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Buttons of the Left, Chicago, IL (2026)

10/12/2026

Happy Day of Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Resistance!

In the 1970s, international conferences of Native peoples of the Americas began to propose October 12 as a day recognizing the long history of resistance to colonialism and genocide. In the United States, that date had been officially designated a federal holiday honoring the brutal ra**st, slaver and conquerer Christopher Columbus just years earlier.

Momentum to institute an Indigenous People’s Day picked up in 1992, the quincentennial of Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean. Boston and Berkeley were two leading cities in the effort, with Berkeley officially proclaiming the day. In Boston a large demonstration was led by the United American Indians of New England (UAINE), which had for years also organized a National Day of Mourning counter-demonstration of the Thanksgiving holiday. In the decades that followed, more cities and states replaced Columbus Day. As part of his administration’s overall attacks on progressive reforms, Donald Trump announced a return to Columbus Day in 2025.

These buttons all date to 1992. Two were illustrated by Lisa Lyons, who also created the graphics for a series of buttons issued in the 1960s by the Independent Socialist Club of Berkeley.

10/02/2026

I’ve had a great week at the UAW International Union Member Mobilization Institute with UAW members from different industries all over the country.

I brought the exhibit “Many Histories of the United Steelworkers” which tells the story of how other manufacturing workers organized to set up for viewing in the eating area and created a new small exhibit “How District 65 Broke All the Rules and Changed the Labor Movement,” as part of a really excellent worker’s art exhibit featuring 𝗝ustseeds Artists' Cooperative posters, nevsprints prints, zines and annabelle heckler 🍉🍞🌹🌈’s curated selection of photography from rank and file “65ers” in the 1940s and 50s.

District 65 grew from a small independent union of wholesale workers into New York’s largest local which used innovative tactics, high level of member leadership, and dedication to fighting racism. There’s a lot to learn and be inspired by their example.

On Thursday I taught some elective classes that used buttons and other ephemera as an entry point looking at examples of working class militancy, union democracy, multiracial organizing, as well as a look at the legacy and lessons of District 65. Class participants also made their own buttons! Preparation for the May Day 2028 contract fight was a big theme.

Solidarity forever! ⚙️

09/24/2026

On September 23, 1968–the anniversary of the Lares Rebellion—the Young Lords street gang in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood refounded itself as a radical community movement influenced by the Black Panthers. Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, which grew substantially in the 1950s, faced constant threat of displacement to new neighborhoods by urban renewal and gentrification projects of the city government and real estate developers. The Young Lords initially formed in the late 1950s to address the self-defense needs of youth who were met with hostility in Lincoln Park by the established gangs of European immigrant groups.

One of the Young Lords’ leaders, Cha Cha Jimenez, became politicized during a jail term and emerged with determination to reorganize the gang into a political organization dedicated to self-determination and liberation for Puerto Ricans and all third world people. The YLO fought created “serve the people” programs modeled on the efforts of the Black Panther Party and fought the gentrification of the neighborhood through building occupations. This button was created using an emblem designed by Omar Lopez.

Within a year of its founding in Chicago, Young Lords chapters were established in other cities, with the New York City chapter outpacing and eventually splitting from the Chicago organization.

By the early 1970s, government repression and internal tensions and factionalism doomed the Young Lords Organization in Chicago, although many of its veteran members including Jimenez remained active and important organizers for decades afterwards.

09/23/2026

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was a socialist-leaning union dedicated to organizing every worker in the garment industry across divisions of skill and language. Dues booklets like these give a picture of the lives, concerns, and beliefs of held by ACWA members in Indiana over a century ago.

09/22/2026

Founded in 2015, Liberation Library is a Chicago-based abolitionist organization that provides books and magazines to young people in eleven detention facilities throughout Illinois. Based on the idea that access to reading material is a fundamental right, LL highlights the choice and autonomy of young incarcererated readers and develops correspondence—based relationships.

The roots of books to prisoner programs stretches back to the early 20th century, when organizations like the Anarchist Black Cross and International Labor Defense provided legal, moral and material support for “class war prisoners”—generally understood at that time as individuals jailed for their political and labor organizing activity.

In the 1930s and especially in the late 1960s, practical alliances with organizations of incarcerated people, civil rights groups, and the Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native liberation movements broadened the idea that all political prisoners are political. Numerous volunteer efforts including bail funds, support networks, and material aid campaigns arose to build solidarity between those on both sides of jail and prison cells. The first book to prisoner programs appeared in the early 1970s in Boston, California, and North Carolina and the idea spread quickly.

