He spelled out an email address and asked if it was mine. It was. I should have hung up, but my first thought was that someone was using my email account to do nefarious things, so I stayed on the line.

He said he had gotten my name and email from a listserv, on which, he said, a terrorist threat to the U.S. government had been made. Oddly, it was one of the listservs from which I had just unsubscribed, because it lacked useful news items. Addressing me as "young lady," he warned me to be careful about what groups I signed up for on the internet, as there were all sorts of dangerous groups and individuals online. And then he hung up. After more than a decade of activism, it was my first direct experience with FBI harassment.

Luckily for me, since my antagonist sounded a bit like Elmer Fudd, the experience was more ridiculous than frightening. That has definitely not been the case for the activists in Bud and Ruth Schultz's timely new book The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America.

The Schultzes interviewed over a hundred people for this oral history, and their previous work, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (1989). In The Price of Dissent, they focus on the labor, African-American, and anti-war movements of the 20th century, interspersing interviews with introductions that contextualize historical periods and social movements. They have included prominent figures like John Lewis, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as scores of less familiar activists like Akua Njeri (Fred Hampton's widow), participants from the mid-1980s Hormel strike, and Dagmar Wilson of Women Strike for Peace. Additional sections at the end of the book highlight the FBI's harassment of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and other Central American solidarity activists in the 1980s, as well as the Chicago Red Squad.

Arriving on the heels of the post-September 11 assault on civil liberties, The Price of Dissent is an apt reminder of the state repression endured by activists in the United States. The current climate of preventive detentions and questioning of men from the Middle East, though deeply troubling, pales in comparison to the Palmer Raids era persecutions, not to mention the McCarthy period. Nevertheless, after reading The Price of Dissent, it is clear that the USA PATRIOT Act and other aspects of the "war against terrorism" contain unsettling echoes of older policies that punished people for their beliefs, and employed scapegoating and the popular fear of “foreigners” to demonize and bully radicals.

Many interviewees mention the 1940 Smith Act, which made advocacy of overthrowing the government a crime. In 1942, for instance, Stanley Nowak, one of the original organizers of the United Auto Workers and a member of the Michigan State Senate, was arrested, charged with "disbelieving in government," and threatened with the loss of his citizenship (he was born in Poland). The federal government withdrew its action, but tried to deport Nowak again under the 1952 McCarren-Walter Internal Security Act, which barred non-citizens from the country if they were considered advocates of communism. According to Nowak, Eisenhower's attorney general planned to de-naturalize and deport thousands of citizens and legal immigrants. The Supreme Court eventually overruled the decision to cancel Nowak's citizenship, and the mass deportation plans were scrapped.

The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act has striking parallels to McCarren-Walter. It permits immigrants to be excluded for any advocacy that the Secretary of State determines undermines anti-terrorism efforts. It allows the detention and deportation of non-citizens who provide assistance for lawful activities of any group the government claims is a terrorist organization, even if the group has never been designated as such.In this political climte, it is not hard to imagine foreign-born members of anti-globalization or anarchist organizations being deported.

Besides highlighting the government's ideological persecution of the left, The Price of Dissent is also a testament to the ways government enforced the color line before and during the Civil Rights movement. The chapters on Cointelpro and the FBI's war against the Black Panthers, including Akua Njeri's harrowing account of Fred Hampton's assassination at the hands of Chicago police, cover well-known, but still highly relevant material.

But some of the other oral histories of lesser-known events are no less disturbing. Former sharecropper George Stith recounts his involvement in the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, a coalition of blacks and whites who organized Arkansas Sharecroppers in the 1930s. Stith recalls that organizers were subjected to violence by deputy sheriffs and others. "Up around Earle and Marked Tree, in northeast Arkansas, they beat the union workers up. They killed some. Some came up missing; we never did find them."

The authors also interviewed Anne Braden, who along with her husband Carl was active in the Kentucky NAACP. In 1954 they bought a house for a black couple in a white community in Louisville. Braden describes the firebombing of the house, and the subsequent grand jury investigation of the matter. With the help of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the investigation turned into a trial of the Bradens. Carl Braden was convicted of sedition and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The Kentucky court threw out the conviction, but the firebomber was never prosecuted. A few years later, Carl was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC, and sent to jail for refusing to talk.

The Schultzes point out that such repression had a poisonous effect on the left. They trace the rise of corrupt, big labor to the CIO's 1950 expulsion of 11 dissident left-wing unions.

Sadly, they omit discussion of how the killing and imprisonment of so many black radicals and other militants of color (Puerto Rican nationalists, Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement) in the 1960s and 1970s has impoverished recent movements for social justice.

Still, in the final analysis, this important work is not simply a record of injustice and persecution, but a remarkable documentation of the scores of Americans who have been willing to risk their lives and livelihoods to change society.