In a darkened space bedecked with impressionistic portraits of the progressive movement’s great heroes, Van Jones — community organizer, environmental activist and erstwhile presidential adviser — steps onto a tiny stage that has just been warmed up by two local teenaged poets and graced by Amy Goodman, the voice of Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” The audience is filled with Washington, D.C. activists, including the comedian and civil rights leader Dick Gregory, CODE PINK founder Medea Benjamin and Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., president of the Hip-Hop Caucus.

The room is packed, and a line snakes along the sidewalk outside Busboys and Poets, a restaurant designed as a gathering place for progressives, even as the event begins.

In a passionate speech focused mainly on the costs and horrors of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Goodman sets the stage for Jones’s talk by imploring activists to organize. While a portrait of Rosa Parks by Anna Rose Soevik glimmers behind her, Goodman debunks the mythology surrounding the woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus sparked the civil rights movement. “Yes, she was a tired seamstress,” Goodman says, “but Rosa Parks was an organizer.”