Subsequent waves of organizing in the 1990s-2000s and 2010s gave birth to local, autonomously run projects around the United States which connect incarcerated people to reading material, challenge book bans, and intersect with other campaigns, independent bookstores, and progressive community institutions. Many, like LL, focus their attention on specific states or populations (such as women or LGBTQ prisoners.)

09/21/2026

Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia on September 21, 2011 after three previous ex*****on dates had been postponed by state and federal courts. During his two-decade incarceration, Davis steadfastly maintained his innocence in the 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail, and his sister Martina Correia worked diligently on his behalf.

Martina helped to unite a coalition with local, national, and international organizations including Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and Amnesty International which rallied a mass movement in defense of her brother and turned the case into a highly publicized referendum on capital punishment. She developed the slogan “I Am Troy Davis” to as a universal slogan opposing the injustice, and in his final statement before ex*****on Troy Davis asserted that the “fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.”

Confined to a wheelchair by aggressive cancer at the time of her brother’s ex*****on, Martina rose from her chair to symbolically “take a stand” against the death penalty at the final rally at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, but tragically succumbed to her disease later that year. In New York City, a Day of Outrage in protest of Davis’ ex*****on linked up with the Occupy Wall Street encampment and, met with police brutality, helped to spark Occupy into a nationwide movement. The following year, many activists who had been active in the fight to save Troy Davis mobilized against George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin, ushering in the Movement for Black Lives.

The photo with this button and shirt being worn are from a previous demonstration for Troy Davis in spring of 2009. Troy Davis, Presente! Martina Correia, Presente!

09/21/2026

I love being the subject of people's cartoons and doodles! (If you've ever made one, this is an official request that you share with me 🙃)

First by Margaret Vail Palmquist
Middle ones by annabelle heckler 🍉🍞🌹🌈
Last one by Luis

09/19/2026

In August 1981, Ronald Reagan fired en masse federal air traffic controllers who had organized into the PATCO union and called a strike for better wages and a shorter work week. The subsequent decertification of the union and draconian repercussions levied against individual strikers, including the cancellation of federal home loans and lifetime ban on federal employment, signaled an open season on unions.

The response by the rest of the labor movement peaked with the “Solidarity Day” demonstration one month later, but this proved to be an insufficient response. Private sector employers followed the lead of the federal government with large-scale hiring of scab workers in industrial strikes over the following years; the frequency and size of strikes (and the power of unions) never recovered to the level known before the PATCO strike.

These buttons and many others like them were issued by various unions, labor support committees, coalition partners, or the AFL-CIO federation and constituency groups. They served as both tools to visibly promote the mobilization and also mementos for participants.

09/18/2026

In mid-September 2011, ten years after stock markets reopened in 2001 and three years into a global recession, small crowds began setting up encampments at Zuccotti Park in New York and the financial centers of other cities. It was the second such attempt in New York—a short lived shantytown deemed “Bloombergville” had been set up that summer—and developed amidst a worldwide protest movement based in public squares which included Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Syntagma Square in Athens, the Spanish “indignados,” and campus occupations against austerity in education.

Occupy Wall Street spread rapidly as both a tactic and a concept of resistance “the 99%.” A week later, Occupiers joined forces with a demonstration against the ex*****on of Troy Davis and the movement developed a surge of momentum. By October, mass arrests in New York symbolized the militancy and resolve associated with the movement and permanent or temporary Occupations, General Assemblies, and other tactics popped up throughout the United States. For the first time in over a generation, political polarization rooted in a loose, populist expression of class division (the 1% vs the rest of us) took hold of public consciousness. In many cities, messy coalitions and alliances formed between Occupiers (despite its identification as a leaderless movement), unions, and other established working class and progressive organizations. Most notably in Oakland, calls for one day strikes represented the peak of participation.

By winter of 2011, most encampments had been dispersed and the phenomenon of Occupy as such dissipated, but much of its symbolism and culture remained embedded in mass consciousness and activist circles for the rest of the decade and helped shape subsequent expressions of class politics. This button, created by designers at McMillian Furrow, is atypical of the “core” Occupy aesthetic which favored cardboard and marker signs and DIY buttons, but represents the breadth of the movement’s appeal and impact.

Buttons of the Left

10/12/2026

10/02/2026

09/24/2026

09/23/2026

09/22/2026

09/21/2026

09/21/2026

09/19/2026

09/18/2026

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