Content:

Pilsen Community Books is excited to join Under the Tree Podcast in welcoming Nancy Kurshan to the store for a conversation with Bill Ayers about Kurshan's book Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories.

In Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories, longtime activist Nancy Kurshan offers a vivid, woman’s-eye view of seven decades of radical social change. From the founding of the Yippies and the theatrical feminist resistance of W.I.T.C.H., to solidarity work with political prisoners and Black liberation movements, Kurshan’s life chronicles the evolution of the U.S. Left—from civil rights to antiwar to feminist, abolitionist, and internationalist struggles.

Throughout, Kurshan was not just a witness. She was also a key player, marching in the first major Vietnam War protest in D.C., co-organizing the 1967 “levitation” of the Pentagon, and running on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In the months that followed, Nancy was in court for the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial. At a press conference following the initial guilty verdicts, she and two other women held a press conference at which they burned judges robes in protest. During the Vietnam War, Nancy traveled to North Vietnam in 1970, and returned four decades later as an honored guest.

Nancy Kurshan is a lifelong activist, writer, and organizer whose work spans civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and criminal justice reform movements. A co-founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and the feminist guerrilla theater group W.I.T.C.H., she played a central role in organizing major protests of the 1960s, including the 1967 Levitation of the Pentagon and the 1968 Democratic National Convention protest events, with the subsequent notorious Chicago 7 trials. Later, she joined the Weather Underground as a public member until its demise. She participated for many years thereafter in the efforts to free political prisoners such as the Puerto Rican political prisoners, Sundiata Acoli, Geronimo Pratt, and many others. She is the author of Out of Control, a foundational text on control unit prisons, and her widely cited essay, “Women and Imprisonment in the United States,” has appeared in numerous anthologies. Kurshan remains active in climate justice and Indigenous solidarity work through 1,000 Grandmothers for Future Generations. She lives in Oakland, California.

Bill Ayers is the author, most recently, of When Freedom is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) and a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers College, Columbia University. He is an engaged scholar and a peace and social justice activist who has written extensively about social justice and freedom, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is a former vice-president of the curriculum division of the American Educational Research Association, and a former member of the executive committee of the Faculty Senate at UIC.