Hindsight is often described as twenty-twenty. Michael Ansara’s memoir, The Hard Work of Hope, proves the point. His insightful reflection looks back on the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, and campus movements of the 1960s and 1970s, gleaning lessons that will likely inspire today’s activists.
Ansara, now seventy-eight, begins the book in 1960 when, as a thirteen-year-old boy, he encountered a group of picketers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, marching in support of Black students who had been refused service by a North Carolina restaurant.
“I did not think about what I was doing,” he writes of his impetuous decision to join this protest. “I was in awe of those who sat in at the lunch counters, rode on the freedom buses, and registered people to vote.”
The Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir
By Michael Ansara
ILR Press, 289 pages
Publication date: July 15, 2025
His contact with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) while still a teen led to quick lessons in community organizing, and Ansara was soon “knocking on doors, producing flyers on mimeo machines, setting out chairs, whatever was needed.”
The idea that social change could be fought for, and that talking to people and listening to their concerns could galvanize collective action, was deeply meaningful to Ansara, a working-class kid who had previously felt the “adolescent despair” common among teenagers.
Assara quickly began working for the newly formed Boston Action Group, facilitators of a 1962 consumer boycott of the Continental Baking Company, the maker of Wonder Bread. The boycott succeeded in pushing the company to change its employment policies and consider Black people for jobs previously reserved for whites. The victory thrilled Ansara.
Likewise, he found burgeoning student mobilizations in support of civil rights compelling.
By 1964, as calls to build a “New Left” resonated, Ansara entered Harvard University as a scholarship student and was drawn to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a group he immediately considered his political home. (Eventually, he found the group’s decision-by-consensus stifling, but that came later.)
Still, when opposition to the Vietnam War led to contention over tactics and strategies, Ansara felt uncertain: Should SDS support Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential bid? Should it encourage young men to burn their draft cards? Did it make sense to target the Dow Chemical Company, makers of the napalm being dropped on what was then called Indochina? Did working to stop the war mean support for the National Liberation Front?
Like his peers, Ansara, now a campus leader, was conflicted. At the same time, he recognized that the antiwar movement lacked a coherent plan.
“There is a world of difference between demands and strategy. We knew our demands,” he writes. “We often debated tactics. But we rarely discussed exactly how the war could end. Would it be by electing a new President? Would it be by cutting off funding for the war in Congress? . . . We did not understand what was needed of us.” What’s more, he recognized that SDS failed to include the 65 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds who were not in college.
Elsewhere in his book, Ansara delves into the sectarianism that divided SDS and comes down hard on the Progressive Labor Party as he dissects the campus strikes at Columbia University in 1968 and Harvard in 1969 that preceded the final SDS convention that June in Chicago, Illinois. He describes feeling “lost, repulsed” by the factionalism at a convention he concedes included by more than 100 undercover FBI and police informants.
ILR Press
In the immediate aftermath of this event, Ansara writes, the Weathermen seemed ascendant. The group’s rise ended after an explosion in a New York City townhouse killed three group members. Violence, he notes, was near constant in 1971 and 1972, with 2,500 domestic bombings carried out over eighteen months by “isolated, uncoordinated, random radicals.”
Still, the war raged. For his part, Ansara was now working to build “a base of committed antiwar activists” at the grassroots level. Challenges were abundant.
In working-class Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, a peace march was derailed when men swinging two-by-fours accosted the protesters. Many injuries resulted, but when the dust settled, Ansara spoke to people whom he’d assumed were pro-war and learned an important lesson.
“We all served in ’Nam,” the men told him. “We don’t support the fucking war. We know what’s going on . . . You marched under the flag of the Vietcong who killed our buddies. We respect the Vietcong. They’re tough motherfuckers but it still disrespects our dead, our fight, and us to march under that flag.”
From that moment on, Ansara was “determined to learn a better way to organize.” Local work began to take precedence, and he and others started a small food co-op in their Dorchester, Massachusetts, community and organized a discussion group for women who had loved ones in jail. They also began working with Vietnam Veterans Against the War and built a winning campaign to remove a corrupt town judge, Jerome Troy.
Moreover, by 1975, the Vietnam War was ending. Ansara was deeply involved in numerous organizations, but took a job leading Massachusetts Fair Share, a group that fought for government transparency. Despite numerous successes, unsustainable growth led to the group’s demise in the mid-1980s. It was time for reassessment.
Ansara had been organizing nonstop for twenty-three years. Stints with the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Central American Peace Campaign, and several businesses followed, but it was being part of an illegal money laundering scheme by the Teamsters that forced him to take stock of his mission, values, and direction.
Since then, he has reinvented himself as a poet, essayist, and community volunteer.
In retrospect, Ansara writes, “I was fortunate enough to have been one of roughly 10,000 women and men of my age group who participated full-time in the great efforts of those years: To split apart the relentless hold of racism, to end a war that should never have been waged, to create new organizations that were massive schools of democracy, to support the birth of a movement that irrevocably altered the role of women, to organize low-income and blue-collar communities to have a voice and to fight for their fair share.”
It is a legacy to be proud of.