Eric Mann

Both sides of his family were Jews who fled the Russian Empire during the anti-Semitic pogroms of the early 1900s.

Eric Mann (born December 4, 1942) is a civil rights, anti-war, labor, and environmental organizer whose career spans more than 50 years.

He has worked with the Congress of Racial Equality, Newark Community Union Project, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, the United Automobile Workers (including eight years on auto assembly lines) and the New Directions Movement.

He was also active as a leader of SDS faction the Weathermen, which later became the militant left-wing organization Weather Underground.

Eric Mann was born December 4, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, into a Jewish home rooted in what he described as "anti-fascist, working class, pro-union, pro-‘Negro’, internationalist, and socialist traditions."

In 1964 Mann graduated from Cornell University with a BA in Political Science and a minor in Industrial and Labor Relations.

Organizers from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee traveled to Cornell to recruit students into the civil rights movement and at 21 Mann went to work for the Congress of Racial Equality.

At CORE, Mann worked as field secretary for the Northeastern regional office on an anti-discrimination campaign against the Trailways Bus Company.

Longtime Black and Latino porters had been refused job promotions; the workers were willing to lead the fight but wanted CORE's organizational support.

The campaign included a regional boycott of Trailways, sit-ins at Trailways terminals, a demonstration at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal and filing a civil rights complaint.

According to The New York Times: "Eric Mann, the field secretary of CORE’s Northeastern regional office, said he and Miss Joyce Ware, another officer, had organized the demonstration 'to bring attention to our demands that the harassment of Negro and Puerto Rican employees be stopped'."

In 1965, Mann joined the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP).

Mann worked with organizers Bessie and Thurman Smith, Tom Hayden, 100 community members, and 10 students in door-to-door organizing in Newark’s Black South and Central wards where they engaged low-income people in movement-building, challenging slum housing and police brutality.

He worked as a public school teacher at the Peshine Avenue School and was fired for demanding that Stokely Carmichael challenge a campus speaker from the Virginia Military Academy, for refusing to enforce what he described as repressive discipline on Black children, and for teaching sex education to eighth graders.

The New York World Journal Tribune wrote that Mann put the school system on trial with 500 parents rallying to his defense.

Convinced by the Black Power movement to organize white students to support the civil rights and anti-war movements, Mann moved to Boston in 1968 to become New England Coordinator of SDS.

In the spring of 1968, Mann played a leadership role in the Columbia University student strike led by SDS and the Black Student Union, demanding that Columbia shut down its Institute for Defense Analysis, and that it “integrate” the gymnasium, which only gave Blacks and Puerto Ricans limited access and a separate entrance.

As a regional coordinator for SDS, Mann organized and spoke at rallies at Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other New England colleges.

“The Columbia strike more than any other event in our history,” Mann said, “has given the radical student movement the belief that we can change this country.”

Mann was elected to the national committee of SDS in 1968.

He told the Associated Press that he believed in "continuous resistance" against "institutions and policies of corporate capitalism" and that SDS chapters transition from campus protests groups to community groups that would guide students as a "de facto government."

He was arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were fired through a window of the Cambridge police headquarters on November 8, 1969.

He was instrumental in the movement that helped to keep a General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, California open for ten years.

Mann has been credited for helping to shape the environmental justice movement in the U.S. He is also founder of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, California and has been its director for 25 years.

In addition, Mann is founder and co-chair of the Bus Riders Union, which sued the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for what it called “transit racism”, resulting in a precedent-setting civil rights lawsuit, Labor Community Strategy Center et al. v. MTA.

Mann is the author of books published by Beacon Press, Harper & Row and the University of California, which include Taking on General Motors; The Seven Components of Transformative Organizing Theory; and Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer.

He is known for his theory of transformative organizing and leadership of political movements and is acknowledged by many as an effective organizer.

Mann is host of the weekly radio show Voices from the Frontlines: Your National Movement-Building Show on KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 in Los Angeles.

When SDS splintered into three groups in 1969, Mann, then a leader in the SDS faction, the Weathermen (Weather Underground), adopted the Revolutionary Youth Movement’s belief that violent direct action should be used as a tactic to dismantle the group's perceived power centers of “US imperialism”.

Mann and 20 others were arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA), which the Revolutionary Youth Movement saw as a university-sponsored institution for counter-insurgency.

Mann and 24 other Weathermen were charged with conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were fired through a window of the police headquarters on November 8, 1969.

Mann surrendered to the police on four counts stemming from the November 8 incident: conspiracy to commit murder, assault with intent to commit murder, promotion of anarchy, and threatening.

Mann was sentenced to two years in prison of which he spent 18 months in the Middlesex House of Correction, Deer Island Prison, and Concord State Prison (with 40 days in solitary confinement).

From 1972-74, Mann was a full-time journalist, writing for Boston After Dark, the Boston Phoenix, and The Boston Globe.

He traveled to California to cover the prison movement and political trials; a three-part series in the Boston Phoenix led to his first book published by Harper & Row in 1974, Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson.

At the Boston Globe, Mann co-wrote the column "Left Field Stands", with Howard Zinn.

In 1975 Mann joined the Chicano-led August 29th Movement (ATM).

ATM merged with Chinese-American organization I Wor Kuen (IWK) and the Black Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) to form the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) in 1978.

Mann worked on automobile assembly lines as an active member of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and "transformative organizer" from 1978 to 1986, moving from the Ford assembly plant in Milpitas, California, to the General Motors assembly plant in South Gate, Los Angeles, California, to the General Motors plant in Van Nuys, California.

With plants facing imminent closings, Mann, with Mark Masaoka, and UAW Local 645 president Pete Beltran initiated a coalition between labor, the community, and the Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open, which Mann chaired for ten years.