Wherever There Is a Fight' book reading
'Wherever There Is a Fight' book reading, signing by former ACLU staffers, in
Sacramento May 24; Book chronicles how those fighting for their rights – from slaves to poets – shaped state of California
SACRAMENTO – The two authors of "Wherever There's a Fight - how Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California" will do a reading and book signing MAY 24, 7 – 8:30 p.m., at Sacramento Friends Meeting House, 890 57th St. (between H and J Streets). It's free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Authors Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi are both former ACLU staffers. The book won the 2010 Gold Medal in California from the California Book Awards.
The authors present historic and contemporary images of places you may have walked by every day, without realizing the civil liberties battles that were fought there:
- the Votes for Women Club in San Francisco where shop girls gathered to eat and organize for suffrage,
- the murals that Richard Nixon tried to censor,
- the building occupied by disability rights activists who changed federal law.
It includes stories of how
- Sacramento’s early African American community prevented a slave owner from forcing his slave back to Mississippi in 1857;
- how a Sacramento fifth grader who was suspended from school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1930’s because it violated her religion,
- and the man who defied President Roosevelt’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
"Wherever There’s a Fight," published by Heyday Books to critical
acclaim, is the first-ever account of how civil liberties and civil
rights have grown in California from the gold rush to the precarious
post-9/11 era. With a wide sweep of history, the book connects the experiences of those who fought for trade unions, women’s suffrage and school desegregation to current battles for marriage equality and freedom from government surveillance after the Patriot Act.
