Remembering a Giant of the American Left: Staughton Lynd

[cbabe]

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/11/remembering-giant-american-left-staughton-lynd

Remembering a Giant of the American Left: Staughton Lynd

Staughton Lynd represented the best of humanity, scholarship, and activism.

SEAN POSEY
December 11, 2022

One of the giants of the American Left, activist, lawyer and eminent historian, Staughton Lynd, died Nov. 17 in Warren, Ohio. He was 92. In a career that took him from the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the first organized Vietnam War protests to a national campaign to save shuttered steel mills in the Rust Belt, he straddled the worlds of the Labor Left of the early 20th century and the New Left of the '60s and '70s.

The indomitable legacy of that humble Quaker of the left will live on. The relevance of his life to a new generation of labor historians, organizers and activists is more evident now than ever.

Friend and colleague Tom Hayden referred to Lynd's ideology as "a blend of Quaker, anarchist and Marxist traditions." During the '60s, he was the model of "the historian as activist," and found himself at odds with contemporaries such as Eugene Genovese, who opposed his ascension to the presidency of the American Historical Association. In explaining the conflict between the two, Howard Zinn described Lynd's moral outlook. "Genovese saw … Lynd as a self-righteous person because Lynd is a very Quaker type, even his life is hard to emulate." Zinn later referred to him as "an exemplar of strength and gentleness in the quest for a better world."

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After meeting the young scholar at a 1960 gathering of the American Historical Association, Howard Zinn, head of the history department at Spelman College, invited him to teach at the historically black college for women in Atlanta. Alice Walker was among his many students.
Before accepting a position at Yale, Lynd served as director of the "Freedom School" during the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. That summer, a bridge between the Civil Rights Movement and the escalating American involvement in Vietnam opened in Lynd's mind during a speech Bob Moses gave to a Freedom School convention after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in July.

"He emphasized that the bodies of the young men were discovered almost simultaneously with Congressional passage of a resolution concerning the so-called Tonkin Bay incident," Lynd later recalled. "I was unaware of it until Bob spoke about it. There was a connection between these two events, Bob said. Dark-skinned people were being killed both in Mississippi and Vietnam."

Lynd's involvement with the nascent anti-war protest movement in 1965 made him a national figure and eventually ended his academic career. He chaired the first anti-war Vietnam protest in Washington with the Students for a Democratic Society in April of that year. …

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[niyad]

1. Rest in power, brave spirit.

[Martin Eden]

2. My Aunt Kate was interviewed by Lynd for his book Rank and File

Rank and File was first published in 1973. It was the basis for the 1976 documentary Union Maids in which my Aunt Kate was one of three ladies interviewed in the film to recount their experiences as union organizers back in the 1930's.