Fight the Power!: A Visual History of Protest Among the English Speaking Peoples

Named one of Rough Trade’s Best Books of 2013

According to Gandhi, the Four Stages of Protest are as follows: First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win!

In Fight the Power!, comics authors Sean Michael Wilson and Benjamin Dickson team up with illustrators Hunt Emerson, John Spelling, and Adam Pasion to show how this process has been played out again and again throughout history--and has slowly but surely led to hard-won rights for the people along the way. Focusing on the English-speaking nations, Wilson and Dickson chronicle the struggles of the Luddites and Swing Riots in the early 1800s, through the Irish Rebellions that lasted through 1922; from the suffragettes in 1918 to Rosa Parks and the bus boycott of the mid-1950s; from the trial of Nelson Mandela to the Occupy movement that has only just begun. By illuminating the variety of protests--and the valuable connections among them--through an accessible art form, Fight the Power! shows that there is a point to the struggle, fight by fight, win by win.