Staughton Lynd 1929-2022

His parents, Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd, were authors of the well-known Middletown books.

Staughton grew up in New York City, during the Great Depression and World War II. He went through the schools of the Ethical Culture Society, where he took to heart the words in the auditorium, “The place where men meet to seek the highest is holy ground.” As a senior at Fieldston, he was elected class president and captain of the baseball team.

Staughton received a Bachelor of Arts degree at Harvard, Master of Arts and Doctorate of Philosophy degrees in history from Columbia and a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Chicago.

Staughton Lynd and Alice Lee Niles met in Cambridge, Mass., in the summer of 1950, shortly after the beginning of the Korean War. They were married a year later, at the Stony Run Friends Meetinghouse in Baltimore, where Alice’s parents were members.

During the mid-1950s, they lived in an ecumenical religious community in northeast Georgia. Several years later, they joined the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers.

Eager to participate in the Southern civil rights movement, in 1961, Staughton accepted an offer to teach history at Spelman College in Atlanta.

In 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) recruited him to be coordinator of the “Freedom Schools” for black teenagers as part of the interracial “Mississippi Summer Project.”

At a time when whites were becoming less welcome in the civil rights movement in the South, in 1964, Staughton accepted a position teaching history at Yale University and the Lynds moved to New Haven, Conn.

Staughton chaired the first march against the war in Vietnam in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 1965. On Aug. 9, 1965, he was arrested together with Bob Moses and David Dellinger at the Assembly of Unrepresented People in Washington, D.C., where demonstrators sought to declare peace with the people of Vietnam on the steps of the Capitol. In December 1965, through January 1966, Staughton, along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker made a controversial trip to Hanoi in hopes of clarifying the peace terms that might be acceptable to the North Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.

Because of his notoriety and controversy over his advocacy and practice of civil disobedience, he was denied tenure at Yale and was blacklisted as an historian.

In order to respond to the needs of workers whose problems were not being addressed, Staughton went to law school in 1973.

Following his graduation in 1976, the Lynds moved to the Youngstown area, shortly before the steel mill closings began. While employed by Northeast Ohio Legal Services, an office that represented clients who could not afford to pay a lawyer, Staughton served as attorney for the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley in its unsuccessful efforts to implement a plan for worker / community ownership of the area steel mills: Local 1330 vs. U.S. Steel.

After retirement in 1996, the Lynds became deeply involved in advocacy for prisoners. They served as co-counsel in a class action on placement and retention of prisoners in solitary confinement at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown. A favorable decision in Austin vs. Wilkinson (N.D. Ohio, 2002), was affirmed in part by the U.S. Supreme Court in Wilkinson vs. Austin (2005).

Among many books and articles by Staughton Lynd, some of which were co-authored with Alice Lynd, the following titles reflect their many concerns over the years: Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism with Alice Lynd; Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History with Alice Lynd; Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers; The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings; Living Inside Our Hope: A Steadfast Radical’s Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement; Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E. P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below; “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930 with Andrej Grubacic, Wobblies and Zapatistas; Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History with Daniel Gross; Labor Law for the Rank and Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law with Sam Bahour and Alice Lynd; Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians; Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising with Alice Lynd; Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together; Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistance: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in the Military and Behind Bars, forthcoming from Haymarket Press, 2023, edited by Luke Stewart; and My Country Is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements against the Vietnam War.

Staughton Lynd is survived by Alice Lynd, his wife of 71 years; their daughter, Barbara L. Bond; their son, Lee Rybeck Lynd; their daughter, Marta Lynd-Altan; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is yet to be arranged. Caring and professional arrangements have been entrusted to the care of the Staton-Borowski Funeral Home, 962 North Road NE, Warren, Ohio 44483, 330-394-6200. Dedicated to serving your loved ones. This obituary may be viewed, and condolences sent to www.statonborowskifuneralhome.com.

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