[H-PAD] Staughton Land Remembered, by Carl Mirra

[Van Gosse]

Farewell, Brother Staughton



Legendary activist, historian and labor lawyer, Staughton Lynd, died on
November 17 from multiple organ failure. He was 92 years old and only days
away from celebrating his 93rd birthday. For me he will always be a mentor
and friend. He is survived by his wife Alice, children Lee, Barbara and
Marta along with his grandchildren and great grandchildren.

It seems apt that H-PAD asked me to write a tribute to Staughton. I first
met Staughton in 2004 at a Historians Against the War (now H-PAD) sponsored
panel at the American Historical Association annual meeting in Washington,
DC.  I soon found myself organizing a series of panels with Staughton on GI
resistance. I traveled to his home in Niles, Ohio, where he worked for
various causes tirelessly and side-by-side with his wife Alice. Howard Zinn
once said that he became “instant friends” with Staughton and I feel
something similar, having experienced his “sweet tempered generosity,” as
Todd Gitlin once put it. So much so, that I was stirred to write a
biography of Staughton titled “Admirable Radical,” both a nod to a Thoreau
article of the same title, but also because countless people I contacted to
interview for the project described their admiration for this “hero” of
justice.

Staughton was born in Philadelphia on November 22, 1929, the son of
arguably the United States’ most famous sociologists of the time, Robert
and Helen Lynd. Lynd’s life is a veritable window on recent US history. He
traveled to the south in 1961 to teach at Spelman College, an all-women’s,
“black” college to thrust himself into the civil rights movement. There he
encountered a young Alice Walker, who gained fame as the author of the
Pulitzer Prize winning, *A Color Purple*. She called him “her courageous
white teacher,” who symbolized “activism at its most contagious because it
was always linked to celebration and joy.” He taught there alongside his
lifelong friend and fellow historian Howard Zinn.

     Along with Zinn, Staughton participated in the legendary Mississippi
Freedom Summer, putting his body on the line as Director of its Freedom
Schools. Around this time, he completed a PhD in History at Columbia
University. Freedom Summer, Staughton told me, was one of the most
significant experiences of his life. There he experienced consensus
decision-making, or participatory democracy, a so-called “beloved
community” of a band of brother and sisters working together for racial
equality. But the sheer violence of America at the time saw that circle of
love yield to Black Power. Staughton recalls an activist telling him that
white people were best working with other whites to teach them the ills of
racism. Staughton took this to heart as he traveled North to Yale
University, having accepted in July 1964 an assistant professorship in
history for $8,000 a year.

While at Yale, Lynd become a prominent anti-Vietnam war activist. The *New
York Times* declared in 1965 that Lynd was the “elder statesman of the New
Left.” In April 1965, Lynd chaired the Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) sponsored March on Washington that was the largest anti-war
demonstration in US history to date. Later that year, Lynd participated in a
 series of protests at the Capitol on the twentieth anniversary of the
Hiroshima atomic bombing. *Life Magazine* featured a full-size photo of
Lynd, alongside Dave Dellinger and Bob Moses, from the demonstration in
which they were splattered in red paint. That image unsettled his
colleagues at Yale. The then-history department chair called the activists
“mad,” having complained that the “photo of Lynd with blood across him and
his arm raised really represents the mood he had cultivated in himself.”
Lynd’s arm was not raised and he was well-known for his calm demeanor.

Later that year Lynd took an unauthorized trip to Hanoi, then enemy
territory, with the Communist Party member and historian Herbert Aptheker
and SDS leader Tom Hayden. They sought to learn about the “other side.”
Staughton learned that the Vietnamese will not surrender and that the US
must withdraw. This radical position eventually was accepted in the
mainstream (and by some Pentagon planners in private at the time).

While in Hanoi, Staughton denounced the Johnson administration’s “lies,”
having called the Vietnam war “immoral, illegal and antidemocratic.” Yale’s
president, Kingman Brewster, released a formal statement that echoed the
law of treason, saying Lynd gave “aid and comfort” to the enemy and it was
a “disservice” to the cause of peace. The US State Department visited
Lynd’s home to query him about the Hanoi trip. These troubles would
eventually lead to Lynd losing his job at Yale and being blacklisted from
academia. As one Yale historian sums it up, Lynd had “more courage than I
did…he put his money where his mouth is.”

Having lost his career, Lynd recalled wandering aimlessly through the
streets of New Haven. But he would soon reinvent himself as a labor lawyer
and resettled near the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. For Lynd, it was a
version of “accompaniment,” a stance he says he learned from El Salvador’s
Archbishop Romero who was assassinated in 1980 while delivering mass
because he accompanied the poor in opposition to those waging war on them.
In Niles, Lynd famously fought to keep the steel mills open. But it is here
that a local worker best summarizes Lynd’s life of commitment and where his
allegiances resided.

 In August 1977, after the Lynds had been living in Youngstown for a year,
a story appeared in the *Youngstown Vindicator*, which included the
famous *Life
Magazine* photograph. Jack Walsh, a worker at the local Schwebel Baking
Company, had just been discharged for leading a wildcat strike. As Jack sat
in a bar wondering where he could find a lawyer, he stumbled across the
newspaper article on Lynd and the picture captured Walsh’s attention. He
thought, “Now, here is a lawyer I can trust.” Whereas Lynd’s Yale
department chair viewed the very same photograph with disdain, this worker
found someone he could admire. These competing interpretations serve as a
metaphor for Lynd’s life. He offends the advantaged class, but was often
embraced by the working class. As Mike Stout, a United Steelworkers of
America Local 1379 member puts it, “I don’t admire Lynd for his writings…or
for being a famous anti-war guy…I admire him because he got down in the
fucking trenches with us [steel workers].”

Indeed, Lynd was always in the trenches fighting for a better world, and
for that he remains a “admirable radical” and, for that matter, a beautiful
person. As Staughton wrote after the passing of Howard Zinn…“Presente!”



Carl Mirra, is associate professor at Adelphi University and author of *The
Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970 with a
foreword by Howard Zinn.*
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