In a recent Indypendent article about organizing anti-ICE protests in Brooklyn, Nancy Hoch declares, “This is a story about how I became a resister.” Her emphasis on becoming a resister expresses the need for communality and renewal in political struggle. For newcomers, in particular, the transformative impact of fighting together for social change can be profound. How to mobilize mass resistance to ICE is crucial to dislodging one pillar of the Trump administration’s authoritarian, increasingly fascistic, imperialistic, domestic and international rule. As a teacher, I am acutely aware of the role of education in building a unified movement in this period of the erasure of history, book bans, resurgence of imperial might, and backlash against reckonings with America’s past that had only begun to take hold in curricula, museums, and public consciousness. 

Hoch’s account of how she and her neighbors gained courage by organizing local resistance to ICE reminds me of Meridel Le Sueur’s New Masses story, “I Was Marching,” written in response to the historic 1934 Minneapolis teamsters’ strike. I teach Le Sueur’s story as part of a unit on women and labor. This semester, I plan to teach it alongside Hoch’s article. Strongly influenced by the poetics of “history from below,” practiced by historians like Marcus Rediker and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, my approach to teaching literature is to engage students in the dialectic between history and culture. The course, which satisfies a core requirement for students mostly majoring in health care professions, remains one of few opportunities for them to study literature in a period of the near extinction of the humanities across much of higher education. 

For example, I teach excerpts from Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States together with an 1845 article by John O’Sullivan about the annexation of Texas in which he coined the term “manifest destiny,” the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led to the “Trail of Tears,” and poems and short stories by Indigenous authors like Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Linda Hogan. Just as Dunbar-Ortiz establishes the settler colonial, genocidal origins of the US, Frederick Douglass’s “What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July” speech exposes the hypocrisies of the Declaration of Independence in America’s original sins of chattel slavery, the internal slave trade, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the utter dehumanization of enslaved Black people. Without such historical grounding, students cannot fully appreciate literary texts by Harjo, Silko, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Tim O’Brien, or Ann Petry.

Hoch describes the fear, despair, and isolation she felt as anti-immigrant raids intensified nationwide, and how getting involved in anti-ICE organizing empowered her. She first attended a Know Your Rights training facilitated by an elementary school teacher in Sunset Park where a fifth grader’s father had recently been detained by ICE agents as they were walking to school. Ms. T, as Nancy refers to her, already upset by ICE detentions and deportations, was traumatized along with the rest of the school community by the abduction of the boy’s father. Motivated to take action, Ms. T answered a call by Hands Off NYC for volunteers to host a training session even though, as she put it, she was “just an individual.” 

Born in Murray, Iowa, in 1900, into a family of abolitionists, radical lawyers, and preachers,  Meridel Le Sueur belonged to the social, political, and literary movements of her time: the John Reed Club, the Communist Party, and the New Deal era Federal Writers’ Project, to name a few. As a federal writer, she taught working class women, many second-language immigrants or barely literate American-born workers, how to write, developing a manual for them entitled “Worker Writers” that begins, “Who will be the future singers and writers of America?” Her answer throughout is that it is the working-class women she teaches and other worker writers who must “write a true history of the past” in order to “create a true history in the future.” 

In 1934, she published “I Was Marching” in New Masses to galvanize support for the Local 754 teamsters’ strike, which reached a crescendo in “Blood Friday” on July 16, when police attacked strikers, wounding 67 and killing two. Like Ms. T in Sunset Park and thousands of others politicized by the deepening repression of ICE gestapo and resistance to it on our cities’ streets, Le Sueur’s first-person narrator begins, “I HAVE never been in a strike before.” Searching for words to describe her experience, her protagonist reflects that it is her middle class tendency to stand outside herself, “a case of ‘Remembrance of things past” and a “distinctly individualist attitude” that prevents her from supporting the strike. 

For days she walked past strike headquarters until she could no longer bear being a mere spectator. “The truth is,” she says, “I was afraid,” not of physical danger but of losing her identity amid the fierce militancy of people fighting not just for a fair contract but for a different consciousness. Experiencing such vibrant solidarity with the strikers, she feels “most alive”; she no longer feels herself as separate. She understands that “In these terrible happenings you cannot be neutral now. No one can be neutral in the face of bullets.”

On January 23,  Minneapolis labor leaders and clergy called a general strike in response to months of ICE raids under Operation Metro Surge, culminating in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Under the banner of ICE Out, the strike brought more than 50,000 people into the streets in sub-zero temperatures and shut down the city. The one-day strike was followed by a national day of action on January 30, called by Somali and Black students at the University of Minnesota, that mobilized over 300 anti-ICE actions nationwide, including massive high school walkouts. It was this mass uprising rather than action of elected officials at the eleventh hour that at least partially defeated Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign in what Border Czar Tom Homan called a “significant drawdown” in the Twin Cities. 

To many observers aware of Minnesota history, these events recalled not only the international protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 but also the general strike by teamsters in 1934. The texts I’ve been teaching in my American lit class are intended to help students connect the Trump administration’s occupation of US cities and resurrection of empire to literature reflecting America’s settler colonial, genocidal, slave-holding history. Before this semester began, I posted Good’s 2020 poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” for students to read even before we met. Teaching Le Sueur’s story of the 1934 strike in Minneapolis together with Hoch’s report on anti-ICE organizing in Brooklyn is one link in that project, underscoring not only the urgent need for action like that of nationwide ICE protests this past month but also the bravery and hopefulness born of solidarity in the struggle and belief that another world is still possible. 

 Deborah Mutnickis Professor of English at Long Island University and the author, most recently, of No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright(University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

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