Fighting for Social Justice: The Life of David Burgess - Hardcover

David Burgess's commitment to social justice began in his youth and continued throughout his studies at Oberlin College. After college he helped coal miners to build homes and organized sharecroppers and migrant workers as part of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. He was an active member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and headed up the CIO State Council in Georgia. He fought to improve the conditions of industrial and agricultural workers in India, served in the Foreign Service in India, with the Peace Corps in Indonesia, and in East Asia with UNICEF, and later fought for affirmative action and public housing as a Christian minister in Newark, New Jersey. Fighting for Social Justice is the memoir of a man committed to achieving social justice for the poor.

Through his narrative, David Burgess connects his fight for the welfare of others to broader politics of twentieth-century America. Burgess combines his belief in pacifism, work with international aid agencies, and inner city Christian ministry to demonstrate the connections between international social movements in America, Canada, and Asia.

Fighting for Social Justice is a highly readable memoir about struggles for social justice in the mid-twentieth century that scholars and students of social movements, labor studies, American history, as well as the general reader interested in religious activism, will find compelling.