This week’s guest is Michael Ansara, author of a new volume of memoir called The Hard Work of Hope. It is a personal story, but it’s also a history of Boston in the 1960s, and especially of anti-war activism at Harvard and organizing among the New Left political movement during the Vietnam era. Michael went from a middle class childhood in Brookline to the playground of the elites at Harvard, just at the historical moment when the civil rights movement entered mainstream consciousness and as the US government dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam. Michael remembers the chaos and fear of those times, but also the patriotism and the optimism of youth that drove so many of his contemporaries, and the relentless organizing it took to shape that youthful optimism into a political movement that had the potential to change the world, though that potential may not have been fully realized. In our conversation, he looks back on hard-won lessons learned and grapples with the question of how today’s organizers might save a democracy teetering on the brink.

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The Hard Work of Hope

The Hard Work of Hope is Michael Ansara’s memoir of the 1960s in Boston. Ansara is probably best known as one of the key leaders of Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard and an outspoken antiwar leader during the Vietnam years. He was also a reporter for Ramparts and the founder of an underground paper called the Old Mole, he operated a grocery co-op in Dorchester, and he was one of the founders of the Mass Fair Share movement, that campaigned for tax relief, utility rate caps, and other economic justice issues in the Bay State. Today, he’s a published poet and one of the founders of Mass Poetry, and he’s a proud father and grandfather.