Alice Lynd once observed that there is something about political convictions or a sense that this is what has to be done which gives strength. She reminds us that the example of another person may help us to gain that strength to resist illegitimate authority. Mark Weber and Stephen Paschen chart the lives of two such powerful exemplars of lives committed to containing arbitrary power and injustice: Alice and Staughton Lynd. This work traces the Lynds struggles to assist draft resisters in the early 1970s and steelworkers in the legendary and tragic labor disputes in Youngstown, as well as chronicling their unflinching commitment to death row inmates at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.
Weber and Paschens fine book complements and extends my efforts in The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 19451970. They pick up the tale in the 1970s, where I left off, as my principal concerns were the social movements of the 1960s and Staughtons pivotal role in some of those movements. My biography of Lynd, this book on the Ohio years, and Andrej Grubacics From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader constitute a sort of nonfiction trilogy that, taken together, offer a complete narrative of the Lynds five decades of activism and writing.
I first decided to write about Lynd after we worked together in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s to organize a series of panels on military resistance from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom. We assembled a panel of veterans who had developed antiwar views either as a result of their military service or for a variety of personal reasons. These panels demonstrated to me the power of oral history testimony in a time of crisis. Vietnam veterans spoke of the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964 that propelled the United States into a senseless wara war that, much later, even Robert McNamara, at the time the U.S. secretary of defense, would admit was wrong. Veterans of Iraq Operation Freedom questioned the validity of the Bush administrations claims that the Iraqi regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. During these times of crises, what are now discredited as outright lies were treated as serious contested topics that required objective analysis and debate. The attack at Tonkin never occurred and Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, yet a frightened public was deceived into supporting imperial ambitions. The veteran panels provided an antidote to mainstream narratives. The antiwar veterans seemed to see through the fog of deception before many scholars and public commentators. Lynd, through practice and example rather than preaching and lecturing, showed me the usefulness of oral history. I went on to publish a book of soldier testimony about the Iraq war. Lynd remembers the legendary historian Howard Zinn sitting in his Atlanta apartment in the 1960s recording members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) discussing their courageous work in the civil rights movement. Zinn had taught Lynd that oral history was a powerful weapon against prevailing narratives; later, Lynd taught me the same.
The Lynds activist livesfrom their civil rights work to their present-day commitment to death row inmatesalso provide a compelling antidote to orthodox narratives. In the 1960s, social activists gave priority to organizing others into a social justice program. Many of these efforts were noble and worthwhile, but Staughton has come to see organizing in a much different light, what he calls accompaniment. Weber and Paschens book is especially useful as a set of reflections on accompaniment, as experienced by Staughton and Alice during their years in Ohio. It illustrates how accompaniment is the outgrowth of Alice and Staughton Lynds lifelong commitment to social justice. A key component of accompaniment is for the so-called organizer to lend his or her expertise to a community in struggle, while at the time recognizing that the community members are the experts on their experience and conditions. Such recognition ensures that the ordinary people guide and shape the decision-making process, rather than the organizer arriving in a community as an outsider with a preconceived set of ideas on what should be done. In short, the radical substitutes a specific set of skills in place of ideology, and actually live[s] in the community among the poor as they accompany each other on the road to long-term commitment to change.
Staughton takes the term accompaniment from Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop, who was assassinated while delivering mass in 1980. In 1993, a United Nations truth commission named former Major Roberto dAubuisson, a leader of El Salvadors far right, as the mastermind behind this cold-hearted assassination; a former National Guard officer, dAubuisson had been trained at the U.S. Army facility in Georgia. Also according to UN reports, assassins from the death squads dAubuisson formed and controlled, who killed Jesuit priests in a separate incident, were likewise connected to the same U.S. Army training center.
Without equating the two, both Oscar Romero and Staughton Lynd have been targets of considerable criticism for taking radical stances against U.S. policies. No rational person would side with those who killed priests in Latin America during the 1980s. But who today could argue that the Lynds stance on civil rights or the Vietnam War was misguided? Should they have remained quiet as white segregationists hung black folks from trees? One thing that inspired me to write a biography of Staughton Lynd was his participation in the civil rights movement, especially his service as coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. These schools were part of the broader Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign, where black and white volunteers worked in solidarity to dismantle segregation through voter registration, Freedom Schools, community centers, and special projects. When white segregationists murdered three of these volunteersMichael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew GoodmanStaughton responded with determination. In a violent army, when your comrade is killed, he argued, you pick up his rifle and shoot back. In a nonviolent army, you pick up that persons dream and make it a reality.
The Lynds have been working to make justice and equality a reality for more than five decades. In an age of illegal government surveillance, drone strikes, and perpetual war, when wages stagnate or decline as corporate and CEO profits soar, there is indeed something about the political convictions of the Lynds that gives us strength to fight for a better world.
