Defending civil society, civil liberties, and civil rights

The panel will focus on the character and depth of attacks by the Trump administration, their strategic

direction and threat to the working class. The discussion will also focus on how to organize resistance,

the role of socialists, social movements, and labor. And how to achieve unity of the anti-fascist majority.

Additionally, the panel will address the key importance of defending civil society, how best to use our

civil liberties, and why a commitment to the civil rights of minorities, the LBGTQ community and

immigrants are essential to a victory over the fascist threat.

The panel will feature Harmony Goldberg, Michaela Brangan and Bill Fletcher. Harmony and Bill are well

known and deeply experienced organizers with well established roots in the working class. Michaela is a

DSA member and teaches at Amherst College. They will have 15 to 20 minutes for their opening

statements to be followed by a moderated discussion. The panel will be for 1.5 hours.

Speakers

Harmony Goldberg has provided political education for social movements in the United States for

over 25 years. She co-founded and led the School of Unity and Liberation in Oakland, CA. Since then, she

has worked closely with the domestic workers movement and with People’s Action. She is currently the

Director of Praxis at Grassroots Power Project. Harmony has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the

City University of New York. Her research focused on the promising forms of worker’s struggle and class

politics that were emergent in domestic worker organizing in New York City. At GPP, Harmony works

closely with People’s Action, and she leads the development of strategic education programs. Harmony

has been driven by her family’s struggles with downward mobility and her standing rage at racial

injustice, which have motivated her to search for ways to build meaningful multi-racial class power.

Harmony is grateful to be able to count Leith Mullings, David Harvey, and the educators of the

Movimiento Sem Terra’s Escola Nacional among her most formative teachers, and her thinking has been

profoundly shaped by the work of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, WEB DuBois and Robin D.G. Kelley.

Bill Fletcher Jr. Upon graduating college Fletcher went to work as a welder in a shipyard, and over

the years has been active in workplace and community struggles, as well as electoral campaigns. He has

worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staff person in the national AFl-CIO.

Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy

Studies; a member of DSA, and in leadership of several other projects. He is co-author with Peter Agard

of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations,

1934-1941”; co-author with Dr. Fernando Gapasin of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor

and a new path toward social justice”; and the author of “’They’re Bankrupting Us’- And Twenty other

myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television,

radio and the web.

Michaela Brangan is a member of North New Jersey DSA and a member of DSA National Poli

Ed Steering. She joined DSA in 2017, during the first organizing drive for Cornell Graduate Students

United which she helped start in 2014. She is part-time faculty at Amherst College in the department of

Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, where she has taught and researched in the intersections of civil

rights and constitutional law, social and political