Moment
They are as diverse as America. Young and old. Of color and white. Urban and rural. Immigrants and native born. They are students and teachers. Athletes and artists. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, farmers, architects, novelists, and more. Names familiar and unfamiliar. Superheroes, figuratively—and in one case, real! They have founded major corporations and grassroots organizations or struck out on their own.
But as diverse a lot as they may be, the people who tell their stories on these pages share one thing in common. Each is committed to fighting inequality and injustice. Each, too, can pinpoint a moment when they were moved to action, when it became impossible to sit on the sidelines and just watch: when the teacher uttered racial slurs, when no one in the college club looked like they did, when the city was on the brink of disaster, when the authorities came for their undocumented mother, when they discovered their ancestors enslaved people, when the cop stopped them in their own driveway, when there was no fresh food in their community, when their right to vote was threatened.
In The Moment, New York Times bestselling author Steve Fiffer presents an oral history from today's social justice activists—many of them still under thirty years old—that is pitch perfect for these dissonant times. First-person accounts, that will inspire us to act, offer a blueprint for making change and, perhaps, most importantly, give us hope for the future.
STEVE FIFFER most recently collaborated with civil rights icon Dr. C. T. Vivian on his memoir, It's in the Action: Memories of a Nonviolent Warrior. He also collaborated with Southern Poverty Law Center cofounder Morris Dees on two award-winning memoirs. He is the coauthor of Jimmie Lee and James: Two Lives, Two Deaths, and the Movement That Changed America and with his wife, Sharon, wrote 50 Ways to Help Your Community: A Handbook for Change. He currently serves on the advisory board of the Chicago-based Civic Leadership Foundation. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.