http://www.buttonsoftheleft.com/

Buttons of the Left, Chicago, IL (2026)

05/12/2026

It’s always rewarding to find references to buttons and other items in my collection from magazines and newspapers published by unions and radical organizations.

This excerpt from a summer 1937 issue of Automotive Industries, a trade publication, might be the first example I’ve seen from the other side. Months after the victorious settlement of the Flint Sit-down Strike, automakers were still bitter.

And with good reason: the heroic autoworkers of Flint had not only led to the first union contracts with General Motors and Chrysler, but inspired a wave of similar strikes throughout the country.

That year, workers at jobs ranging from laundries to lumber mills, department stores to oil refineries, occupied their workplaces to fight for better wages, conditions, and collective power and dignity. Historic contracts were signed in many industries, in some cases preemptively in order to prevent the threat of a sit-down.

These strikes were necessary, and honorable, to break the power of big business and win gains for workers. In a system that prioritizes private property over human needs, they were also illegal.

Illegal and honorable.

05/12/2026

There is a long history of persecution of Palestinian activists by US immigration agencies. One historic case was that of Elias Ayoub, a student and activist with the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign, whose deportation was ordered after the spurious cancellation of his student visa based on his decision to change majors. The INS had declared Ayoub a “subversive” in internal memos.

This legacy of repression continues with persistent, targeted efforts by the federal government to deport Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States. Khalil was a leader of the spring 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia, which inspired a wave of similar protests at universities across the United States.

After 104 days of detention, Khalil was released in June 2025 following a ruling by a New Jersey district court; subsequent hearings in federal court have put him again at imminent risk of deportation. Internal Department of Justice documents reveal that the Trump administration fast-tracked his case to set an example and intimidate other activists.

Staunch Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani, a founder of the organization Within Our Lifetime which had its social media presence censored, has faced multiple threats on her life, including an attempt to firebomb her home in March.

05/11/2026

I’ve been a bit too busy and overwhelmed recently to keep up with the pace of frequent posting I’d set, but can’t let Mother’s Day end without a quick dedication to my mom, Sally, who helped make all of this happen.

It’s become a part of unofficial BOTL lore to mention my early memories of her wearing an “I Choose Peace” button in the Deep South military town where I grew up; this was one of my first examples of taking a political stance (and the role buttons play in making that happen.)

The other photos are from May Day 2021 when my parents visited me in Chicago, and a couple of cool old lapel pins she found for me at a street stall in Mexico City. One is for the Mexican Communist Party and the other from a campesino organization in Northern Mexico. Both are likely from the Cárdenas era, but I’m not totally sure on that.

05/08/2026

In a blatant attack on Black political representation, the Republican-controlled Tennessee state government passed a new electoral map that would dilute the voting power of Memphis and other concentrations of Black voters. Protests in the statehouse likened the move—enabled by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that reverses key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act—to the system of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement which shaped Southern politics for decades.

Jim Crow was the name given to an array of state, local, and federal laws which reversed the gains of Reconstruction through segregated access to housing, transportation, public services, and courts. All of these policies were perpetuated in part through the disenfranchisement of most Black voters.

In 1946, the National Negro Congress held its tenth and final convention with the slogan “Death Blow to Jim Crow!” and subsequently transitioned into a new organization named the Civil Rights Congress. Like the NNC, the CRC had heavy participation from the Communist Party, and was led by lawyer and Party activist William Patterson. This button was perhaps produced to publicize the existence of the new organization.

The CRC saw itself as a left-wing challenger to the NAACP which focused on legal advocacy for prominent Black prisoners with a combined strategy of courtroom defense and public pressure, including international exposure. In 1951, the CRC petitioned the United Nations charging the United States government with genocide.

At this time, the Labor Youth League existed as an embattled youth organization affiliated to the Communist Party. Established in 1949, the LYL struggled in the McCarthy period - this “button of the month” opposing Jim Crow and issued the following year may have been the only one in the series. The LYL published one issue of a magazine in 1953.

05/05/2026

Last week, the Supreme Court effectively destroyed what remained of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a central victory of the Civil Rights movement. Almost immediately, several southern states began the process of redrawing electoral maps to disenfranchise Black voters.

The Voting Rights Act was one of a number of concessions from the federal government amidst an upsurge of the Black freedom movement domestically and surging anticolonial struggles globally. Some of these victories restored rights initially won during Reconstruction; the counterrevolutionary wave which followed led to a generations-long fight to reassert political, economic and cultural self determination for Black Americans, especially in the South. Varied coalitions encompassing cross-class Black institutions, and multiracial alliances rooted in both middle-class and working-class organizing pursued tactics ranging from voter registration and local electoral efforts within the two-party system, independent political parties, civil disobedience and mass action. The strategy of organizations based in the North and South varied according to the different political realities of each region.

