[Lynd explored the biggest little secret, one people everywhere
should heed: We who do the work can build a better world, and we can
best do it without the parasitic Super Rich who contribute nothing and
weigh us down like a monstrous ball and chain.]
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STAUGHTON LYND, ¡PRESENTE!  
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November 17, 2022
Zinn Education Project
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_ Lynd explored the biggest little secret, one people everywhere
should heed: We who do the work can build a better world, and we can
best do it without the parasitic Super Rich who contribute nothing and
weigh us down like a monstrous ball and chain. _

,

 

People’s historian Staughton Lynd died on Nov. 17 after an
extraordinary life as a conscientious objector, peace and civil rights
activist, tax resister, professor, author, and lawyer.

Lynd inspired us with his role as a people’s historian, always
working in solidarity with struggles for justice today.

Lynd served as director of the Freedom Schools
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the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project
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prisoners and challenged the prison-industrial complex.

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Staughton Lynd speaks with Freedom School teachers in Oxford, Ohio,
1964. Photo by Herbert Randall.

While teaching at Spelman College, his family and Howard Zinn’s
developed a lifelong friendship. Zinn said of Lynd, “He is an
exemplar of strength and gentleness in the quest for a better
world.”

Among Lynd’s many books is _Doing History from the Bottom Up_
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which he described three key perspectives that are guides for any
teacher or student of history.

1. History from below is not, or should not be, mere description of
hitherto invisible poor and oppressed people: it should challenge
mainstream versions of the past.

2. The United States was founded on crimes against humanity directed
at Native Americans and enslaved African Americans.

3. Participants in making history should be regarded not only as
sources of facts but as colleagues in interpreting what happened.

Historian Stephen West tweeted about an earlier book of Lynd’s on
Reconstruction.

In that book
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Lynd critiqued liberal analysis and uplifted the arguments of people
like W. E. B. Du Bois and Thaddeus Stevens:

In my opinion a third point of view is crystalizing. It seeks to
escape the debate as to whether Northern policy was too soft or too
hard by contending that it was hard in the wrong way, or more
precisely, in the wrong area of social life. This third view holds
that the fundamental error in Reconstruction policy was that it did
not give the freedman land of [their] own. Whether by confiscation of
the property of leading rebels, by a vigorous Southern homestead
policy, or by some combination of the two, Congress should have given
the ex-slaves the economic independence to resist political
intimidation.

After Freedom Summer, Lynd got involved in anti-Vietnam War
organizing.

Dave Dellinger, Staughton Lynd, and Robert Moses at a protest against
the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C., in August 1965. From _Direct
Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven_.

Despite his talents as a scholar, academia closed their doors to him
after he traveled on a fact-finding mission to Hanoi. In a 2013 essay
about Lynd
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Andy Piascik explains what happened next:

Lynd never looked back. He became an accomplished scholar outside the
academy and one of the most perceptive and prolific chroniclers of
“history from below,” with a special interest in working class
organizing. From a series of interviews, he and [his wife] Alice
produced the award-winning book _Rank and File_, which begat the
Academy Award-nominated documentary film _Union Maids_.

Lynd moved to Ohio in 1976, became an attorney and, when the mills in
Youngstown began to close, assisted steelworkers in an unsuccessful
attempt to take them over. In a book he wrote about the effort, Lynd
explored the biggest little secret of all, one that people everywhere
would do well to heed: We who do the work can build a better world,
and we can best do it without the parasitic Super Rich who contribute
nothing and weigh us down like a monstrous ball and chain.

In a memorial tribute to Howard Zinn at the Organization of American
Historians
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Lynd said, “When a comrade dies in the struggle for nonviolent
revolution, we try to pick up his dreams.” May we all do that now:
pick up Lynd’s dreams and his principled, grassroots approach to
making those dreams a reality.

Books

[accompanying9781604866667]
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[laborlaw9781604864199] [[link removed]]
[lucasville9781604862249] [[link removed]]
[rankandfile9781608461509] [[link removed]]

[fromheretothere9781604862157]
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[admirableradical9781606350515]
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Read Lynd’s edited collection on Reconstruction below.

Videos

Staughton Lynd on Democracy Now!, January 4, 2011, discussing prisoner
hunger strike at an Ohio supermax prison.

The film _Union Maids_ — directed by Julia Reichert, Jim Klein,
and Miles Mogulescu — an oral history of three women labor activists
featured in the book _Rank and File_
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* history from below
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* civil rights movement
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* peace
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* Labor Movement
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* plant closings
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* Staughton Lynd
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INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

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