In the 1980s, being diagnosed with AIDS was basically a death sentence. There were no treatments. People were scared. Today, people with HIV can live full lives, thanks to major breakthroughs in medicine. But the fight isn't over. There are still serious challenges—like unequal access to care, stigma, and high infection rates in marginalized communities.

In 1980s, a playwright and activist Larry Kramer lived in New York. One of his plays, The Normal Heart, told the story of the mystery and fear that surrounded AIDS. As the epidemic grew worse, Kramer watched his friends die with no treatment available—and almost no response from the government.

Kramer helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which focused on social services, but he became disillusioned with its bureaucratic approach. He wanted bold, loud, confrontational action. In 1983, he wrote the explosive article “1,112 and Counting” in The New York Native, which accused politicians and doctors of apathy, calling out specific people by name, and urged the gay community to take action. The article became a turning point, a wake-up call.

In March 1987, Kramer gave a speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City calling for direct political action. About 300 people showed shortly after to form ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). That October, they made their public debut at the National March on Washington for Gay Rights. They marched. They gave speeches. And they staged a protest at the Supreme Court.

ACT UP's guiding principle was nonviolence, but they were not polite or quiet. Members trained for protests, for civil disobedience. They joined “affinity groups” — small, tight-knit teams that could coordinate during protests and protect one another. They agreed on ground rules: no violence, no weapons, no drugs, no actions that would cause panic (so no running or throwing objects). They came prepared.

Instead of one-off protests, ACT UP focused on coordinated campaigns: multi-step actions targeting specific institutions or policies. Their tactics were often disruptive and dramatic. In one protest, they threw fake blood on computers of Big Pharma. In another protest, they overturned tables at a government hearing. They coined the slogan “Silence = Death” and laid down outside the FDA building with cardboard tombstones that read “Killed by FDA Red Tape.”

On March 24, 1987, on Wall Street and Broadway, protesters lay in the streets, blocked traffic, and demanded expanded access to AIDS drugs and a coordinated national policy. They expected to get arrested and had studied up on how to handle this when it happened. These protests worked: research samples grew larger and results arrived faster. Lives were saved.

Some actions pushed boundaries. ACT UP accused the Catholic Church, the FDA, and city governments of direct harm through their silence, delay, and opposition. In 1989, ACT UP and Women's Health Action and Mobilization staged the “Stop the Church” protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. They protested the Catholic Church's opposition to homosexuality, abortion, and condom use. Around 700 demonstrators entered the church; 111 disrupted the mass and were arrested. While it was controversial, this protest drew widespread media attention and put ACT UP in the national and even international spotlight.

A big part of their success came from what they called the “inside-outside strategy.” First came public disruption—big, loud protests. Then came private meetings with government agencies and pharmaceutical companies. For example, they staged large protests to push the FDA and NIH into meetings, where ACT UP members would then sit across the table from officials from these agencies and pharmaceutical executives. This approach helped them shape experimental drug access programs and speed up clinical trials.

Larry Kramer often said that anger is necessary. In one interview years later, he said, “We were dying, and it happened first—so far as I could tell—through my people around me, my friends, our group. And you just think, oh my God, we've got to save our lives, I guess.” He drew inspiration from civil rights protests, Vietnam rallies, and even the Holocaust, asking how could society ignore the suffering of others, thinking how to combat prejudice.

Unlike some other groups, ACT UP didn't have a single leader or hierarchy. This allowed for flexibility and creativity. Campaigns could form organically, with local chapters leading their own initiatives. Obviously, this structure had its challenges—conflicts, fragmentation, burnout. But it also helped ACT UP stay creative, fast-moving, and deeply committed.

The legacy of ACT UP goes far beyond AIDS. Their model—direct action with a clear message and a strategic political goal—has shaped how people protest injustice today. It's been adopted by subsequent health justice and queer liberation movements. ACT UP spoke truth to power, even when it was uncomfortable. They refused to wait quietly. And they showed what determined people can do when systems fail.

Let me take you back to 1975, Iceland. At the time, Iceland was celebrating 50 years of women's suffrage. Women had been voting since 1915, but voting rights didn't mean equality. Women were still expected to cook, clean, care for children, and maybe—if they were lucky—work a job that paid far less than what a man made. Most women earned less than 60% of what men did for the same work. And very few held positions of power. Only nine women sat in the Icelandic parliament.

