, making demands for today’s most salient issues. High schoolers went on strike to support common sense gun reform legislation during the March for Our Lives protests in 2018. Youth not yet in college participated in the Fridays for Future climate justice protests and joined Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

When high schoolers protest, they demonstrate our historic connection to the recent uprising in France. The connection proffers inspiring indications that massive youth organization will lead to structural change. And the material demands made in France—for better schooling conditions and equitable investment in education in the race of austerity cuts—resonate across the United States and other struggling democracies.

It’s time that we listen, again, to what high schoolers have to say.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Jon Hale
Jon Hale, professor of education history at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of “A New Kind of Youth,” a history of high school student activism in the southern United States.
Full Bio >

‘Inspired By the Young People,’ Greta Thunberg Joins French Students Demanding School Fundin

“Our future is being robbed away from us,” said the Swedish climate activist. “It just gives a signal to young people that you’re not prioritized in our society.”


Swedish activist Greta Thunberg speaks with students as they prepare to take part in a blockade at the Lycée Paul Eluard in Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris on October 13, 2026, as part of a nationwide student mobilization.
(Photo by Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Oct 13, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Arriving Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis to stand with students demonstrating against poor school conditions, climate and rights activist Greta Thunberg had one question for French leaders and authorities who have appeared shocked that hundreds of thousands of high schoolers would rise up against disinvestment in their education: “What do you expect young people to do?”

“Of course we’re going to revolt, of course we’re going to rise up,” the Swedish climate action leader told L’Humanité. “It should have been expected.”


Hundreds of Schools Closed Across France as Students Demand More Education Funding


Thunberg joined the protesters—a group that originally included students, mostly aged 15-18, when the demonstrations began last month, but that’s grown to include hundreds of thousands of people including union members and teachers—as the movement entered its fourth week.

She expressed pride in the French students who have led the movement, and denounced political leaders for refusing to invest in public education.

“Our future is being robbed away from us,” she told Agence France-Presse. “Schools are not getting investments that they need... It just gives a signal to young people that you’re not prioritized in our society.”

Hundreds of schools have been closed as students have formed chains at the building entrances and marched through Paris and cities and towns across France, demanding more funding for schools.

Students are raising alarm about dilapidated buildings, overcrowded classrooms, and too many teacher absences, and the protests have exploded as French President Emmanuel Macron’s government tries to pass a budget including a modest increase in education funding—which students and teachers have denounced as an effective cut due to inflation.

Students are calling for €10 billion increase in investment for the country’s lycées, or high schools.

Thunberg said that students “are not being included in the conversation,” and condemned French authorities for their “extremely violent” response to the protests.

Police were pushed to end their use of stun grenades last week after a teenager lost his hand because of one of the weapons. Another student lost the use of his eye, and another lost many teeth when tear gas canisters were fired at close range.

“That the police are now meeting it with such violence and politicians are meeting it as if it’s something unexpected, or that young people are destroying things, just shows that they are living in a completely different reality,” said Thunberg.



At least 24 instances of police brutality are being investigated, and the violent police response has drawn condemnation from international human rights groups.

“They should know that all over the world we are following these developments. We are inspired by the young people who are demanding their basic rights,” Thunberg told reporters outside Lycée Paul Eluard in Saint-Denis. “Whether it’s not funding schools enough, or the climate crisis, or social injustice crises... It’s about time that young people are stepping up and reclaiming that future.”

The government is prosecuting about 1,500 people for their participation in the protests, which are backed by the leftist political party France Unbowed, led by presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

In Paris on Tuesday, students blockaded the entrances to their schools, while in Marseille, some pushed dumpsters on wheels in front of school doors.

Speaking to L’Humanité, Thunberg called on “workers’ movements, migrants’ rights movements, climate movements” and others to “stand united because we are facing the same enemy.”

“We are not going to give up, and we are going to fight for this future that is being stolen from us right before our eyes,” she said.

