"Suddenly hundreds of small boats appeared on the scene and surrounded [the trawler]. They told those fellows who were operating the ship, 'We are going to set fire to your ship. If you want to save your life, come down now.' So the crew came down and the fishermen threw petrol on the ship and completely burnt it down."
The Teacher
In another chapter, readers are brought into a DC public school classroom.
After four or five years teaching at Sousa Middle School, Elizabeth Davis was amazed to learn of the school's role in the famous 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. But her excitement didn't carry over to her students, who, like her, were black.
"It was so depressing because my students said, 'Okay -- so what? Ms. Davis, we're not interested in that stuff,'" she recalls. "It did not resonate with them because... they were not familiar with the history of segregation because they did not experience any of it."
Davis had. The daughter of a sharecropper, she was born on a farm in North Carolina and attended a segregated school system before moving to DC with her mother. In high school Davis helped organize a mass student walkout with Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael.
If Sousa's history was going to come alive for her students, Davis needed to yank it out of the past.
"So I came into the classroom and said: 'Do you all know that one of the students filed a lawsuit against the principal because he would not let that boy come here. He told him that he was too black!' What!!!! Oh, the room was silent. 'Who was it, Ms. Davis? Who was it? Oh! It must have been Tony" Is he suing'?"
Davis then explained that this is what happened at Sousa, although not to their friends, but to other students a few decades ago. Their interest piqued, some of these students went on to help stop the city from tearing down Sousa, which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001.
Davis, meanwhile, is no longer at Sousa, or in the classroom. She's now president of the Washington Teachers' Union.
The Resistance
The spoken histories of Davis, Father Kocherry, and the others in Shifting the Universe provide a rich tapestry of resistance. These individuals are not so much great people, as ordinary folks who set out to do great things. They don't always succeed, but what else is there do but try?
That's what a forest guardian in Ecuador asks. "How can I resign?... To drop that defense would be to doom our generation. To condemn my children," says Marlon Rene Santi Gualingo, whose indigenous community has been fighting for its survival for generations.
Meanwhile here in the U.S., Trump's four-month presidency has spawned a vibrant resistance of its own. With this book, Wolf offers readers powerful examples of what's possible.
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