Local presentations cluster around progressive politics.

This week sees a convergence of events centered on progressive politics that allow newcomers and veterans to get aligned to keep their eyes on the prize. Here’s what’s happening:

THE ACTIVIST

Akin Miller was there in Berkeley when the black power movement was poppin’ off five decades ago, working with the Black Panther Party and traveling to Africa during that heady time.

He shares the tales he’s collected in a talk, “Remembering the Movements of the ’60s and ’70s,” at that hub of progressive movement, Old Capitol Books. Direct Action Monterey Network sponsors this Black History Month series talk.

You can see Miller still doing the good work around the community: showing solidarity at the Martin Luther King Jr. March and Program in Seaside, or manning a table at the Monterey Jazz Festival doling out condoms and information about AIDS/HIV in communities of color.

7pm Fri. Old Capitol Books, 559 Tyler St., Monterey. 333-0383.

THE TEACHER

Alana Hagood Myles and her family left the ethnically diverse military community of Seaside in the 1950s and traveled through the Deep South for a stay in Columbia, South Carolina. There, the family encountered open and hostile racism they hadn’t experienced before.

From acts that attacked their dignity to threats to their safety, Myles, a retired school teacher and Monterey Peninsula Unified School District board trustee who lives in Del Rey Oaks, hasn’t forgotten the events, or the anger, pain, confusion and fear that it caused. She will talk about that story, chronicled in her fictionalized memoir The Way It Was, and share family photos in this talk. The book is aimed at school kids, but the lessons are universal.

4-6pm Sat. Monterey Peace and Justice Center, 1364 Fremont Blvd., Seaside. Free. 899-7322.

THE LIBRARIAN

In 2013, a delegation of librarians traveled to Palestine in search for that early casualty of war: the truth. They came back and created the traveling art show Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, comprised of art, photos, zines and posters, in an end-run around “suppressed, censored or misrepresented” information.

The art ends its stay in Seaside with a film screening of The Great Book Robbery, a documentary about the confiscation of 70,000 Palestinian cultural books by Israel during the 1948 war.

Before the film, Kenny Garcia, CSU Monterey Bay reference and instruction librarian, will show a photo slideshow of the delegation’s trip; after the film, a discussion. One possible subject: anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) bills in the legislature.

“Imagine,” Garcia writes by email, “if social justice-based actions such as the Delano grape strike and boycott campaign, the Montgomery bus boycott, or the organizing being done now to divest from fossil fuel investments were illegal.”

4-6pm Sun. Monterey Peace and Justice Center, 1364 Fremont Blvd., Seaside. Free. 899-7322.

THE HISTORIAN

In her new book Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press), Lori Flores, assistant professor of history at Stony Brook University, traced the farmworker movement to two tragedies in the Salinas Valley. In 1958, 14 bracero workers burned to death when their labor bus, chained from the outside, caught fire. Five years later, a freight train collided with a “shoddily constructed” bracero bus at an unmarked railroad crossing in Chualar.

Both incidents cast the country’s eyes on the conditions under which the people killed had to work and live.

“The ways in which Salinas and California built their wealth on the backs of farmworkers during the 20th century, particularly Latino ones, are often glossed over in tourist-driven historical narratives of places like ‘Steinbeck Country,’” she writes in the book’s intro.

She’ll speak on it in King City. (See a full interview on the Weekly’s website.)

6-8pm Tue. Monterey County Agricultural & Rural Life Museum, 1160 Broadway, King City. 385-8020.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Bob Fitch of Watsonville documented the people and events of the peace, justice, farmworker and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s – not as a disinterested observer, but as a supporter. He’s photographed Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, Stokely Carmichael, Joan Baez.

Fitch, 77 and battling Parkinson’s, told me last year, “It was a job that was exciting [because it] irritated the racists.”

Stanford University has archived thousands of his photos. In October 2014, their Green Library displayed Movements of Change: The Bob Fitch Photography Archive at Stanford Libraries.

Richard Bains, Chair of CSUMB’s Music & Performing Arts Department, brings a compact version of that show to Tanimura & Antle Library for a six-month engagement, opening next Thursday.

“It relates to what’s going on today,” Bains says, “like Black Lives Matter and immigration. This is still happening.”

4-6pm Thu (March 3). CSUMB, Tanimura & Antle Library, 3054 Divarty St., Seaside. 582-3000.