Whether we want to fight censorship, dictatorship, fascism, or contest racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, or other forms of hatred, it helps to know that the fight we’re waging has deep roots, with precedents that include centuries of resistance.
What’s more we need role models to rouse and challenge us to stand up for equity and fairness, and help us understand the risks taken and fights fought by previous generations.
Strategies and tactics can, of course, vary, and victory can mean different things to different people, nonetheless the writers of the They Said No series from Seven Stories Press—eight books, four of them already published and four that will roll out by the start of 2024—want to inspire young people to be bold and say “No” to discrimination, hate, violence, and oppression.
Seven Stories Press
The series, written as historical fiction, is geared to readers aged ten and older. And while each volume offers an insightful glimpse into the factors that precipitated each individual’s dramatic rebellion, the fact that the first four people profiled—Mordechai Anielewicz, Victor Jara, Harvey Milk, and Anna Politkovskaya—were murdered because of their work, makes the series less useful than it might be. After all, plenty of activists spend long lives organizing against the status quo, devoting decades to successful resistance.
Indeed, the stories told in these books are tragic and require readers to take a long view of both history and social change, something I am not sure is possible for newly-minted activists. That said, each volume includes appendices of additional resources—books, videos, films, and websites that expand on the information presented. Nonetheless, the life stories that unfold are as likely to induce fear as they are to induce action or defiance.
Anielewicz, for example, helped instigate 1943’s Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a twenty-eight-day revolt against the Nazis who had confined the city’s 400,000 Jews behind a walled, overcrowded, and filthy enclosure for two-and-a-half years. According to author Rachel Hausfater, the twenty-four-year-old Anielewicz finally reached his boiling point and, beginning in the fall of 1942, began pulling together an army of parentless children. She describes the “troops” as made up of “700 boys and girls between thirteen and twenty-four years of age, ragged, starving, and barely trained; with 350 revolvers, ten rifles, ninety grenades, a few hundred Molotov cocktails, explosives, and two mines . . . . They knew no one would come to their rescue, neither the Poles nor the Allied forces . . . . Almost all were killed.”
Is it laudable that they fought back? Absolutely. But is Anielewicz the best resistance role model to highlight for kids seeking to change the world?
Similarly, the books tell the story of Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara, whose courageous decision to raise his voice in song while imprisoned by fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, led to his death in September 1973. Likewise, Harvey Milk, an out and proud gay man who became a San Francisco City Supervisor in 1977—one of the first openly queer elected officials in the United States—was gunned down by homophobe Dan White. The killing, writer Safia Amor reports, took place three days after local voters approved a measure protecting LGBTQ+ teachers from being fired because of their sexual orientation.
I am glad the series will eventually include books about George Sand and Amie Cesaire, people whose work was not cut short by war or political opponents.
Then there’s Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who refused to stop writing about government corruption or the genocidal war that was raging in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. Politkovskaya’s 2006 assassination triggered an international outcry–largely unsuccessful–in support of press freedom inside Russia. Still, as Dominique Conil writes, in Russia, “where successive powers seek to destroy freedom of thought, opponents always emerge. Whether their name is Pussy Riot or Alexei Navalny.”
Indeed, history makes clear that attempts to stifle resistance are a fool’s errand. That said, I am glad the series will eventually include books about George Sand and Amie Cesaire, people whose work was not cut short by war or political opponents (though two of the remaining four subjects, Rosa Luxemburg and Janusz Korczak, were killed). Young readers navigating a precarious world need role models who not only survived, but made fighting back a life-long occupation. While activists sometimes pay the ultimate price for “saying no,” countless people throughout the world have devoted decades to making good trouble, whether for environmental stewardship, gender equity, racial justice, or promoting peace.
Indeed, many people die of old age having spent their lifetimes fighting the good fight. They deserve to be recognized as much as young martyrs, especially in a series targeting budding activists in need of both hope and inspiration.