Pedagogy of the Southern Worker

By Inez O'Donnell, Lindsey Krenzler-Ferreira 

August 7, 2026

Source: Scalawag Magazine

Image via USSW on Facebook (@RaiseUpTheSouth)

The Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) is an organization of workers in the low-wage, high-turnover service industry of the U.S. South, with members in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. From the beginning, the union has placed political education at the center of its strategic vision. USSW understands that to transform workplaces and communities, workers must understand the roots of the system that exploits them and develop the skills necessary to fight back. As with any union or community organization, USSW runs campaigns to win concrete, material victories. But the real fruit of the union’s organizing work lies in the constant political formation within an expanding base of dedicated worker militants. Unlike the traditional union model, USSW treats political education not as ancillary training, but as a core component of its method; it is a dimension of the union’s approach that makes victories durable and transforms workers into long-term leaders. 

Having grown up in New York, Tahtebah “Tee” Gonzalez immediately felt the culture shock of working in the U.S. South. At Dunkin’, his pay was just $9 an hour, just barely above minimum wage and a third of Fulton County’s living wage. The conditions of low pay, overwork, and understaffing boiled over when Tee and his coworkers discovered that other workers in the same shopping center would be paid extra to work a busy weekend in downtown Atlanta during the Dragon-Con convention. 

When a USSW organizer visited his store days later, Tee and his coworkers were already agitated and ready to act. Within a week, they had organized a weekend-long strike. The action won them a raise they had once considered impossible. More importantly, it proved to Tee that workers held real power: When they fight together, they can win. 

That breakthrough—shifting from isolated frustration to collective action—was the spark of political consciousness. But in the USSW, the spark does not fade. Tee’s first strike was only the beginning of a longer process of formation, sustained by the union’s model of political education and leadership development. Through Worker Power Schools, collective study, and the discipline of organizing, Tee deepened his understanding of the system that exploits workers and gained the skills to lead others. What began as a fight over wages became a journey of transformation: from an exhausted service worker into a committed leader of a broader struggle for dignity and justice in the South. 

THE ROLE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION IN ORGANIZING 

Workers like Tee have been deeply shaped by the USSW’s political education program, particularly through Worker Power Schools: residential training programs designed to develop leadership, strategic thinking, and organizing skills among members. 

In August 2024, a Worker Power School specifically for Waffle House workers provided a space for analyzing workplace struggles, connecting them to systemic forces, and refining organizing strategies. Through study, discussion, skills training, and collective planning, Waffle House workers from across the South developed the confidence and skills necessary to lead workplace actions, negotiate with management, and build solidarity across locations. 

Two weeks after the 2024 August Worker Power School, spurred on by the connections they made with other workers and the education they engaged in, Waffle House workers from three different locations in Atlanta delivered demand letters to their employers in a coordinated action, marking a bold step in their ongoing fight for fair wages and safer working conditions. This experience solidified their understanding that their power does not come from isolated complaints but from unified, strategic action driven by political education. 

USSW represents a transformative force in labor organizing, particularly within the U.S. South’s politically repressive and union-hostile landscape. By connecting political education with direct action, USSW provides workers with the tools to take control of their workplaces and reshape their communities. Understanding USSW’s pedagogical framework reveals how political education is a foundation for worker-led struggle, drawing from historical movements, radical traditions, and global organizing models to develop strategies that challenge exploitation and build collective power. 

WHY WORKERS NEED A DIFFERENT EDUCATION 

Public education in the United States has been under sustained attack for decades, with particularly devastating consequences for the Southern working class. State legislatures have systematically slashed funding for public schools, forcing districts, especially those in working-class and Black communities, to operate with crumbling infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, and underpaid teachers. 

This disinvestment has coincided with an aggressive push toward school privatization, charter schools, and voucher programs. The right-wing assault on education has also weaponized curriculum, censoring discussions of slavery, racism, labor history, and gender justice. 

These attacks are strategic. They aim to create a generation of workers unequipped to critically analyze the system or resist exploitation. For many USSW members, their first true political education comes through the union, not the classroom. 

