Michael James
Rising Up Angry: Our Fight for a Better World
Berger Park Cultural Center
6205 N Sheridan Road, Chicago IL

Book Release and Reading Monday, November 20 at 7 PM

Join us for a book launch with Michael James celebrating the work of Rising Up Angry. The first 30 attendees will receive a free signed book. Rising Up Angry was both a newspaper and radical community based organization in Chicago. From 1969-1975, 82 issues of the paper were published and distributed throughout Chicago and beyond. The organization worked to bring people of all races and ethnicities together, hoping to build a better World. Like other members of Chicago’s Rainbow Coalition, RUA set up and ran a series of Serve the People Programs, including a free legal clinic and a free medical clinic. RUA also produced peoples’ dances, had a peoples’ sports institute, and worked with returning veterans to help end the war in Vietnam. RUA supported the Black Panther Party, Young Lords Organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the American Indian Movement. This collection of writings, photographs, and graphics will introduce you to the important and inspirational work RUA did during its time, food for thought for today’s activists working for social, economic, and political justice.

Michael James is a photographer, teacher, actor, and activist/organizer. He graduated from Lake Forest College in 1964, and spent that summer working on a study of Southern white migrants in Chicago’s Uptown. That fall he headed to UC Berkeley to study sociology on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. There he was arrested in the Free Speech Movement, joined Students for a Democratic Society, and then returned to Uptown to work with JOIN Community Union, an SDS project in Chicago’s Uptown seeking to build an interracial movement of the poor. He co-founded the newspaper and organization Rising Up Angry in 1969, and the venerable Heartland Café in 1976, a progressive community based restaurant he co-ran for 36 years. He has worked in major motion pictures (Above the Law, The Fugitive, Chain Reaction, et cetera), is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, and teaches at DePaul. He has published three books of his photography and is working on more. James produces and hosts the Live from the Heartland Show, which airs Saturdays 9 AM Central on 88.7 FM and wluw.org, on CANTV21 Thursdays at 9 PM Central, and on YouTube. His photos are online at michaelgaylordjames.com and selections of his writing at theragblog.com.

This event is being shared at Berger Park Cultural Center as part of Movement Studies – a programming series investigating social and environmental transitions.

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