In the coffeehouse, you'll find delicious fair trade, organic coffee and espresso as well as a selection of vegan and vegetarian food. In the bookstore, you'll find books and periodicals on a wide range of topics, with a focus on radical politics and culture. We also offer free internet access, both through our wireless network and our public internet terminals.
If you are looking for information about 2640, the community events space we run in conjunction with St. John's United Methodist Church in Charles Village, please have a look at the 2640 website .
If you are looking for information about the Baltimore Free School, another project that's spun off from the Red Emma's Collective, please check out the Free School website.
Audio: Eric Lyle's SCAM: The First Four Years and Jeff Miller's Ghost Pine: All Stories True
by Eric Lyle and Jeff Miller
Red Emma's celebrated the launch of the book collections of two of North America's finest zines! The tales of life lived boldly and often illegally published in the early issues of Erick Lyle's SCAM zine made it one of the most influential zines of the 1990s. His new book collects the out-of-print first four issues. Jeff Miller's Ghost Pine is one of Canada's best loved and longest running punk zines. The best of his engaging, slice of life stories are collected in Ghost Pine: All Stories True. Erick and Jeff read with Baltimore author China Martens (The Future Generation).
Audio: You're not listening: Baltimore youth speak out
by Baltimore City High School Youth
You're Not Listening is a compilation of narratives recorded by Baltimore, Maryland high school students about their experiences, perceptions, and opinions on a range of topics: family, school, sex, identity, racism, politics, and crime. They chose the title You're Not Listening to express concern that adults donât listen closely enough to their voices. Indeed, their narratives offer important lessons to teachers, parents, and public officials who interact with urban youth on a regular basis and challenge readers to reexamine the predispositions and stereotypes they may hold about cities and city kids.
Audio: Craig Hughes presents Uses of a Whirlwind
by Team Colors
There was some excellent discussion following this equally excellent overview of the new Team Colors critical omnibus of contemporary radical social movements in the US, but because people were speaking really freely and frankly about their questionable experiences in the belly of the non-profit industrial complex, we're not going to post all that here!
Audio: "In our Control" w/ Laura Eldridge
by Laura Eldridge
In the most comprehensive book on birth control since the 1970s, women's health activist Laura Eldridge discusses the history, scientific advances, and practical uses of everything from condoms to the male pill to Plan B.
Do diaphragms work? Should you stay on the Pill? What does fertility awareness really mean? Find these answers and more in In Our Control: The complete guide to contraceptive choices for women, the definitive guide to modern contraceptive and sexual health. Eldridge presents her meticulous research and unbiased consideration of our options in the intimate and honest tone of a close friend. Eldridge goes on to explore large-scale issues that might factor into women's birth control choices, urging her readers to consider the environmental impacts of each method and to take part in a dialogue on how international reproductive health issues affect us all.
www.sevenstories.com
Emory Douglas coming to Baltimore
So Emory Douglas, the legendary illustrator for the Black Panther Party, is coming to Baltimore on August 20th, for a special talk and reception at the Cork Gallery to raise money for former Baltimore Black Panther and current political prisoner Eddie Conway, who, as regular readers of this website hopefully know by now, has been imprisoned for a crime he did not commit as a result of a counterintelligence frameup for over 40 years. It's a crucial time to be funding Eddie's legal defense, and as part of that effort, Eddie's support committee will be selling limited edition Emory Douglas prints to raise money. The event starts at 7PM, at the Cork Gallery (1601 Guilford), and costs $10.
Down here at Red Emma's, we've been working with Eddie to put together a quarterly study group, where we all read a text and then discuss it together, with Eddie joining us over the telephone from the prison in Jessup where he's imprisoned. The first installment, convened around Frederick Douglas' "What is the Fourth of July to the Slave?", went great—you can hear the audio below, and keep on eye on the website for details about the next session, where we will be talking about Huey Newton's Revolutionary Suicide.
Serving new rad coffee!