Red Stocking, a radical women's movement founded in 1970, proposed a strike. But some Icelandic women felt it would be too confrontational and feared that a traditional labor action would invite reprisals. So the strike was renamed "Women's Day Off," which won near-universal support, including solid backing from the unions. The idea was to make visible all the invisible work that women did every day. Not just in offices or factories, but in homes, in schools, in communities. What if women just stopped? Stopped working their jobs. Stopped cleaning. Stopped cooking. Stopped looking after the kids. Just for one day.

But how do you get thousands of women—working women, stay-at-home moms, grandmothers, young students—to take a stand? You organize.

The planning began 6 month in advance. Five major women's organizations in Iceland formed a planning committee to coordinate the strike. First, they organized a Women's Congress in Reykjavík two hundred women delegates, which connected the activists. Then, women's rights groups reached out to unions, political parties, church groups, schools, and businesses. They elected an Executive Committee of ten women and formed five action groups—a public relations planning group, a mass media group, a finance group, a program group, and a national group to contact people outside the Reykjavík area. The public relations group circulated 47,000 copies of a letter "Why a Day Off for Women?" Mass media group prompted radio, television and national newspapers to run stories on low pay for women and sex discrimination. Financial support came from the five organizations as well as from a number of political groups, trade unions and a variety of other associations. Twenty-five thousand stickers reading "Women's Day Off" were printed and sold. Soon they were seen everywhere: on clothing, handbags, walls and windows. More flyers were printed. Meetings were held across the country. Women knocked on doors. They talked in kitchens and cafés and workplaces.

On October 24th, 1975, 90% of the women in Iceland walked off the job—both paid and unpaid. Office buildings emptied. Schools closed early. Nurseries shut their doors. Store shelves went unstocked. Telephone services came to a virtual standstill. Newspapers closed because the typesetters are women. Theatres shut down because actresses wouldn't work. Many schoolchildren were left untaught since 65 per cent of the teachers were women. The national airline had to cancel flights for lack of stewardesses and banks managed to remain open only because executives staffed the counters instead of female tellers.

And at home? The same thing. Women put down their spatulas and laundry baskets. Fathers scrambled to look after their children. The stores ran out of easy-to-cook meals like hot dogs because men were trying to feed families on the fly.

In Reykjavík, the capital, twenty five thousand women—almost one-tenth of the country's population—gathered for a massive rally. They listened to speeches, sang songs, and stood shoulder to shoulder. A women's brass band played the suffragette march. The final speech was given by the head of the union for women cleaning and working in the kitchens and laundries of hospitals and schools. She was not used to public speaking but her speech was so strong and inspiring, that she later went on to become a member of parliament.

The Executive Committee had set up several open houses in the city, so that after the rally, the women went there to talk and have a cup of coffee. Volunteer entertainers went from one open house to another, singing, performing songs and plays. Women connected with each other to continue organizing.

The very next year, Iceland passed Gender Equality Act, guaranteeing equal pay for men and women. And five years after the strike, Iceland elected the world's first democratically elected female president, who said she never would have run if not for that day in 1975.

So, what worked? The organizers chose one clear action—one day off—and stuck to it. They used language strategically, calling it a “day off” to ease fears and get broad buy-in. They planned for what would happen after the strike too—how to keep the momentum going, how to push for policies, not just headlines. It didn't all happen in one day, but many Icelandic women today point to that strike as the transformative moment of their lives, when they first felt a sense of empowerment and a sense of connection to other women that crossed class and political lines.

Nearly 50 years later, the spirit of that day lives on. Iceland still marks October 24th every year as Women's Day Off. The strike inspired similar protests in other countries like Poland, where women boycotted jobs and classes in 2016 to protest a proposed abortion ban. In Spain, women staged a 24-hour strike in 2018 on March 8, International Women's Day, under the theme “If we stop, the world stops.”

So the next time someone tells you that one day won't change, remember: in 1975, 90% of Iceland's women walked out and made history.

In the early 1990s, Los Angeles was deep in a public transit crisis. Traffic congestion was legendary, air pollution was choking the city, and working-class neighborhoods—home to most of the city's bus riders—were being left behind. The city's transportation planners had turned their focus toward shiny rail projects to serve suburban commuters. But in doing so, they were quietly pulling money away from the bus system: although 94% of transit users were bus riders, most of them low-income people of color, the Transportation Authority was spending 70% of its budget on the 6% of its ridership that were rail passengers.

At the same time, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, a community-based organization led by longtime organizer Eric Mann, was running campaigns on labor rights, toxic emissions, and immigrant justice. In 1991, they created a Transportation Policy Group to investigate how these rail investments were affecting low-income riders. They launched the Bus Riders Union, or BRU, to contest what they called a “separate and unequal” transit system. Their goal was to stop fare increases, restore the monthly pass, increase bus service, and place a moratorium on new rail construction until bus needs were met. MTA was preparing to raise fares, eliminate discounted monthly passes, and cut service.

It began with a simple but strategic premise: talk to people where they are. So organizers boarded buses. They rode with people. Handed out bilingual flyers. Listened to complaints. Explained the stakes. They knew that bus riders didn't all live in the same neighborhood, or go to the same church, or belong to the same union. Buses were one of the last truly public spaces for working-class Angelenos—Black, Latino, Asian, white, immigrant. Organizers turned the buses themselves into a site of political education.

This wasn't just outreach. It was recruitment. BRU quickly built a base of 1,500 dues-paying members, most of them regular bus riders. These members became the turnout base for public actions.

In early 1994, when the MTA proposed its fare hike, the BRU was ready. They turned out riders to flood a public hearing. The BRU kept pressure on the MTA board by disrupting meetings, holding press conferences, and publishing detailed critiques of transit budgets.

They partnered with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit on behalf of 350,000 low-income riders. It was one of the largest transportation discrimination cases in U.S. history. A judge quickly issued a restraining order to block the fare hike.

But the BRU didn't rely only on lawyers and legal briefs.

They trained volunteers to count overcrowded buses and identify service gaps. They collected thousands of personal testimonies. They documented how service cuts affected real lives: missed jobs, missed medical appointments, missed opportunities. They kept the media involved. They framed the issue in terms everyone could understand: this wasn't just a transit issue—it was a civil rights issue.

They also formed a multi-issue, multi-ethnic coalition. The BRU's core organizers built alliances with groups like Justice for Janitors, the Filipino Workers Center, Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, and others. Some support came from conservative critics of the rail project. The BRU accepted tactical and ideological differences in order to hold the coalition together—keeping the focus tightly on stopping the fare hike and winning the lawsuit.

They also enlisted technical allies: planners and academics who had credibility with the media and courts. USC Professor James Moore provided expert analysis and frequently contributed biting editorials to the Los Angeles Times.

Inside the MTA, not everyone supported the rail expansion. BRU leaders quietly built relationships with disaffected planners and MTA staffers who worried about bus neglect. These insiders shared information and, at times, informal support for the BRU's case.

All of these connections were, as one observer put it, “strange bedfellows.” But the BRU held the coalition together focused on one goal: win the lawsuit. Two years after the case was filed, the BRU reached a landmark settlement with the MTA. The consent decree included four major victories:

1. A reduction in monthly fares, along with new weekly and semi-monthly options for those who couldn't pay all at once.
2. A commitment to increase the bus fleet to reduce overcrowding.
3. A Joint Working Group, composed of MTA officials and bus riders, to oversee implementation.
4. A court-appointed monitor to enforce the agreement over a 10-year period.

This wasn't symbolic, riders won an actual formal role in shaping transit policy. And the BRU was now a recognized stakeholder.

Along the way BRU developed what scholars call a repertoire of contention: a new model for organizing around public infrastructure in cities where people are geographically dispersed, socially divided, and politically overlooked. Yes, the urban environments can be fragmented, but if community's grievances are rooted in place, like a bus, this common space can be used to rally support.

For organizers today, the lesson is clear: structural problems can be challenged with strategic organizing—if the work is specific, persistent, and based in the daily experiences of the people most affected.

BRU started with a clipboard, a seat on the bus, and a willingness to ask strangers: “Did you know what's happening to your service?” And from there, they built a movement.

“I am not a human. I am an animal.” That's what workers in a Dominican Republic factory were forced to scream together, out loud, several times a day. That factory made Georgetown University's clothing.