Education, in its dominant form, functions to maintain existing class structures, reinforcing the power of the ruling class while fragmenting workers. In the South, this has meant a curriculum designed to discipline Black workers while erasing their history of resistance. Schools produce a compliant workforce, not critical thinkers or organized leaders within the working class. 

USSW’s pedagogy breaks with this model. It creates a transformative educational process that prepares workers not only to challenge exploitation, but also to govern society in their own interest. The union understands political formation as the ongoing process of turning struggle into analysis, strategy, and leadership. What makes the USSW distinct is that it turns the whole of struggle into a school—on the strike line, in trainings, and in meetings—where workers’ voices carry authority and their participation drives the learning process. 

USSW also operates as a community union, recognizing that workers’ lives extend beyond their workplaces. The concept of “community unionism,” articulated by Beloved Community Center co-founder Reverend Nelson Johnson, reflects this understanding: that the conditions of work and community are inseparable, and so too must be the organizing response. By affirming the fundamental humanity of all people, especially those who have been stripped of dignity, USSW’s pedagogy seeks to restore agency and promote holistic development. 

This approach draws inspiration from the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who defined political education as “all efforts of mobilization, organizing, and training that prepare people to exercise the power which they must necessarily conquer.” In USSW, education is never abstract or detached. It is inseparable from organizing, ensuring that every act of study, training, or collective work becomes a practical tool for struggle. 

THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF USSW’S PEDAGOGICAL METHOD 

USSW’s pedagogy is organized around four interconnected dimensions: study, militant work, practical training, and Soul. Each shapes the learning process and reflects the union’s core values. Together, they ensure that political education is not separate from organizing, but woven into every campaign, school, and meeting. 

1. STUDY 

USSW leaders study history and politics from the standpoint of Southern workers. The relationship between facilitator and participant is dialogic but directive, never neutral. Dialogic education means that learning happens through conversation, questioning, and collective reflection rather than passive absorption. Directive education means that facilitators guide the discussion with clear objectives, ensuring lessons move from personal problems to systemic analysis. 

This practice is not invented from scratch. USSW builds on a long lineage of popular education traditions that link study directly to struggle. Freire, whose literacy campaigns in Brazil taught workers to “perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality,” captures one dimension of what USSW puts into practice.  The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), which continues this tradition, insists that “full human development occurs through the historical process of learning and socialization, intertwined with cultural, ideological, social, and political aspects.”  These global insights resonate deeply in the South, where testimony, storytelling, and collective problem-solving have long been survival tools for Black and working-class communities. 

Closer to home, Myles Horton of Highlander Folk School cautioned that while education must begin with people’s experiences, it cannot end there: “There’s a time when people’s experiences run out.” USSW study sessions follow this principle: they start with lived workplace struggles and move outward to the broader systems that produce them. Workers read aloud from history and political economy texts, wrestle with their meaning together, and then ask how those lessons apply to their own campaigns. The result is not just knowledge but sharper strategy. 

Study in USSW is never abstract; it is always tethered to practice. It equips workers not only to analyze their conditions but to act together to change them. 

2. MILITANT WORK 

USSW aims to reclaim the dignity of labor and develop heightened working-class consciousness by reshaping the meaning of work in its fullness. Every Worker Power School and event requires members to engage in what the union calls “militant work”: cooking, cleaning, childcare, and other shared responsibilities. These tasks are not included as an afterthought or a chore; they are part of the pedagogy itself. 

The category of “work” is understood both in the narrow sense of the labor that employees perform in exchange for a wage, and as the uniquely human act of creation – physical, mental, and cultural. Freire noted that the instructors in his adult literacy programs in Brazil “began with the conviction that the role of man was not only to be in the world, but to engage in relations with the world – that through acts of creation and re-creation, man makes cultural reality and thereby adds to the natural world, which he did not make. We were certain that man’s relation to reality, expressed as a Subject to an object, results in knowledge.”  Militant work also connects to Southern traditions where communal work – whether farming, food preparation, or community childcare – has long sustained working-class life and organizations. 

