Fugitives are on the run—not free yet, they are running and running hard…running toward freedom. Refugees have escaped war or catastrophic climate collapse or extreme social disintegration, and forced to flee their homes, compelled to confront a fresh landscape, they invent new ways of living, learning, loving, and being—on the run. Walter Riley is a long-distance runner—he’s been in the mix and on the move for eight decades. A refugee from the Jim Crow South where as a teenager he was a renowned organizer and activist, and at 19 moderated a conversation with Malcolm X in Durham, NC, Walter Riley is a civil rights attorney in Oakland, California, winner of the National Lawyers Guild’s Champion of Justice Award, and a founder of Haiti Emergency Relief (visit Episode #38 where Walter is in conversation about Haiti with our Beloved late comrade Malik Alim). Walter Riley is a fugitive from our soul-crushing racial capitalist system, and a powerful revolutionary thinker and strategist. His son Boots Riley says that his dad teaches us that “we must participate, we must engage, we must seek to change the world.” In motion and in action we will develop our thinking and figure out with more clarity “how to fight, how to live, how to love…” Arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart, Walter Riley returns to “Under the Tree” for a discussion of movement-building in this political moment as well as his new book (with Jesse Strauss and a Foreword by Boots), Civil Rights and Structural Attacks.

We're delighted to be joined—again—by Mark Nowak, a labor activist, organizer, legendary teacher, and prize-winning poet, who is the founding director of the Worker Writers School. I've participated in sessions at the School several times, and the joy and energy that explodes into the room is striking as domestic workers, cab drivers, miners, and other workers embrace and display their intellectual and creative talents. Adrienne Rich praised Nowak for "regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature." Here we discuss AGAIN, his photo-text commentary on MAGA, touching on mass incarceration, school shootings, environmental collapse, white nationalism, and war.

Anarchy is community gardens and potluck dinners, playgrounds and art classes, friends and family in the foreground, and dancing wildly on the ruins of a system that was killing us. Anarchy is spontaneous cooperation without coercion, mutuality and reciprocity, tolerance for confusion, contingency, improvisation, dialogue and debate, experimentation, spontaneity, and the flux that accompanies constant social learning. Anarchy is embracing the cosmic dream boogie and a freedom we’ve never tasted. Anarchy is free people doing all the things that free people do, and respecting other free people doing everything that free people do. We're in conversation with Jessica Lawless, author of Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent, a moving account of abolitionist feminist resistance excavated from their decades of organizing and activism.