Resistance finds a home in the newly opened Columbus Liberation Center

When the members of PSL Columbus began looking for a physical space that could be home to the new Columbus Liberation Center, they immediately homed in on the South Side of the city, aware that the neighborhood in which the building rested would have an undeniable impact on the mission that extended from within it. 

“I think [the liberation centers across the United States] all reflect the different areas they’re in. The Boston Liberation Center is really informed by the working-class neighborhood of Roxbury where it’s rooted,” said Shenby G., who will join other PSL Columbus (Party for Socialism & Liberation) members in celebrating the opening of the Columbus Liberation Center, located in a former dance studio at 1004 Parsons Ave., with a reception beginning at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 13. “We’re here on the South Side because we know it’s an area neglected by the city and actively over-policed. … You wouldn’t have enough fingers or toes to count how many times the cops are racing down [Parsons] chasing … working-class people and especially working-class Black Americans. And then you have rising rents and a lack of affordability, with apartments increasing their prices by $100, $150 [a month] and businesses closing down that used to be sites for people to get things, like there was talk about the [Great Southern] Kroger potentially being shut down.”

These issues being faced by the neighbors who live around the center – over-policing, affordability, the impacts of the growing housing crisis – will form the backbone of the work activating the space, which Shenby described as “a political organizing hub.”

PSL Columbus organizers, who have been working on renovations for more than a month, estimated the new building to be around 4,000 square feet, comprised of a main auditorium adorned with a series of murals, a handful of offices, and a large side room that will serve a dual function as a community space and a bookstore-slash-lending-library.

“And the bookstore’s purpose is really to have different materials from workers’ struggles past to present, and books on the struggle for Black liberation, for Palestinian liberation,” said Shenby, adding that the shop will stock books from publishers such as 1804 Books and LeftWord Books, focused on the kind of radical, nonfiction literature “you might not be able to find at Barnes & Noble.” 

Both the main auditorium and the adjacent community space will operate as the beating heart of the new center, serving as hubs in which community organizations, labor unions, and activists can hold meetings and commune. 

“This isn’t just going to be a space for people to come in and read and look at posters, though it’s true that’s an aspect of it,” Shenby said. “This is also going to be a place where we can have townhalls on the ongoing gentrification efforts and how we can organize our neighbors to push back.”

For the members of PSL Columbus, it’s been a years-long process getting to this point, requiring the development of a more firmly entrenched activist base better steeled by real-world experience. “We have people who have learned what it means to organize a union, people who have learned how to organize protests, how to organize educational and cultural events,” said Shenby, who noted that the space is entirely member funded, though PSL Columbus has plans to launch a sustainer program for those community members with the financial means to help financially support operations. “And it was really, in a way, the accumulation of all that experience that taught us the skills necessary to launch a physical space.”

And it couldn’t have come at a more prescient time, the opening landing in a social and political moment when groups ranging from trans rights activists to immigration attorneys are striking up urgent conversations about the need to build community power that exists outside of traditional systems. 

“What we’re seeing on the national level is that the Trump administration is waging an all-out war on people’s democratic rights, trying to take us back … to the era of robber barons, where it was a gilded age for the rich, and where working people had no rights, and where Black Americans lived under Jim Crow fascism and brutal, brutal apartheid,” Shenby said. “And on the local level in Columbus, we’re seeing the inadequacy of the Democratic Party. … People can’t afford to live here, and we have tech centers moving in and Les Wexner calling Columbus the future global hub for AI, which is going to impact our water resources, our energy bills. All of these things are coming, and we need a space to organize against that. We need to build our unions. We need to build our social movements. And that is what this space is going to be.”