In USSW, militant work becomes a political exercise when it is structured with the intention to overcome the alienation of workers from their labor. This transformation requires overcoming many dynamics that structure current work conditions, including the separation of manual and intellectual work, as well as the gendered and racialized hierarchies that shape labor exploitation. Historically, women and workers of color have been relegated to the most devalued and underpaid forms of labor, while their contributions have been erased or diminished. Militant work in USSW creates a collective practice that not only affirms the dignity of all labor but also actively works to disrupt the social divisions of labor that capitalism relies upon. 

Militant work in USSW challenges traditional notions of leadership, competition, and workplace hierarchy. Members intentionally restructure how they relate to their “coworkers” during militant work time, ensuring leadership is rooted in accountability rather than top-down authority typical in traditional workplaces. This means actively rejecting the behaviors and attitudes of their bosses and cultivating leadership that fosters mutual respect and shared responsibility. 

A key aspect of this transformation is acknowledging and uplifting often invisible labor – the essential but undervalued tasks such as taking out the trash, doing the dishes, leading childcare efforts, and maintaining communal spaces. These acts of care and maintenance are integral to sustaining the organization and the movement and to making political education processes possible. USSW’s dimension of militant work reinforces the idea that all labor, regardless of visibility or status, has value and contributes to the collective struggle. 

Key elements of militant work in USSW include: 

• Base Group Responsibilities: Participants take on work necessary for maintaining a functional and organized learning environment, through tasks like cleaning collective spaces, meal preparation, etc. 

• Cooperative Projects: Community-oriented service; preparing meals, building resource pantries, and maintaining spaces such as the chapter offices as gathering places outside of scheduled events, embodies a vision of labor that serves collective well-being. 

As Studs Terkel wrote in his 1974 book Working, “Most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit.” USSW’s pedagogical model seeks to expand the meaning of work: work for social uplift rather than profit-making. 

By engaging in militant work, workers develop a new relationship with labor – one that is not defined by competition, coercion, or exploitation, but by cooperation, a sense of purpose, and solidarity. It affirms that work can be an act of humanization rather than alienation. 

3. PRACTICAL TRAINING 

A strong and sustainable movement requires an intentional structure that integrates political education with leadership development, ensuring that workers are both learning and practicing the skills needed to sustain organizing efforts. USSW’s organizing model is designed to ensure that workers are not only participants in struggle but also leaders in shaping the movement. At the core of this structure are Base Groups, which serve as both a site for political education and a vehicle for organizing. Through these groups, workers engage in small group discussions, build relationships, and take on concrete responsibilities that serve an operational role but also strengthen their leadership within the movement. 

In USSW, Base Groups play a critical role in both Worker Power Schools and chapter organizing. In Worker Power Schools, Base Groups include six to eight people and serve as spaces for structured dialogue and reflection, the completion of militant work, and collective accountability. Concretely, this means that a portion of the day during Worker Power Schools is spent within the Base Group to discuss and build on the lessons from the day, identify areas where there are still questions, and relate theoretical lessons to the practical tasks ahead of them when they return home. The Base Groups are also responsible for militant work on a rotating schedule during the school year and for ensuring the participation of each member in the school. 

In USSW chapters, Base Groups act as smaller mobilization units that help maintain engagement between major campaigns and actions, allowing veteran members to remain active while also integrating new members into the organization’s political work. 

Facilitation is especially important. Members are trained to lead discussions, frame debates, and draw out the voices of others. This is where leadership development and political education converge: learning to facilitate means learning to listen, to analyze, and to hold a room together with clarity and purpose. 

Facilitators learn to engage participants in structured dialogue, ask critical questions, and ensure discussions remain orderly and grounded in political clarity. This process helps workers develop confidence, strategic thinking, and discipline – all essential skills for workplace and community organizing. Learning to facilitate also reinforces the principle that education is not something imposed from the outside but a collective and reciprocal process that emerges from within the movement. Every student is a teacher, and every teacher is a student. 

