Radical Grand Rapids: The Introduction to my latest book

This is the introduction to my latest book, Radical Grand Rapids: Places, dates, actions and people. This book is a companion to my A People’s History of Grand Rapids. I hope to have it printed and available this September, so stay tuned!

Introduction

The word radical has numerous meanings, but one of the most important is, to get to the root of something. 

With the title, Radical Grand Rapids, I want to get to the root of things, both in terms of highlighting major aspects of the history of this city — Settler Colonialism, Racial Capitalism and White Supremacy —  plus I want to share stories of when organized people took action to address systems of power and oppression. This is what I mean by getting to the root of something, getting to the root of oppression.

The book is divided into four sections, places, dates, actions and people. With these four sections, I want to briefly illuminate how organized people have fought back against oppression and organized money.

In his insightful book, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, radical historian James Loewen takes us on an enlightening tour of the US and examines historical markers in big cities and small towns to examine the lens through which history is presented. 

Grand Rapids also has many historical markers, especially in the downtown area, most of which have been sanctioned by Grand Rapids City officials or by other entities that are reflective of those who run this city. I challenge some of those historical markers, but I also share stories that can change how we see spaces in Grand Rapids. I want people to know that organized actions have taken places in these spaces, actions that were radical, in order to give people a new way of experiencing those spaces as places of resistance and liberation. 

In her book, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition geography starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place.” Building on Wilson’s notion of abolition geographies, we can then understand the importance of mapping the political, social, and economic terrain of Grand Rapids. Therefore, I am arguing that freedom and liberation can be a place, but it can also be about dates, actions, and people. 

I am only including forty places, dates, actions and people in this short book, since many more stories of the powerful and radically imaginative actions that people have taken in Grand Rapids over the past two centuries are explored in my book, A People’s History of Grand Rapids. I want show people, especially young people, that when we take radical actions, we open spaces for people, and we allow them to radically imagine that another world is possible. 

Radical Grand Rapids also includes images from various actions, documents, and archival resources that communicate their own stories and messages beyond the printed word. 

I hope that people will be inspired by the stories in this book and then make some of their own, thus building on the rich tradition of radical organizing that has been part of this mostly suppressed and radical history of what we call home.

Photo credit: Barb Lester – from a protest at the Gerald R. Ford building in downtown Grand Rapids in the mid-1980s.