Once the students found out, they didn't look away.

It was 1997. That summer, student interns working with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees began digging into where collegiate apparel was made. They traced the supply chains. Found the sweatshops. And they brought that knowledge back to campus.

What started as research soon became organizing. Across the country, students began holding teach-ins and public discussions about globalization, labor rights, and factory conditions. At schools like Duke and Georgetown, students demanded to know: how can our universities preach ethics while turning a blind eye to the exploitation behind our merchandise?

In 1998, students at three colleges—including Georgetown—joined together to form United Students Against Sweatshops, or USAS. By 2000, there were chapters on more than 200 campuses. Organizers used email listservs and early websites to share tactics, coordinate pressure, and grow fast. Experienced students from Wisconsin counseled neophytes from Arizona and Kentucky, and professors at Berkeley and Harvard explained how to calculate a living wage and guarantee independent monitoring in Honduras.

And students got creative.

At Yale, they staged a “knit-in” to dramatize the issue. At Holy Cross and UC Santa Barbara, they hosted mock fashion shows to showcase the real working conditions behind the clothes. Duke students printed a coloring book explaining how the school's Blue Devil mascot was sewn by workers earning poverty wages. At the University of Wisconsin, students dressed as sweatshop workers and carried a giant Reebok shoe through a homecoming parade. They held a press conference to present their chancellor with an oversized check for 16 cents, the hourly wage paid to Nike factory workers in China.

The movement gained traction because it hit multiple nerves. Women's rights, since most sweatshop workers were women. Immigration. Environmental justice. Human rights.

At Georgetown, my kid's current college, students formed the Georgetown Solidarity Committee and built a coalition across more than 20 student organizations. They flyered. Rallied. Hosted debates and teach-ins. They created a nine-panel display explaining Georgetown's role in the sweatshop economy—and placed it where students and staff passed by every day. Within a week, over 800 people had signed petition postcards calling for action.

But the administration moved slowly. So students prepared to escalate.

On February 5, 1999, twenty-six students walked into the university president's office with sleeping bags, bottled water, peanut butter, and a plan. They staged an 85-hour sit-in.

They weren't loud. They weren't destructive. They whispered so the office secretary could keep typing. They brought their homework. They stayed organized.

And outside the building, more students kept the pressure on. They held rallies. Ran press outreach. Maintained discipline and focus.

Their demands were clear: don't sign the weak Collegiate Licensing Company code. Wait until there's visible progress on living wages and independent monitoring. And cancel contracts with any manufacturer that refuses to disclose factory locations within one year.

After days of negotiation, Georgetown agreed. The administration backed off the CLC code, promised to cut ties with noncompliant factories, and opened the door to the Worker Rights Consortium, a new, independent monitoring group that USAS and labor allies were building together.

Such actions inspired students elsewhere.

At Macalester College in Minnesota, the fight picked up in 2000. Students there had followed the Georgetown campaign closely. They launched their own demands: for a code of conduct, full factory disclosure, and Worker Rights Consortium affiliation.

They started with education. Flyers, conversations, public events. But like at Georgetown, the administration didn't move.

So on March 6, they began a sit-in on the steps of president's office. The occupation lasted eleven days. Students kept a constant presence. They coordinated shifts. They brought food. They brought in faculty supporters and built campus-wide momentum.

A week after the sit-in, Macalester College hosted the Eighth Annual “Meeting the Challenge” Labor Educational Conference, which brought together activists and speakers from around a dozen local unions, theatre troupes, dancers and other activists.

Macalester agreed to adopt the code, require factory disclosure, and affiliate with the Worker Rights Consortium.

By that spring, students had won similar commitments at Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin through sit-ins. At other schools Harvard, Brown, the UC system, Princeton, Middlebury students used petitions, public displays, and meetings to win factory disclosure without civil disobedience.

At Wisconsin, students convinced the university to organize an academic conference to figure out how to calculate and implement a real living wage policy for apparel workers across countries.

Students were able to connect distant injustice to a local responsibility. No student could shut down a factory in El Salvador. But they could stop their school from ignoring it. And they showed each other what it looked like to organize: with discipline, imagination, and purpose.

They did it with coloring books and knit-ins. With listservs and sit-ins. Not at our school. Not in our name.