Theresa “TK” Kinard, a Waffle House worker from Georgia, embodies this principle. From speaking up about safety issues at her store to facilitating chapter meetings, TK has used her lived experience to guide discussions and show other workers how to foster courage and skill by example. For TK, facilitating has become a key tool for her development. It has pushed her to think critically about the work, analyze feedback, and engage with it strategically. Each time she facilitates, she sharpens her ability to listen, reflect, and hold space for different perspectives in the room. 

Rather than lecturing or leaning on strict scripting, TK brings authenticity, rapport, and personal expertise to her role as a facilitator. This approach allows her to draw out the voices and opinions of her peers, encouraging them to share their thoughts and insights freely. Through facilitation, TK not only empowers everyone in the room but also herself by strengthening her public speaking skills. USSW’s use of media also extends this train. It is used both as a tool for visibility and a methodology for political education and development. By telling their own stories on their terms, workers practice self-determination, sharpen their analysis, build practical public speaking skills, and develop confidence as leaders. More than representing the union, forward-facing workers represent their communities, their struggles, and their visions for the future. 

Workers speak not just to the media but through it, reaching other discontent workers, challenging harmful stereotypes, and putting faces, names, and voices to some of the most overlooked and underappreciated in our society. Being a spokesperson in USSW isn’t about being polished or media-trained. It is about being honest, clear, and speaking as part of a living, breathing movement, grounded in experience. 

By applying their lived experience to public speaking, workers deepen their political understanding of the world around them. As storytellers, they keep up to date with current events and policy decisions, study history, and prepare intentionally for speaking opportunities. With this ongoing practice, they evolve not only as communicators but as thinkers and organizers capable of analysing power and moving others to act. 

Through leadership development as a pedagogical dimension, USSW creates an organizing structure that is sustainable, democratic, and strategically effective. These structures ensure that workers are not passive participants but architects of their own political education and movement-building. The development of worker-leaders at every level of the organization allows USSW to build a movement that is simultaneously flexible, adaptive, and disciplined. 

4. SOUL 

The final dimension of USSW’s pedagogy is what members call “Soul”: the cultural, emotional, and spiritual force that sustains collective struggle. 

Soul is expressed in many ways. It’s the sound of a Black men’s gospel choir and the Dudley High School drumline at the Worker Power Summit. It’s the rhythm of chants and drumsticks hitting buckets on the strike line. It’s the shared meals cooked by members to feed chapter meetings. It’s the poetry, raps, and posters that workers create to express their vision of a different world. These practices affirm that political education must engage the whole person: mind, body, and spirit. 

USSW’s practice of Soul reflects the Southern traditions it comes from: the spirituals of enslaved people, the testimonies of Black churches, the culture of working-class families who carried history through stories and lyrics. At the same time, it resonates with global movement traditions. The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement calls this dimension mística. Mística – a Portuguese word with no precise English translation – refers to the spiritual and cultural force that binds people together in struggle, recognizing that movements require not only strategic planning but also emotional and symbolic sustenance. 

Despite the understanding of the indispensable nature of these moments and practices, there is a natural tendency, particularly in the U.S., to reduce this to chanting slogans and a few spontaneous moments, or worse, deprioritize it in favor of other needs. USSW has incorporated Soul as a very intentional pedagogical dimension to counter this tendency. 

In Greensboro, NC, in February 2025, the member-organized “Worker Fest” showcased this dimension. USSW members performed original spoken word, poetry, songs, and raps. One highlight was a fashion show of upcycled clothing made from old USSW memorabilia, designed by Columbia, SC worker-leader Shae Parker and modeled by members themselves. Set to the song “Are My Hands Clean?” by Sweet Honey in the Rock, the performance offered a sharp critique of both labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Worker Fest also featured a powerful performance by a Black gospel choir that included Nah’Shon Blount, a Duke University housekeeper and USSW leader in Durham, NC. Their voices highlighted the deep interconnections between faith, culture, and the labor movement. 

