Matt Damon leads an evening of left-leaning prose at Metro

"I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy," the Hollywood actor Matt Damon declared Tuesday night on the stage of the packed Wrigleyville music venue Metro, "that things are all wrong. That the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people out of jail. That the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power." At the Metro, that got the beatnik-style finger clicks going in the balcony. Damon, who was clearly making an effort not to let his celebrity dominate, did not, of course, pen those words, red meat for the crowd that sees little use in incremental change. They were written by the late lawyer and activist Howard Zinn in 1970, during a Vietnam-era debate at Johns Hopkins University. Those particular remarks were published under the title "The Problem is Civil Obedience" and they set the tone for a rousing and fervent Tuesday evening of disobedient, left-leaning prose and music called "The People Speak, Live!," part of nationwide tour of an educational project called "Voices of a People's History" (which aims to put the prose of ordinary folks in classroom and curricula), but especially well matched to a town where the people have been writing of their struggles for as long as the residents of this particular Midwestern patch have toiled. Damon, who knew Zinn when Damon was a kid, did his piece and left the stage for good (he was mostly in Chicago to promote the program in Chicago schools). But although the program featured words by the likes of Sylvia Woods, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. (the lesser-known "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, stirringly performed Tuesday by Rami Nashashibi of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network), there were particular pleasures for fans of local literature, including Maritza Cervantes reading from the lesser known "Back of the Yards," a 1933 piece about working in the stockyards penned by Vicky Starr, the assumed name of Polish American activist called Stella Nowicki, who dared to suggest that sausage grinders merited safety guards and was nearly ground up by the bosses for her pains. On the way to a stirring conclusionary performance from Lupe Fiasco, a late addition to the bill but the warm and generous core of this particular night, Robert Brueler, the Steppenwolf actor, took on the prose of August Spies, one of the demonstrators executed, on questionable evidence, after the notorious Haymarket affair. It was a useful reminder of when the West Loop was about struggles for justice rather than struggling to get a table. And the poet Kevin Coval threw himself into such pithy truisms from Nelson Algren as "for the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart," a great line from a judiciously selected passage from that articulate old softie's classic work of civic definition, "Chicago: City on the Make." The Tribune's Rick Kogan and Steppenwolf actress Alana Arenas performed part of Studs Terkel's famous interview with Mamie Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till. For the record and in full disclosure, no interviewee has ever had more impact on me than Mobley. Turkel's far richer conversation with her should be required reading for every kid in town. "If Jesus Christ died for our sins," Mobley told him, her words re-created with dignity by Arenas, as a clearly moved Kogan looked on, "Emmett Till bore our prejudice." Indeed he did. Many of the selections were designed to show that things don't change much: the text of Mary Elizabeth Lease's "Wall Street Owns the Country," with its references to the "accursed foreclosure system," would fit an Occupy Wall Street rally perfectly well, but the salient words were written in the 1890s. You could argue, with cause, that plenty of ordinary people have espoused more conservative political views and that they should have a place at the regular folks' literary table, and in the classroom. Why not? Rebels, dissenters and visionaries come in all stripes. Ordinary people don't always behave as other ordinary people might wish. Zinn would not have had much truck with that view, I suspect. In the piece read by Damon, Zinn argued that "Nixon and Brezhnev had more in common with each other than we have with Nixon." Tecumsah put the sentiment another way. As Lani T. Montreal read, the great Indian chief, known for getting to the point, observed to his assembled people from different tribes that there was only one way to avoid their own destruction. "We must," he said, "fight each other's battles." Los Angeles - Chicago tribuine