“After you experience a community victory, the pursuit of justice is no longer voluntary. It is obligatory.” That's what Juana Gutierrez said. She was one of the founders of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, a group of women who, across eight long years, organized, marched, and mobilized their neighbors.

In 1985, California's governor proposed a new state prison, the first ever planned for an urban setting, and picked a site near the Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, a densely populated neighborhood with thirty-four schools within a two-mile radius. There was no public hearing. No environmental review. The state just went ahead and bid on the land. The Senate passed the bill for the prison construction with no senator voting against it and sent it to the Assembly.

Local officials assumed there would be little resistance. A state report had profiled the kind of community least likely to organize: older, working-class, less educated. Boyle Heights was this working-class community, overwhelmingly Mexican American. A place that had already lost homes and playgrounds to the construction of the L.A. freeway interchanges and Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the state profile missed something crucial. It didn't account for mothers.

Juana Gutierrez was one of them. She'd lived in Boyle Heights for decades. She'd started out organizing through the PTA, then with the Neighborhood Watch, going door to door to keep kids safe from drug dealers in the parks. When she learned about the prison site from Assemblywoman Gloria Molina's letter, she called a meeting at her house. Fifteen people showed up. That meeting became the beginning of the Mothers of East Los Angeles.

They started with flyers, knocks on doors, phone calls. They passed information in parish bulletins. They got support from local priests like Father Moretta, who asked twenty-one others to announce meetings from the pulpit. They set march times around cooking dinner and picking kids up from school. They brought their children with them, they said, "because we were fighting for them and we wanted them to see what we were fighting for." Their slogans made that clear: "Books Not Jails," "Schools Not Prisons."

Father Moretta suggested white scarves for the women to wear. He believed that when the cameras showed up and saw hundreds of Mexican American women in white mantillas, they would ask, “Who are these women?” and the answer would resonate: They're the Mothers of East Los Angeles.

They began marching every Monday across the Olympic Boulevard Bridge, linking their neighborhood to the proposed prison site. Hundreds came each week. In August, over 2,000 people marched from Resurrection Church to downtown LA. They carried signs. They chanted. They made it clear: East LA would not be passive.

They weren't alone. Business owners started lobbying in Sacramento. Assemblywoman Gloria Molina pushed for environmental reviews and gathered 900 signatures to show the depth of local opposition. But it was the mothers who showed up every week, who mobilized their sisters and cousins and neighbors.

And the tactics kept expanding. They disrupted a Department of Corrections job fair, filling a rec center with 150 women chanting and demanding answers. They demonstrated at the state capitol. They gathered data on the 878 students at Lorena Street Elementary and made signs demanding their protection. These were not professional activists. Many didn't speak English fluently. Some were scared to speak at all. But over time, the nervous ones became spokespersons and activists.

Soon came the next threat: a toxic waste incinerator proposed for Vernon, just across the city line. MELA didn't hesitate. They filed lawsuits, challenged permits, and forced the company to back down. Then, an oil pipeline was proposed to run beside another East LA school, rerouted from Santa Monica because that community had more political clout. The Mothers fought that too.

The group expanded. They built alliances with Greenpeace, the United Farm Workers, and other Chicano and environmental groups. They learned to navigate the legislature. They tracked proposed bills. They told their stories to reporters and legislators. When the state passed AB58 which required environmental reviews for hazardous waste sites, the Mothers made sure that the law was enforced.

The prison was never built. By the end of the 1990s, the Mothers of East Los Angeles defeated three major infrastructure projects, each of which had been sited in East LA because officials assumed the community wouldn't fight back.

What made their organizing effective wasn't funding or formal structure. It was trust. People knew these women. They weren't outsiders. They were neighbors, sisters, grandmothers. That mattered. As one observer put it, when the Mothers came to talk, it wasn't like a stranger asking you to get political, it was like family.

In the late 1990s, Serbia was a place where hope felt hard to come by. Slobodan Milosevic had been in power for over a decade, dragging the country through wars, repression, and international isolation. Young people had grown up watching their futures crumble. Many left or joined underground gangs.

In the winter of 1996-1997 the country was roiled by student protests. They were not effective, but a dozen of veterans of those protests in Belgrade formed a new group, called Otpor, which means Resistance. They focused less on open protests, but on recruitment.