By intentionally incorporating art, music, and performance, Worker Fest was a concrete demonstration of USSW’s belief that the union is not just about immediate reforms, but also about reclaiming dignity, celebrating identity, and strengthening the collective spirit necessary for sustained struggle.

THE TASK AHEAD: DEVELOPING “THE THINKER, THE WORKER, AND THE DREAMER” 

USSW has shown over the years that political education is not an abstract exercise but a living, breathing process that fuels worker-led struggle. Through study, workers sharpen their analysis. Through militant work, they remake their relationship to labor and leadership. Through practical training, they gain the skills and discipline to guide struggle. And through Soul, they sustain the cultural and spiritual strength to endure. Taken together, these dimensions nurture workers who understand their historical role, see immediate fights in a broader context, and are prepared to act strategically to organize and transform the South. 

At a time when both public education and labor power face systemic dismantling, USSW’s work is an urgent intervention. The defunding of schools, the suppression of radical histories, and the attacks on unions are not isolated crises but deliberate strategies to weaken worker consciousness and power. By insisting on deep, historically grounded, and action-oriented political education, USSW challenges these strategies directly. It ensures that Southern workers are not only resisting exploitation but preparing themselves to govern their own futures. 

The pedagogical model of USSW reflects a fundamental truth: education is inseparable from struggle. Whether through Worker Power Schools, base group organizing, militant work, or the cultural force of Soul, USSW is reclaiming education as a site of empowerment rather than subjugation. This approach does not simply train workers for isolated fights over wages and conditions; it cultivates the vision, discipline, and solidarity required for long-term movement building. 

The history of the Southern working class is a history of resilience, from the Reconstruction-era struggles for land and literacy to the battles of Black labor organizers in the 20th century. USSW stands in this lineage, building on past lessons while forging new paths. Its pedagogy makes possible the development of leaders who do not burn out after a campaign – whether won or lost – but remain rooted in a long horizon of struggle. 

In his 1946 speech “Behold the Land,” W.E.B. DuBois spoke of the South: “Here, if anywhere on earth, is the need for the thinker, the worker, and the dreamer.” In our moment, these are not separate figures but unified aspects of what it means to be fully human in struggle. To think critically, to work collectively, and to dream boldly are all necessary to build a new society. 

The pedagogy of the Southern worker is not just about survival – it’s about transformation. It’s about workers recognizing that they are not just cogs in a machine but the very force that makes the world run. With the right tools, strategies, and political education, they will not only demand a better world; they will build it.

Inez O’Donnell is a communications specialist with USSW, based in Georgia.

Lindsey Krenzler-Ferreira is a political educator with USSW, based in North Carolina.

---

This article was originally published by Scalawag Magazine; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

“Behold the Land”

As we celebrated Juneteenth 2026, W.E.B. DuBois reminds us the path to freedom runs through the South

By W.E.B. DuBois

June 19, 2026

Source: The New Liberator

Selma Voting Rights March. Photo: SEIU, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This year and every year, we are reminded that the great liberation of Black people on Juneteenth 1865 is a call towards more life, wider commitment, and deeper freedom. In the shadow of Callais and on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must honor the best of what our ancestors have struggled, died, and lived for by struggling and fighting for the hearts and minds of millions.

In this moment we look to an address by W.E.B. DuBois at the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Columbia, South Carolina, October 1946, urging young people to regard the South as the battleground in the struggle for emancipation of working people, Black and white. He called on them to fight for “a new nation, a new economy, a new culture in a South really new.”

The future of American Negroes is in the South. Here three hundred and twenty-seven years ago, they began to enter what is now the United States of America; here they have made their greatest contribution to American culture; and here they have suffered the damnation of slavery, the frustration of reconstruction and the lynching of emancipation. I trust then that an organization like yours is going to regard the South as the battle-ground of a great crusade. Here is the magnificent climate; here is the fruitful earth under the beauty of the southern sun; and here, if anywhere on earth, is the need of the thinker, the worker and the dreamer. This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalist monopoly.

