Staughton Lynd

Lynd was one of two children born to the renowned sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, who authored the groundbreaking "Middletown" studies of Muncie, Indiana, in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Though the family lived in New York City, his mother elected to give birth at a hospital she preferred in Philadelphia.

Lynd followed not only his parents' academic occupations, but also their strong left-wing beliefs.

He was a conscientious objector who was assigned to a non-combatant position in the U.S. military, but amid the McCarthy Era, he was dishonorably discharged after it was found that he had briefly affiliated with communist groups while an undergraduate at Harvard College.

He went on to earn a doctorate in history at Columbia University and accepted a teaching position at Spelman College, in Georgia, where he worked closely with historian and civil rights activist Howard Zinn.

Staughton Craig Lynd (November 22, 1929 – November 17, 2022) was an American political activist, author, and lawyer.

His involvement in social justice causes brought him into contact with some of the nation's most influential activists, including Howard Zinn, Tom Hayden, A. J. Muste, and David Dellinger.

Lynd's contribution to the cause of social justice and the peace movement is chronicled in Carl Mirra's biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970 (2010).

Lynd married Alice Niles in 1951.

They had three children and were married until Lynd's death from multiple organ failure at a hospital in Warren, Ohio, on November 17, 2022, five days before his 93rd birthday.

At Yale, Lynd became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

His protest activities included speaking engagements, protest marches, and a controversial visit to Hanoi along with Herbert Aptheker and Tom Hayden on a fact-finding trip at the height of the war, which made him unwelcome to the Yale administration.

As the protest movement became increasingly violent, Lynd began to have misgivings.

As a self-described "social democratic pacifist" and "Marxist Existentialist Pacifist", he became more interested in the possibilities of local organizing.

Lynd's obituary in The New York Times described his political influences as "drawing equal inspiration from Marxism, American abolitionism and Quaker pacifism".

When Zinn was fired from Spelman at the end of the 1962–63 academic year, Lynd protested.

During the summer of 1964, Lynd served as director of the SNCC-organized Freedom Schools of Mississippi.

After accepting a position at Yale University, Lynd relocated to New England.

In 1965 he gave lectures on 'The History of the American Left' at the Free University of New York.

In 1967, Lynd signed a letter declaring his intention to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War, and urging other people to also take this stand.

In 1968, Lynd published his book Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism.

It came under severe criticism by then-Marxist professor Eugene Genovese, writing in the New York Review of Books.

Professor David Donald in reviewing the book called it "a major work in American intellectual history".

Sociologist and Professor of American Studies M. Clément Petitjean notes that Lynd accepted a job from Saul Alinsky in 1968 supervising the second phase of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) Saul Alinsky organizer training school "Although he was highly critical of Alinsky's politics, he needed a job at the time... Lynd started teaching courses on US workers' history but also on contemporary forms of collective action to the dozen or so individuals."

In the supervision of the trainee in a field placement in Gary, Indiana, Lynd saw an opportunity to continue a campaign he had been working on "targeting the fact that US Steel, which had one of its biggest steel making sites in Indiana, paid almost no taxes... But Alinsky and the organizer Lynd was supervising had different plans. Instead, the trainee 'tried to organize around the existence of a pornographic bookstore in Indiana, just next to Gary.' " In May, 1970 he requested a leave of absence to return to his research in oral history, and left the IAF altogether a year later.

In a letter announcing his decision he wrote "[Saul and I] come out of quite different political and organizing backgrounds, and it is not surprising that sooner or later our paths would diverge."

Meanwhile, he and his wife Alice embarked upon an oral history project dealing with the working class.

The conclusions of this work, titled Rank and File, inspired Lynd to study law in order to assist workers victimized by companies and left unprotected by bureaucratic labor unions.

Working first for the union-side labor law firm of Green, Schiavoni, Murphy & Haines, and then for Northeast Ohio Legal Services in Youngstown, he proved to be a vital participant in the late 1970s struggle to keep the Youngstown steel mills open.

He served as lead counsel for six local unions, several dozen individual steelworkers, and the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley which sought to reopen the mills under worker-community ownership.

Despite the ultimate failure of those efforts, the Lynds continued organizing in the Youngstown-Warren area.

Staughton Lynd remained extremely active as an attorney, taking on a broad range of cases, including those concerning chemically disabled auto workers and retired steelworkers.

In 1973, he enrolled at the University of Chicago law school, where he earned a degree in 1976.

From there, the Lynds relocated to Youngstown, Ohio, in the heart of the Rust Belt.

Lynd's book Lucasville is an investigation into the events surrounding the 1993 prison uprising at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, and voices serious concern over the integrity of legal proceedings subsequent to the event.

About the Cambridge University 2009 reprint of the book, Commentary Magazine referred to it as an "established classic".

It became clear that Yale would deny Lynd tenure, and he became unemployable in academia.

Lynd relocated his family to Chicago.

There, he struggled to make a living from community organizing.

A memoir of his and Alice's life, "Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together," was released in January 2009.