Ivan Marovic: "We were spending so much energy just getting people into the street day after day, that we said, “We're not going to recruit people to do actions, we're going to do actions to recruit people.” Whether it was a street demonstration, or a picket or a sit-in, the first question we asked ourselves was: “How are we going to do this action so that we bring new people into the movement?” That changed the way we did things. We realized that shouting slogans, heckling politicians and things like that are too much of a hassle without new recruitment. We started doing more activities — actions and tactics that got people interested in joining the movement."

So what kind of activities? Otpor! set up in green markets, by schools, and outside shopping centers. And instead of angry speeches, they brought street theater.

When a solar eclipse passed over Serbia, Otpor! built a giant cardboard telescope and invited people to look through. What they saw wasn't the sun — it was Milosevic's head, falling like a dying comet. People laughed. They stayed. They joined.

When Milosevic's wife threatened bloodshed if protesters didn't back down, students set up a blood drive at a hospital. They collected blood and delivered a message: "Here's your blood. Now please leave."

When she wore plastic flowers in her hair, Otpor! released five turkeys into a crowded square with plastic flowers taped to their heads. Everyone got the joke. And when the police chased the turkeys through the street, the crowd roared. Later, animal rights activists sued the police for arresting the turkeys.

That kind of humor wasn't a sideshow. It was the tactic. It's called a "dilemma action": no matter how the regime responded, they looked ridiculous. Take the most famous one: Otpor! placed an oil barrel with Milosevic's face in a shopping district. People could drop in a coin and whack the barrel with a bat. If they were broke because of Milošević's policies, they were told to hit it twice. Eventually, the police arrested the barrel. Otpor! held a press conference: "The police have taken your retirement donation for the president. We hope they pass it along."

And they kept going. Barrel after barrel, city after city. Headlines read, "Third Barrel Arrested in Serbia."

But this wasn't just performance. Otpor! was deeply organized. They trained every recruit. Step one: do you accept nonviolent resistance as our method? If not, this isn't the group for you.

They created protocols for arrests, with buddy systems and public follow-up. They lionized people who were detained. The black T-shirt with the Otpor! fist? You had to be arrested ten times to earn it.

They developed trust with the public, and even with police. When officers made arrests, Otpor! members would calmly say, "We respect your job. We know you'd rather go after real criminals. We hold no grudge."

It worked. Morale among police dropped. Some refused to show up for work.

To get around the state TV ignoring them, Otpor staged daily photo-friendly actions to get into local papers. When Milosevic claimed they were terrorists, they organized "terrorist fashion shows" featuring regular people — students, grandmas, readers with glasses — all showing off their casual wear. Volunteers walked a makeshift runway in jeans and glasses, while an announcer intoned: “Clearly a terrorist. He reads books.” The message was clear: these are your terrorists.

Constant reminders that the regime was not invincible. On Milošević's birthday, activists staged a party in the city of Niš. They brought a giant card filled with sarcastic wishes: a one-way ticket to The Hague, a prison uniform, a pair of handcuffs. Thousands showed up.

When Milosevic promised grand reconstruction projects after NATO bombings, Otpor! activists in Novi Sad built a toy bridge in a city park, with a sign: "Reconstruction, brought to you by the people."

When their offices were raided, they re-entered the building in a rented van, full of cardboard boxes. Police stopped it. The boxes were empty. Otpor! said: "They are scared of everything. Even air."

And they always asked: what would get someone to take the first step? So they kept it light. They made Otpor! a lifestyle. T-shirts. Mugs. Umbrellas. Joining the movement meant doing something, being part of something.

They trained not just students, but high schoolers. Unemployed youth. Retirees, who knew their neighborhoods better than anyone. Mothers of the arrested students. The most politically active generation — 18 to 29 — turned out at nearly 86% in the 2000 elections.

And they won. Hundreds of thousands flooded the streets. Milosevic was gone.

Otpor! didn't just topple a dictator. They showed what resistance can look like when it's smart, funny, disciplined, and wide open to everyone. They didn't wait for perfect conditions. They organized until the conditions changed.

And if they could do it with cardboard telescopes and barrels and blood drives, so can we.

