Article Title
Celebrating Rod Bush: Friend, Comrade, and Revolutionary Warrior
Abstract
This essay co-authored by Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott and titled “Celebrating Rod Bush: Friend, Comrade, and Revolutionary Warrior” is a chapter in the anthology Rod Bush: Lessons from a Radical Black Scholar on Liberation, Love, and Justice, edited by Melanie E. L. Bush, and co-edited by Rose M. Brewer, Daniel Douglas, Loretta Chin, and Robert Newby (2019). In the chapter, the authors celebrate the life and work of Rod Bush as a friend, a comrade, and a revolutionary warrior. They locate Bush’s theory and practice of the interpenetration of Black struggle and class struggle within today’s transformative movement to end global capitalism and world white supremacy. Bush lived and moved within many complex and contentious spaces from the street, to the academy and the sociological 266 Celebrating Rod Bush Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott profession. His life’s work embodied a powerful unity of revolutionary theory and political practice—his teaching and mentoring, his scholarship and writing, his political education and movement work in his community and in social movement spaces in the United States and the world. For Rod Bush, revolutionary theory and practice was wherever he lived and worked. He understood the need to connect theory and strategy to peoples’ lived experience and daily struggles in the classroom and in the street. Through compelling pedagogy, Katz-Fishman and Scott argue, Rod Bush mentored a new generation of transformative thinkers and movement actors. He did the essential work of nurturing the intellectual side of the twenty-first century revolutionary movement. In celebrating Rod Bush’s life, the authors re-commit themselves to the revolutionary praxis his life embodied.