These buttons and other tokens represent different points in that long struggle: commemorative medallions of Radical Republican Charles Sumner, whose landmark Civil Rights Act was passed a year after his death in 1874 but overturned less than a decade later; the Lincoln League, a Black political organization in Tennessee which fought restrictions to voting and took its name from Reconstruction-era grassroots clubs; a button from the 1940s protesting the poll taxes which disenfranchised poor voters; buttons from the NAACP and National Negro Congress during the 1930s when economic and political demands merged, and items from Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. The present fight to protect and expand democratic rights likewise demands a spectrum of activity, including the defeat of Republican control of as many state governments as possible.

05/03/2026

Looking forward to this event on Tuesday, May 5 with some real heavy hitting organizers and thinkers! I hope to see you there 🍻

May Day! What’s Next?
Tuesday, May 5 | 7 p.m. | 2040 N. Milwaukee St.
RSVP at bit.ly / maydaypanel

7 pm — Booze, Books, Buttons, and Mags w/Ren Dean of Skunk Cabbage Books and Isaac Silver of Buttons of the Left

7:30 pm — Unamerican Comedy w / Adam Burke

8 pm - Panel discussion: May Day, labor and the continuing resistance to fascism.
- Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez
- ITT Columnist Eman Abdelhadi
- CTU Vice President Jackson Potter
- UWF Member Jasson Perez
Moderated by ITT Senior Editor Miles Kampf-Lassin

05/03/2026

Looking forward to this event on Tuesday, May 5 with some real heavy hitting organizers and thinkers! I hope to see you there 🍻

May Day! What’s Next?
Tuesday, May 5 | 7 p.m. | 2040 N. Milwaukee St.
RSVP at bit.ly / maydaypanel

7 pm — Booze, Books, Buttons, and Mags w/Ren Dean of Skunk Cabbage Books and Isaac Silver of Buttons of the Left

7:30 pm — Unamerican Comedy w / Adam Burke

8 pm - Panel discussion: May Day, labor and the continuing resistance to fascism.
- Congresswoman Delia C. Raimirez
- ITT Columnist Eman Abdelhadi
- CTU Vice President Jackson Potter
- UWF Member Jasson Perez
Moderated by ITT Senior Editor Miles Kampf-Lassin

05/02/2026

Since 1890, May 1 has been recognized as International Workers Day to commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs and to demonstrate the strength and objectives of the labor movement.

This year, thousands of actions have been called to end the war, shut down ICE, tax the rich, and expand democracy. You can find the one closest to you at MayDayStrong.org.

These buttons were issued by the Communist Party USA in the 1980s. During the Reagan years, the Communist Party was active in the peace and anti-nuclear movements, organized labor, anti-apartheid activism, and attempts to form broad alliances against the rightward turn of US politics. While still claiming a membership of thousands, the CPUSA, like the rest of the Left, shrunk in size and influence. Reflecting this downturn of activity, in this era May Day demonstrations tended to be smaller and more insular displays of socialist tradition.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 surfaced longstanding divisions within the Communist Party. A split led by some of its most well-known members and activists including Angela Davis, Pete Seeger, Gil Green and Leslie Cagan formed the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

05/02/2026

Since 1890, May 1 has been recognized as International Workers Day to commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs and to demonstrate the strength and objectives of the labor movement.

This year, thousands of actions have been called to end the war, shut down ICE, tax the rich, and expand democracy. You can find the one closest to you at MayDayStrong.org.

This button was issued by the Workers Party of the United States (WPUS) for May 1, 1935. The WPUS had been formed at the end of the previous year through a merger of the Communist League (CL) and the American Workers Party (AWP), which had played leading roles in historic strikes of Minneapolis Teamsters and Toledo auto workers, respectively. The new organization, while much smaller in size than the Communist or Socialist Parties, counted thirty branches in large cities as well as small industrial and farming towns and included a number of influential labor activists and Marxist intellectuals.

The founding organizations had very different roots. The AWP emerged from within the US labor movement by advocates of industrial unionism centered around the Brookwood Labor College; the CL had been expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 as part of factional and strategic disputes which engulfed the world Communist movement. For many years seeing itself as an “external faction” of the Communist International, by the mid-1930s the CL instead moved in the direction of permanent independence and by 1938 helped to found the Socialist Workers Party as part of the Fourth International guided by the ideas of Leon Trotsky.

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