Remember here, too, that you do not stand alone. It may seem like a failing fight when the newspapers ignore you; when every effort is made by white people in the South to count you out of citizenship and to act as though you did not exist as human beings while all the time they are profiting by your labor, gleaning wealth from your sacrifices and trying to build a nation and a civilization upon your degradation. You must remember that despite all this, you have allies—and allies even in the white South.

First and greatest of these possible allies are the white working classes about you, the poor whites whom you have been taught to despise and who in turn have learned to fear and hate you. This must not deter you from efforts to make them understand, because in the past in their ignorance and suffering they have been led foolishly to look upon you as the cause of most of their distress. You must remember that this attitude is hereditary from slavery and that it has been deliberately cultivated ever since emancipation.

Slowly but surely the working people of the South, white and Black, must come to remember that their emancipation depends upon their mutual cooperation; upon their acquaintanceship with each other; upon their friendship; upon their social intermingling. Unless this happens each is going to be made the football to break the heads and hearts of the other.

White youth in the South is peculiarly frustrated. There is not a single great ideal which they can express or aspire to, that does not bring them into flat contradiction with the Negro problem. The more they try to escape it, the more they land into hypocrisy, lying and double dealing; the more they become, what they least wish to become, the oppressors and despisers of human beings. Some of them, in larger and larger numbers, are bound to turn toward the truth and to recognize you as brothers and sisters, as fellow travelers toward the dawn.

There has always been in the South that intellectual elite who saw the Negro problem clearly. They have always lacked and some still lack the courage to stand up for what they know is right. Nevertheless they can be depended on in the long run to follow their own clear thinking and their own decent choice. Finally even the politicians must eventually recognize the trend in the world, in this country, and in the South. James Byrnes, that favorite son of this commonwealth, and Secretary of State of the United States, is today occupying an indefensible and impossible position; and if he survives in the memory of men, he must begin to help establish in his own South Carolina something of that democracy which he has been recently so loudly preaching to Russia. He is the end of a long series of men whose eternal damnation is the fact that they looked truth in the face and did not see it; John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman are men whose names must ever be besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon democracy and freedom.

Eventually this class of men must yield to the writing in the stars. That great hypocrite, Jan Smuts, who today is talking of humanity and standing beside Byrnes for a United Nations, is at the same time oppressing the Black people of Africa to an extent which makes their two countries, South Africa and the American South, the most reactionary peoples on earth, peoples whose exploitation of the poor and helpless reaches the last degree of shame. They must in the long run yield to the forward march of civilization or die.

If now you young people, instead of running away from the battle here in Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, instead of seeking freedom and opportunity in Chicago and New York — which do spell opportunity — nevertheless grit your teeth and make up your minds to fight it out right here if it takes every day of your lives and the lives of your children’s children; if you do this, you must in meetings like this ask yourselves what does the fight mean? How can it be carried on? What are the best tools, arms, and methods? And where does it lead?

I should be the last to insist that the uplift of mankind never calls for force and death. There are times, as both you and I know, when

Tho’ love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,
‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe
When for truth he ought to die.

At the same time and even more clearly in a day like this, after the millions of mass murders that have been done in the world since 1914, we ought to be the last to believe that force is ever the final word. We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason if this ever becomes a reasonable world. The careful reasoning of the human mind backed by the facts of science is the one salvation of man. The world, if it resumes its march toward civilization, cannot ignore reason. This has been the tragedy of the South in the past; it is still its awful and unforgivable sin that it has set its face against reason and against the fact. It tried to build slavery upon freedom; it tried to build tyranny upon democracy; it tried to build mob violence on law and law on lynching, and in all that despicable endeavor, the state of South Carolina has led the South for a century. It began not the Civil War — not the War between the States — but the War to Preserve Slavery; it began mob violence and lynching and today it stands in the front rank of those defying the Supreme Court on disfranchisement.

