Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement was published by Haymarket Books in 2016. The book collects speeches, interviews, and essays from 2013–2015 — a period that saw the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent revelations about the scale of police violence against Black Americans.
Davis’s central argument is that the struggle for freedom is not episodic but continuous — not a series of discrete campaigns (civil rights, then feminism, then gay rights, then prison abolition) but a single, ongoing, interconnected movement against interlocking systems of oppression. She connects Ferguson to Palestine (arguing that the militarized policing of Black communities in the US and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories are linked by shared technologies, shared ideologies, and shared structures of racial domination), to South Africa (the anti-apartheid movement as a model for contemporary organizing), and to the global prison-industrial complex.
The book’s most provocative element is its insistence on international solidarity: Davis argues that understanding racism in the United States requires understanding imperialism abroad, that the police who patrol Black neighborhoods are connected to the military that patrols foreign countries, and that liberation movements must be transnational or they will be defeated by systems that are already transnational.
Collecting Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
First edition (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $15–$30
- Signed: $50–$150