We are now serving coffee from a new, quality, and simply rad coffee roaster called Just Coffee. Based in Madison WI., Just Coffee is a worker cooperative (a wob shop just like Emma's!) that roasts and distributes quality, fair-trade, organic coffees grown by small scale farmers who are members of worker-run cooperatives. This translates to a good cup of coffee and a fair amount of justice for those producing it.
Check out their website to see what other roasts are provided.
For those of you who are addicted to our Orinoco Coffee, no worries, we will still be serving that coffee as well.
New Community Grants in Baltimore!
Are you a struggling activist, organizing, or social justice organization in the Baltimore area? Then come to 2640 on June 12, and find out more about an exciting new opportunity for small-scale community grants in the city. Research Associates Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of a new Community Grants Program starting in Baltimore this fall - organizations will be able to apply for $500 - $2500 grants to fund movement-building and organizing work! Hear from members of the RAF, ask questions about the new grant program, find out how you can apply, and celebrate the first round of grantees! Find out how you can be involved as a funder, to help support RAF's important work. Plus, music by the Charm City Labor Chorus, and free food & drink! June 12, 5-7PM, at 2640 Saint Paul Street. For more info rafbaltimore.org.
A New World From Below: An Anti-Authoritarian Convergence at the 2010 US Social Forum
If you're heading up to Detroit for the US Social Forum in a couple of weeks, you definitely want to check out the "New World From Below" track that's being put together both inside and outside the official Social Forum. A couple of us from Red Emma's are working pretty heavily on this, and doing a couple of workshops coming out of the work we've been doing (you can see the full schedule at http://anarchistussf.wordpress.com):
Your City from Below Red Emma’s and the Baltimore Development Cooperative for The City From Below
Wednesday, June 23 * 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. * Cobo Hall: O2-42
Drawing on the “Represent Your City!” discussion held at the City from Below conference in Baltimore last year, this workshop will provide an open space for activists and organizations working in an urban context to share stories, strategies, and successful models with each other. This will be a participatory workshop—everyone who attends will be encouraged to speak about what’s going on in their city. Our goal is to get beyond the surface of projects and campaigns, and explore what’s common (and what’s not) in the less-visible, long-term, and infrastructural struggles over “the right to the city.” We’ll let the participants’ contributions shape the dialogue, but will also offer questions like: How are you working to implement a vision of real urban democracy? How have you built successful grassroots and citywide alliances “from below”? How has the ongoing economic crisis impacted organizing? Where have things gone wrong?
Weaving Urban Fabrics: Spaces and Strategies for Building Social Justice Networks in the City Red Emma’s and the Baltimore Development Cooperative for The City From Below
Friday, June 25 * 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. * Westin Book Cadillac Hotel: WB1
This workshop draws on our experiences with organizing the City from Below conference in 2009 and the STEW grassroots fund-raising dinners that followed as well as the lessons we have learned in Baltimore working on associated projects like Red Emma’s, Participation Park, the Indypendent Reader, and 2640. It will explore the potentials and pitfalls of creating intentional, grassroots spaces with an eye toward helping build and sustain informal networks and networking between different social justice struggles taking place in the same metropolitan region.
Fault Lines and Subduction Zones: The Slow-Motion Crisis of Global Capital: A Seminar with Brian Holmes
At the height of the Bush/Cheney war regime in 2005 radical theorist Brian Holmes and his co-conspirators launched a series of Continental Drift seminars to see how the drive for global economic integration was leading toward a systemic crisis. These meetings brought together artists and activists along with cultural critics and social theorists in an attempt to “feel out” the ways that the political order of the world was shifting beneath our feet. Since then we have witnessed the global banking crisis, the indisputable rise of East Asian economic power and the dramatic melting of the Arctic ice in the summer of 2008. Sudden events come to punctuate long-term trends in a surreal collapse of geographical scales; the time of everyday life seems out of joint with the time of the world. Is it possible to map out the social and ecological consequences of recent tectonic shifts, and to help set a political agenda for left-leaning activism over the upcoming decades?
