Red Emma’s

“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over; I maintain that if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them up in a cloak of humor to take the dryness off of them, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science.”  —Joe HillJoe Hill—Wobbly labor organizer, nomadic musician, and revolutionary—is one of the great martyrs of American working class struggle. And the late Franklin Rosemont's sprawling biography—Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture—is the definitive archaeological excavation of Hill's life and spirit, and of the milieu of wild working-class creativity and global solidarity in which his songs were born.In this special event to celebrate the new edition of Franklin's book, we'll be joined by his collaborator and accomplice David Roediger, one of our favorite antiracist historians, who will illuminate the history of Joe Hill's life, death, and legacy, as well as by Red Emma's own Kate Khatib, who worked closely with Franklin in hist last years, and who will situate Joe Hill within Franklin's larger Surrealist project to explode the continuum of history.