The photo, by the way, is activists standing in a cage made of newspapers to protest Milosevic's suppression of independent media. Beyond these stories, there are A LOT of interesting strategy choices and tactics about this movement that may come in more and more handy as our country goes more and more authoritarian, so I may return to this in the future to tell you more about them.

Advertisements in student newspapers read, “Pregnant? Don't want to be? Call Jane.”

Behind those few words was a network of women working quietly, methodically, and under legal threat to provide abortions in Chicago before Roe v. Wade. From 1969 to 1973, this underground group—known simply as the Jane Collective—helped more than 11,000 women terminate pregnancies safely, affordably, and with care.

It began with a single referral. Heather Booth, then a University of Chicago student and civil rights activist, helped a friend's sister who was pregnant and desperate. Booth found a provider through contacts at the Medical Committee for Human Rights. After the abortion, word spread. More women began calling. Booth started answering the phone under the name “Jane.” Soon, there were too many calls for one person to handle. So she recruited others. They divided responsibilities, trained new members, and gradually formed a collective.

At first, the Janes worked as a counseling and referral service. A woman would call the number, leave her name, number, and the date of her last period. A Jane would call back, talk through the options, and set up a meeting. The first meeting took place at “The Front,” usually someone's apartment. There, the patient would be reassured, given information, and then transported to “The Place,” the apartment where the abortion was performed. At each step, Jane volunteers worked to make the process feel as safe and human as possible.

Their commitment to centering women shaped every aspect of their operation. One of the members insisted on that approach because of her own experience while pregnant with cancer. “Through that whole experience,” she said, “there wasn't one woman involved. It was men — the doctors, the hospital board — controlling my reproductive rights and condemning me to death.” Jane's approach was different. Women came to a space where they were heard, informed, and cared for by people who understood.

That transition—from referring to performing—was a turning point. It came after the Janes discovered that their main provider wasn't a licensed physician. Instead of shutting down, they decided to take control. A few trained under a sympathetic doctor, learning the tools and techniques. Then they trained others. As one Jane put it, “We finally took speculum, flashlight, and cannula in hand. We needed to know how, so we learned it—just like you learn anything.”

With the procedure now under their own control, they could lower the cost from $500 to $100. They fundraised to cover the cost for women who couldn't pay. They also trained themselves in anatomy, learned to perform Pap smears, and found a lab to process the results for $4. And when new challenges arose—whether medical, legal, or logistical—they adjusted their protocols and learned what was needed.

Each patient was treated not as a case, but as a person. The women received detailed explanations of the procedure, copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and emotional support throughout. A Jane might hold their hand, talk with them during the procedure, stay nearby afterward. As one member explained, “We performed abortions with women, not on them.”

Security was always on their minds. Members used pseudonyms. Roles were distributed to minimize legal exposure. Patient information was tracked carefully but discreetly, often with only first names on handwritten index cards. The entire operation was structured to reduce risk. They knew the law wasn't on their side.

In May 1972, that risk became real. Police raided an apartment where procedures were taking place and arrested seven Jane members. Two were carrying index cards with patient details. On the ride to the station, they destroyed the evidence—tearing the cards to shreds and swallowing the scraps—to protect the women who had trusted them.

Each of the arrested women faced felony charges, including conspiracy and practicing medicine without a license. A conviction could have meant decades in prison. Their attorney pursued a strategy of delay, trying to push the case into the following year.

And in January 1973, the landscape shifted. The Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion across the country. The charges were dropped.

That ruling brought the Jane Collective to an end. Some members continued on to help run feminist health clinics, while others returned to different kinds of activism.

“Awareness plus commitment equals change.” That was the motto of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group of farmworkers from Florida's tomato fields who, in the mid-1990s, decided that poverty wages, physical abuse, and silence were no longer acceptable.

It began quietly and slowly. In the early '90s, crop-pickers in Immokalee started meeting in parking lots after shifts. They were mostly immigrants—Latino, Haitian, Mayan—working long hours in the Florida heat for wages that hadn't risen in two decades. At the time, they earned about 40 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes. To make just $50, they had to pick two tons of produce. They received no pay if the bucket wasn't just filled, it had to be overflowing. Continuous abuse and intimidation, horrible field working conditions, sexual harassment, no sick leave, no health insurance, no overtime pay, and no federally protected right to organize.

