Afro-dissented

When a woman knits costumes for her turtles…

Embroidered City Notebooks

Including Liverpool, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Vilnius, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Tijuana and Guanajuato

From Montaldo’s 1971 Sacco e Vanzetti

Watch it here with English subtitles (in Italian)

Watch it here dubbed in Spanish 

and here dubbed in French

Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants who became anarchists after seeing the brutality capitalists brought upon the working class in the US. A common myth of the day was that the U.S. was being flooded by anarchists and communist immigrants from all corners of the world so It’s important to note that they were largely unpolitical in Italy.

One night Sacco and Vanzetti and several friends attempted to hide anarchist literature.  Numerous raids were made by the government and citizen mobs against radical immigrants all over the country and they feared jail and deportation-or even lynching. 

During the night a person saw the men attempting to retrieve their car from a shop and called the cops on them. They were arrested while headed home on a trolley. The two were armed with guns as they were determined not to be murdered like their friend Andrea Salsedo had been weeks earlier when in FBI custody. Salsedo’s death was made to look like suicide or an accident when he was pushed from the top of a building. Quickly the police determined to link Sacco and Vanzetti to a local robbery and murder. Despite overwhelming evidence that vindicated the two, including an imprisoned Portuguese gang member who claimed responsibility for the crime Sacco and Vanzetti were on trial for, they were sentenced to death, and after 7 years of appeals and worldwide protests across North and South America, Europe, China, South Africa, and Japan they were executed August 23rd, 1927.

Their guilt or innocence has been debated by historians to exhaustion. Some say they were guilty, others say they were innocent, some say Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti was innocent. Innocence or guilt are irrelevant to the fact that the case was not based on their innocence but rather on who they were.

I got some messages asking me for resources on Eritrea so I decided to just compile a list of resources related to Eritrean history, the Eritrean liberation movement, and the history of Ethiopian colonial and imperial domination of Eritrea. If anyone else has anymore feel free to add to this post.

This first set of resources are short articles:

Tsenay Serequeberhan. (1989) ”The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front: A Case Study in the Rhetoric and Practice of African Liberation.”

Okbazghi Yohannes. “The Eritrean Question: A Colonial Case?” Journal of Modern African Studies Vol. 25, No. 2, June 1987.

Revolution in Eritrea: The Ethiopian Military Dictatorship and Imperialism

The War for Liberation in Eritrea

Eritrea in Struggle: Newsletter of Association of Eritrean Students in North America

Declaration of the Central Committee of the EPLF concerning negotiations with the Ethiopian Regime

EPLF Mass Organizations in North America Hold their Annual Congresses

The Revolutionary Children of Eritrea

Resolutions of the 8th Congress of the National Unions of Eritrean Workers & Students in N. America and the 6th Congress of the National Union of Eritrean Women in N. America

For the most in-depth analysis, here is a link to a great full length book written by Eritrean student organization during the liberation movement: