Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers

Alice Lynd was a draft counselor and trainer of draft counselors during the war in Vietnam. In 1968, she published We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors. She later became first a paralegal and then a lawyer. After retirement from practicing labor law in the wake of plant shutdowns, she became an advocate for prisoners sentenced to death and/or held for years in solitary confinement at Ohio’s supermaximum security prison.

Staughton Lynd (1929–2022) received a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from Columbia, and a JD from the University of Chicago. He taught American history at Spelman College in Atlanta, where one of his students was the future Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Alice Walker, and at Yale University. Staughton served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 and wrote or edited numerous books.