Application deadline: July 10, 2025 11:59 PM / Note: Course is in person only.

The Long Popular Front

Instructor: Mary Reynolds
Dates: Alt. Mondays, 7–9pm • July 14, July 28, August 11, and August 25, 2025
Location: Sixth Street Community Center, 638 E. 6th Street bet Aves B & C
Course cost: $35 DSA members / $45 nonmembers

Course Description:
In our moment of desire and need for a ‘united front’ to fight authoritarianism and fascism, the American Popular Front’s history and legacy has a renewed resonance for the Left.

This course will go beyond the common understanding of the Popular Front as a short-lived, top-down Communist International policy of the mid-1930s. Instead, participants will explore it as an indigenous form and style of American revolutionary politics that took living shape within local grassroots campaigns for race, gender, and economic justice in the Depression decade, but survived far beyond it. Materials for the course will focus on radicals who developed their organizing methods and theoretical frameworks in anti-racist, feminist and transnational Popular Front politics, and whose legacies affected social movements into the twenty-first century, despite continuous anti-leftist repression.

The basis for class discussions will be case studies detailing the lives and labors of four working-class women whose lifelong commitments to grassroots organizing and radical politics emerged from the Popular Front’s coalitions, collective actions, and political theories. Each session will focus on one of these “Popular Fronters” and an example of their multi-racial and cross-class organizing campaigns as entry points into the broader legacy of what we could call “Popular Frontism”: Dorothy Healey and the People’s Front in California; Claudia Jones and the youth movement in New York; Emma Tenayuca and the unemployed campaigns in Texas; and Ah Quon McElrath and the labor movement in Hawaii.

Participants will discuss questions including: What organizing models, tactics and strategies did these 'Popular Fronters' embrace? What political theories shaped their writings and actions? How did they respond to divisions and debates among and between national leaders and grassroot organizers? How did they survive the constant onslaught of reactionary, anti-radical suppression? And how might their organizing strategies and political theories apply to our own moment?

Materials will include book and article excerpts, primary sources, and video clips.

Instructor Biography
Mary Reynolds is a historian of twentieth-century American radicalism. After organizing alongside academic and hospitality workers in UNITE HERE local unions for fifteen years, she is now a research strategist for the Gender and Authoritarianism Research Collective and the Reflective Democracy Campaign. She has taught at Yale and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently writing a book on women in the long Popular Front.

About the NYC DSA Academy for Socialist Education
Education, broadly defined, is and always has been a vital function of revolutionary socialist movements. The NYC DSA Academy aims to enhance the ongoing political education efforts of the New York chapter of DSA. Designed to connect the history and theory of socialist struggles with the work of today’s activists, the Academy aims to offer a rigorous but accessible curriculum for working adults to develop their understanding and strategy.