Living Inside Our Hope - Softcover

Lynd, Staughton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801484022 ISBN 13: 9780801484025

Publisher: ILR Press, 1997

Synopsis

The photograph of three men spattered with red paint, their arms linked, marching to protest the Vietnam War, is an icon of the 1960s movement for social justice. David Dellinger is on one side, Robert Moses on the other. In the middle is Staughton Lynd, chairperson of the first march on Washington against the war, and former director of the Mississippi Freedom Schools.

Thirty years later, Staughton Lynd here reaffirms ideas central to the New Left of the sixties: nonviolence, participatory democracy, an experiential approach to education, and anti-capitalism. In essays written between 1970 and 1995, he passionately defends the intellectual contribution of a movement often dismissed as mindlessly activist. In addition, he advocates direct, sustained involvement in meeting the needs of the working class and the poor.

Each section of the book identifies major influences on Lynd's life as teacher, historian, lawyer, and organizer. In the section entitled "Accompaniment", Lynd suggests the relevance to the United States of the concepts of liberation theology which have revolutionized Central America. In "Socialism with a Human Face", he expresses continued allegiance to the socialist ideals exemplified by Simone Weft and E. P. Thompson. The final section, "Solidarity Unionism", deals with the self-activity of rank-and-file workers.

Living Inside Our Hope will reach out to everyone who remembers the Meals of the sixties with nostalgia and to those, too young to remember, who are seeking a foundation on which to build their own social activism.

About this title

About the Author

Staughton Lynd was formerly a member of the faculty at Spelman College and Yale University.

From Library Journal

Lynd?who, with his wife, Alice, currently works as a Legal Services lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio?writes as an unrepentant New Left activist who favors the return of a militant radical movement in the United States. The Lynds combine their works with a strong commitment to historical analysis, rank-and-file trade unionism, and Quakerism. This book consists of politically committed essays linked by the author's distincitve brand of democratic socialism. Topics include the Civil Rights movment of the 1960s, the labor movement radicalism of the 1930s, the legacy of E.P. Thompson, and the prospects for rank-and-file mobilization in the age of globalism. In the opening chapter, Lynd also writes about his parents, the eminent sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, who authored the classic study of Midwestern American values, Middletown (1959). The result is a provocative defense of ethically informed radicalism with a labor movement twist. Recommended for libraries with collections on labor, the Left, the 1960s, and/or American political thought.?Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0801484022
• ISBN 13: 9780801484025
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312