At one of those early meetings, a dozen workers gathered to talk about what could be done. By 1995, they had formed the Proyecto de Trabajadores Agrı´colas del Sureste de la Florida (Project of the Southeast Florida Agricultural Workers), and that November, they launched a general strike. Four thousand workers walked off the job in protest of wage cuts. For five days, 90% of Immokalee's agricultural production ground to a halt. Six workers went on a hunger strike that lasted a month. And they won. The growers backed down.

That victory sparked what they called the Campaign for Dialogue and a Living Wage. It paired community-wide protests with popular education and leadership training. When a field foreman struck a laborer who'd stopped to get a drink of water, 600 people marched to the contractor's house chanting, “A blow to one of us is a blow to us all.” That action marked the birth of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and the launch of their Anti-Slavery Campaign to expose the beatings, the debt bondage, and the outright slavery taking place in Florida's fields.

After a second general strike in 1997, they launched neighborhood canvasses. since not many workers had phones, CIW staff went door to door, knocking and talking to neighbors about upcoming protests. They organized marches, held meetings, and continued hunger strikes.

In 2000, they organized a 230-mile “March for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage” from Fort Myers to the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association in Orlando. Their symbol: a Statue of Liberty holding tomatoes, not a torch. Their destination wasn't the state capitol: it was the growers' lobby.

But they didn't stop with growers. CIW knew who was buying the tomatoes. So in 2001, they targeted Taco Bell. They proposed a simple idea: raise the price of tomatoes by one cent per pound, and pass that penny on to the pickers. It would nearly double wages.

The CIW launched the Taco Bell Boycott with a tactic they would make famous, the Truth Tour. A caravan of workers and allies traveled 8,000 miles across 17 cities, holding workshops, public actions, and building alliances. They slept in church basements and student housing. They met with local activists, union members, and students organizing against sweatshops. By the time they reached Taco Bell's California headquarters, they had built a network.

Colleges became key battlegrounds. Student activism removed Taco Bell from 25 campuses. In five more, they blocked new franchises. At Notre Dame, students convinced the university to cancel a $50,000 sponsorship deal with Taco Bell. At UCLA, the campaign succeeded too.

And it wasn't just students. Faith leaders got involved. Cardinal Roger Mahony and Bishop Jaime Soto sent letters and postcards to protest unfair practices. Local congregations passed boycott resolutions. Whole denominations endorsed the boycotts. That support helped open church doors along the Truth Tour route. It also gave the CIW legitimacy in communities where they might have otherwise been dismissed: it wasn't just “activists” and “students” who protested, but more conservative-looking faith communities.

CIW got creative. At a 2002 World Series game, Taco Bell ran an ad featuring a floating target in the stadium cove. Protesters responded with a banner placed strategically just yards away: “Taco Bell Exploits Farmworkers” (and the CIW url). The broadcast of the game ended up showing this banner to 11 million viewers.

They held “Three Days of Action” in Florida, culminating in a carnival-style protest outside a Taco Bell. By walking the labor camps, churches, and streets, they gathered 2,000 hand-signed cards from workers and community members saying: “Our poverty is the basis of your company's wealth.”

They showed up at concerts, for example, Ozzfest with System of a Down. They recruited celebrity supporters like Danny Glover and Ricky Martin. They joined other national caravans like the “New Freedom Bus Tour” to connect farmworker justice with broader movements.

And always, behind the scenes, they were organizing support for their community. They started a co-op store to provide staples like pasta and toilet paper at cost. They built a community radio station, Radio Conciencia, broadcasting in Spanish and Haitian Creole. They ran education and leadership programs organizing festivals, producing street art and theatre. They connected worker rights to housing and police abuse.

In 2005, Taco Bell's parent company, Yum! Brands, agreed to the demands. The next rally became a celebration. The workers had won a penny-per-pound raise and a seat at the table.

Two years later, McDonald's signed a similar agreement.

For a time, the changes were real. Bucket rates went up. Wages rose by 50 to 75 percent. Violence in the fields dropped. Paychecks were no longer withheld arbitrarily. Employers stopped pitting workers of different nationalities against each other. Field bosses, once feared, became cautious.

And through it all, the CIW kept organizing. The math stayed simple. Awareness plus commitment equals change.