This weekend seminar in Baltimore forms part of a new program entitled Four Pathways Through Chaos, which seeks to draw practical conclusions from a survey of the various phases of American hegemony since WWII. This time we will focus on the constitution of the neoliberal period since the early 1980s, the emergence of the real-time global financial system that necessarily accompanied it, and the gradual intensification of new economic, political and ecological contradictions that now seem certain to tear apart the neoliberal order, not in one day or with one event but instead in a series of crises and increasingly chaotic conditions that is likely to continue for the next ten or twenty years. By examining the dialectical shifts in four key categories – Productive Processes, Social Integration, Global Protocols and Agents of Change – we can begin to understand the specific components of the current order and the conflicts and struggles that gave them their present forms. From that standpoint it is much more realistic to ask why the basic categories of social existence are now gradually morphing into something else, through the struggles and conflicts that are unfolding right now in the world. The point is to grasp our own potentials to participate in long-term systemic change.
In 2005, J.C. Hallman came across a scientific paper about “Pleistocene Rewilding,” a peculiar idea from conservation biology that suggested repopulating bereft ecosystems with endangered “megafauna.” The plan sounded utterly utopian, but Hallman liked the idea as much as the scientists did—perhaps because he had grown up on a street called Utopia Road in a master-planned community in Southern California. Pleistocene Rewilding rekindled in him a longstanding fascination with utopian ideas, and he went on to spend three weeks at the world’s oldest “intentional community,” sail on the first ship where it’s possible to own “real estate,” train at the world’s largest civilian combat-school, and tour a $30 billion megacity built from scratch on an artificial island off the coast of Korea. In Utopia explores the history of utopian literature and thought in the narrative context of the real-life fruits of that history.
Friday Aug 27, 7PM @ 2640
Free School Talent Show Extravaganza!
Calling all performers, artists, and aficionados! Brush off your dancing shoes, tune up your instrument, practice your do-re-mi's to show off your skills in our very special Talent Show Extravaganza, a fun-filled fundraiser for the Baltimore Free School.
Performances can include dance, song, music, dramatic interpretations, step, juggling, stand up, ventriloquism, bird calls, magic tricks, or anything else you have a talent for that you'd like to share. You can sign up to perform by emailing freeschool@redemmas.org with your contact information and a description of your act. Solo and group performances welcome.
Stage fright? No problem! While enjoying the wildly entertaining displays of our community's talent, you'll be able to sign up as a monthly sustainer of the Free School or make a one-time donation. We'll be calling out our monthly pledges telethon-style, as well as giving away some fantastic door prizes.
Free admission. Cash bar. Nuff said.
And really folks, the Baltimore Free School is actually the city's truest, year round talent show, where we celebrate talent, skill and knowledge - for free!. You can always share your talents with others as an instructor, cultivate new ones as a student, or make it all possible as a sustainer.
More info on the Baltimore Free School: freeschool.redemmas.org/
Contrary to our plans last year or so, Red Emma's is not at the moment actively pursuing a new location for the bookstore and cafe. Instead, at least for the time being, we are concentrating our efforts on keeping the existing space thriving, but also on the 2640 project, a partnership between Red Emma's and St. John's United Methodist Church in Charles Village, where both parties are cooperating to restore the (beautiful) building at 2640 St. Paul St. and to put this building to work as a space for social justice organizing and independent culture. Like most big projects, this is going to take a lot of money and a lot of work - if you're able to offer either, please drop us a line at 2640 [at] redemmas.org.
800 St. Paul St. * Baltimore, MD 21202 * (410) 230-0450 * info@redemmas.org
Red Emma's is open Monday through Saturday from 10AM-10PM, and Sunday from 10AM-6PM. Our weekly collective meetings are Sunday at 7PM, and are open to anyone interested in the project, except for the first Sunday of every month, which is closed to everyone except collective members.
Red Emma's is part of IU 660 of the Industrial Workers of the World, one of the only unions to recognize that worker collectives can stand in solidarity with those fighting the bosses as part of one big union.
