A Radical Line - From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground

Informationen zum Autor Thai Jones used multiple aliases before he reached the age of four. In 1981, while he was watching a baseball game, heavily armed agents of the FBI and NYPD swept into his family's New York City apartment and arrested his parents, fugitive leaders of the radical Weather Underground. Since then, Jones has mostly used his real name. He has worked as a reporter for  Newsday  and is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Albany, NY. Klappentext In this elegant family history, journalist Thai Jones traces the past century of American radical politics through the extraordinary exploits of his own family. Born in the late 1970s to fugitive leaders of the Weather Underground and grandson of Communists, spiritual pacifists, and civil rights agitators, Thai Jones grew up an heir to an American tradition of resistance. Yet rather than partake of it, he took it upon himself to document it. The result is a book of extraordinary reporting and narrative. The dramatic saga of A Radical Line begins in 1913, when Jones's maternal grandmother was born, and ends in 1981, when a score of heavily armed government agents from the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force stormed into four-year-old Thai's home and took his parents away in handcuffs. In between, Jones takes us on a journey from the turn-of-the-century western frontier to the tenements of melting-pot Brooklyn, through the Great Depression, the era of McCarthyism, and the Age of Aquarius. Jones's paternal grandfather, Albert Jones, committed himself to pacifism during the 1930s and refused to fight in World War II. The author's maternal grandfather, Arthur Stein, was a member of the Communist Party during the 1950s and refused to collaborate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. His maternal grandmother, Annie Stein, worked closely with civil rights legends Mary Church Terrell and Ella Baker to desegregate institutions in Washington, DC, and New York City. His father, Jeff Jones, joined the violent Weathermen and led hundreds of screaming hippies through the streets of Chicago to clash with police during the Days of Rage in 1969. Then Jeff Jones disappeared and spent the next eleven years eluding the FBI's massive manhunt. Thai Jones spent the first years of his life on the run with his parents. Beyond the politics, this is the story of a family whose lives were filled with love honored and betrayed, tragic deaths, painful blunders, narrow escapes, and hope-filled births. There is the drama of a pacifist father who must reconcile with a bomb-throwing son and a Communist mother whose daughter refuses to accept the lessons she has learned in a life as an organizer. There are parents and children who can never meet or, when they do, must use the ruses and subterfuge of criminals to steal a hug and a hello. Beautifully written and sweeping in its scope, A Radical Line is nothing less than a history of the twentieth century and of one American family who lived to shake it up. Chapter 1: Cobblestones Two young women climbed the stairs to an elevated rail platform in Brooklyn during the summer of 1929. One of them walked with a cane, and the other's legs were hampered by a long black coat that was anything but stylish. Their school day had just ended, and they stood a few paces apart waiting for the train to Coney Island. On the street below, nothing stirred unless it had to. Glass, steel, stone, concrete: everything in the borough absorbed the sun and was too hot to touch. Carefully shaded groceries were rank and rotten by midmorning, while fat flies swarmed around the steaming trash piled on the sidewalk. Evelyn Wiener, known to her Yiddish-speaking friends as Chavy, was taking summer classes because she had flunked geometry. Only fifteen years old, a childhood case of polio forced her to walk with the aid of a wooden cane. Her father had been a charter memb...

List of contents

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 Cobblestones

Chapter 2 L'Enfant Jones

Chapter 3 Konspiratsia

Chapter 4 The Other Cheek

Chapter 5 The Committees

Chapter 6 Breakaway

Chapter 7 Class Struggle

Chapter 8 Days of Rage

Chapter 9 In the Forest

Chapter 10 The Bust

Afterword

Notes

Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

About the author

Thai Jones used multiple aliases before he reached the age of four. In 1981, while he was watching a baseball game, heavily armed agents of the FBI and NYPD swept into his family's New York City apartment and arrested his parents, fugitive leaders of the radical Weather Underground. Since then, Jones has mostly used his real name. He has worked as a reporter for Newsday and is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Albany, NY.

Product details

• Authors: Jones, Gary Jones, Thai Jones, JONES THAI
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.03.2013
• EAN: 9781451656626
• ISBN: 978-1-4516-5662-6
• No. of pages: 336
• Series: FREP - FREE PR
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education