Nevertheless reason can and will prevail; but of course it can only prevail with publicity — pitiless, blatant publicity. You have got to make the people of the United States and of the world know what is going on in the South. You have got to use every field of publicity to force the truth into their ears, and before their eyes. You have got to make it impossible for any human being to live in the South and not realize the barbarities that prevail here. You may be condemned for flamboyant methods; for calling a congress like this; for waving your grievances under the noses and in the faces of men.

That makes no difference; it is your duty to do it. It is your duty to do more of this sort of thing than you have done in the past. As a result of this you are going to be called upon for sacrifice. It is no easy thing for a young Black man or a young Black woman to live in the South today and to plan to continue to live here; to marry and raise children; to establish a home. They are in the midst of legal caste and customary insults; they are in continuous danger of mob violence; they are mistreated by the officers of the law and they have no hearing before the courts and the churches and public opinion commensurate with the attention which they ought to receive. But that sacrifice is only the beginning of battle; you must re-build this South.

W.E.B. DuBois, ca. 1907.

There are enormous opportunities here for a new nation, a new economy, a new culture in a South really new and not a mere renewal of an old South of slavery, monopoly and race hate. There is a chance for a new cooperative agriculture on renewed land owned by the state with capital furnished by the state, mechanized and coordinated with city life. There is chance for strong, virile trade unions without race discrimination, with high wage, closed shop and decent conditions of work, to beat back and hold in check the swarm of landlords, monopolists and profiteers who are today sucking the blood out of this land. There is chance for cooperative industry, built on the cheap power of T.V.A. [Tennessee Valley Authority] and its future extensions. There is opportunity to organize and mechanize domestic service with decent hours, and high wage and dignified training.

There is a vast field for consumers’ cooperation, building business on public service and not on private profit as the main-spring of industry. There is chance for a broad, sunny, healthy home life, shorn of the fear of mobs and liquor, and rescued from lying, stealing politicians, who build their deviltry on race prejudice.

Here in this South is the gateway to the colored millions of the West Indies, Central and South America. Here is the straight path to Africa, the Indies, China and the South Seas. Here is the path to the greater, freer, truer world. It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists and gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources. The oil and sulfur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; the lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, Black and white, and not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive for the real right to vote, the right to real education, the right of happiness and health and the total abolition of the father of these scourges of mankind, poverty.

“Behold the beautiful land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.” Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, Black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other, and dare not face a future of equal, independent, upstanding human beings, in a real and not a sham democracy.

To rescue this land, in this way, calls for the Great Sacrifice; this is the thing that you are called upon to do because it is the right thing to do. Because you are embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, Black and white; the upbuilding of democracy; the breaking down, particularly here in the South, of forces of evil represented by race prejudice in South Carolina; by lynching in Georgia; by disfranchisement in Mississippi; by ignorance in Louisiana and by all these and monopoly of wealth in the whole South.

There could be no more splendid vocation beckoning to the youth of the twentieth century, after the flat failures of white civilization, after the flamboyant establishment of an industrial system which creates poverty and the children of poverty which are ignorance and disease and crime; after the crazy boasting of a white culture that finally ended in wars which ruined civilization in the whole world; in the midst of allied peoples who have yelled about democracy and never practiced it either in the British Empire or in the American Commonwealth or in South Carolina. Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by Black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races — without poverty, ignorance and disease!

---

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868–1963) was a foundational sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and author who shaped the trajectory of Black liberation and civil rights in twentieth-century America. As the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Du Bois rejected accommodationist policies, co-founded the NAACP, pioneered empirical sociology, and championed global Pan-Africanism.

---

This article was originally published by The New Liberator; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

W.E.B. DuBois

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868–1963) was a foundational sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and author who shaped the trajectory of Black liberation and civil rights in twentieth-century America. As the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Du Bois rejected accommodationist policies, co-founded the NAACP, pioneered empirical sociology, and championed global Pan-Africanism.