Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

We each share a human culture, a human experience, and a human fate with everyone who exists, or ever did exist—we are born, we suffer, we die. And yet, within that vast shared experience there are enormous disparities and variations—all of which can test our capacity for empathy and human solidarity. Imagine facing bombardment and continuous war, invasion and occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the murders of your friends and your children and your family members, the loss of home and community, dislocation and exile—all the worst experiences human beings have suffered. Come close; don’t look away. Now, connect. We are joined in conversation by Tareq Baconi, a Palestinian writer and activist who has written a memoir—Fire in Every Direction—that is also an exquisite love letter to the people of Palestine—their land, their ancestors, a history that cannot be forgotten and a future that cannot be denied. Free Palestine!

International solidarity is at the heart of our hopes for fundamental, humane change in the US. There can be no revolution in values or in fact if progressive Americans wrap themselves in the myth of “exceptionalism” and stand aside from the global struggles leading the fight against imperialism and for peace and justice. We need to become comrades, standing together—shoulder-to-shoulder against a common enemy and toward a common goal. We join, then, a voluntary association characterized by enthusiasm and joy at being part of something larger than ourselves. We’re not allies, functioning in service to, but rather comrades, acting in solidarity with. The biggest obstacle to authentic comradeship in US history—the third rail of American radical politics—is and always has been white supremacy, and tepid work toward International Solidarity and Black freedom. Comradeship in America emerges only from an unconditional embrace of Internationalism and Black Liberation. We are joined in conversation with Martha Biondi, the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University, author of The Black Revolution on Campus;   To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City,  and most recently, We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberationand Prexy Nesbitt, a Chicago organizer, engaged scholar, and activist who built (over several decades) international solidarity with African liberation movements fighting against colonialism and apartheid in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa.

Police agencies across the country have functioned from the start as a violent arm of the elite and a cat’s paw in resisting racial justice and economic fairness. Today’s ICE agents are in the long tradition of slave patrols, SWAT teams and Red Squads. During the high tide of the Civil Rights Movement the brutality of Southern sheriffs was on full display, but two critical phenomena are missed when the dominant narrative focuses exclusively on iconic photos from a few dramatic moments: first, state  repression—brutality, physical violence, infiltration and spying, reputational attacks, bogus prosecutions—against the Movement was not confined to a few redneck sheriffs, but was common practice in police departments at every level everywhere; and, second, Movement activists did not passively accept the abuse, but rather, fought back actively. In Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activist Who Fought Back Joshua Clark Davis documents a monstrous pattern of police activity to crush the Movement, and also the brilliance of Movement folks who confronted police power openly, consistently, and courageously. 

We surely know by now that freedom is more journey than destination, more a summons to struggle than a port-of-call in which to lie down and take s rest. We understand freedom most acutely, paradoxically, when we name the obstacles to our full humanity as unacceptable, and link arms to storm the barricades in the name of liberation. There are moments in history when an apparition of freedom appears clearly, and its meaning is transformed and enlarged—General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” was just such a moment. Twenty thousand enslaved people liberated themselves, taking freedom into their own hands in the wake of the march—they sought freedom in movement, and created a keen, detailed reimagining of freedom, reframing the meaning of the Civil War ever after. We’re joined in conversation by my dear friend and co-host for this episode, Jeff Jones, and Bennett Parten, the author of the remarkable new history, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation.

These are tough times for teachers and students, for young people and their families, for immigrant communities, for people of color, for all of us. All times are tough, of course, but the consolidation of white supremacist power, the organized acts of everyday cruelty, the disdain for humanity, the consolidation of autocracy, the performance of savagery, the unchecked embrace of selfishness, selective humanization and the rendering of large sections of human beings as disposable—the vilest human qualities and the beating heart of capitalism—make our lives all the more precarious, and precious. We’re joined by Kathryn (Kat) Zamarron, a Chicago Public School teacher, in a wide-ranging conversation focussed on the complex  reality of supporting children and youth and their families in dark times. 

On September 27, 2025 we met up at Pilsen Community Books with Aaron Hughes and Arti Walker-Peddakotla of About Face: Veterans Against the War, a dynamic and powerful group involved in building an irresistible movement for peace and against war and fascism. About Face builds on and highlights the legacy and revolutionary power of GI resistance against the backdrop of military mobilizations to violently suppress people’s movements. They walk a difficult and necessary path, organizing inside the military as they support GI resistance and the right to refuse, and outside as they create structures of care and support that prevent enlistment in the imperial death machine in the first place. Their work dances a difficult dialectic as it embraces a fundamental contradiction: confronting and resisting the real harm erupting from the war-makers, and providing paths for radical reorientation for people who (like all of us) can be both perpetrators of harm and victims of a racial capitalist system. They are the authors of a new zine, State Violence, Abolition, and GI Resistance.

On Monday, September 29th the National Public Housing Museum in collaboration with the Goodman Theatre hosted a conversation between Lisa Lee, the founding director of the Museum, and the playwright Zayd Dohrn whose hip hop rock musical Revolution(s) opens the Goodman Theatre's centennial season in October. The gathering was part of an epic citywide and year-long event—100 Free Acts of Theater—which will activate all 50 wards in the city to celebrate the artistic fabric of Chicago, amplify existing arts programming, and collaborate on new efforts. (Learn more at GoodmanTheatre.org/100FreeActs). The conversation roamed widely and revolved around questions like: What does revolution mean? What is the future we deserve? What role do love and joy play in our visions of a better world? What is the role of the many arts at this moment on the clock of the universe?  Examining how art, activism, and imagination shape movements for change, Lisa and Zayd are joined by guest activists throughout the night.

When Hurricane Katrina roared up the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Coast in August, 2005, the devastation was just beginning. The government was murderously unprepared—when the levees failed, 80% of New Orleans was underwater, 1500 people lost their lives, thousand more were injured, and property losses were estimated at $125 billion. The capitalist media consistently smacked its lips over suffering and offered an upside down world where victims became criminals, and mutual aid was portrayed as theft.  The afterlife—the trauma, waste. and wreckage—of the catastrophe is ongoing and includes displacement, corporate theft, privatization of public goods, educide, and cultural sacking.   We’re joined on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by Kristin Buras, an anti-racist activist, teacher, and researcher who is the director of the New Orleans–based Urban South Grass-roots Research Collective, a coalition with African American community groups that combines research and grass-roots organizing for racial equity. She is the author, most recently, of What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.

The speed at which a fascist government can disrupt, dismantle, and destroy on its way to building a full-blown fascist society is breathtaking. Resistance is scattered, and anyone looking to the Democratic Party to offer guidance or leadership should remember that we came to this point on bipartisan rails, that is, the ruling class and the political establishment has agreed for decades on every major issue: unqualified support for Israel’s murderous and illegal actions; the militarization of domestic police forces and policing as the ready-answer to every social problems; mass incarceration as a defining feature of society; the frantic privatization of public goods and services. And underlying it all, the tenacious and deadly legacy of the culture and structures of white supremacy. We’re joined in conversation with the activist, organizer, and writer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, author most recently of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future.

Just as the US Department of Defense should change its name back to the more accurate and honest War Department—its true function and its title from 1789 until 1947 when it morphed into the National Military Establishment (NME), and then, with mad-help from a PR offensive in 1949, the DoD—state and city organizations with names such as “child welfare” and “family services” should stop air-brushing their true functions—the Departments of Family Policing. We’re joined in conversation today with Erin Miles Cloud, the mother of two dazzling kids, a civil rights attorney, and co-editor of a new book from  Haymarket called  How to End Family Policing: From outrage to action.