Show Daily: Interview with Staughton Lynd
Still Going Strong
by Joseph Barbato -- Publishers Weekly, 6/12/2004
“It has never occurred to me to do anything other than change the world,”
says Staughton Lynd, 74, retired labor lawyer and radical historian, best
remembered for his notorious trip to Hanoi with activist Tom Hayden nearly 40
years ago, early in the Vietnam War. Now, in Lucasville: The Untold Story of
a Prison Uprising (Temple Univ. Press), Lynd has turned his attention to
the Ohio legal system, which, he argues, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to
death five inmates who took part in an 11-day prison riot in Lucasville, Ohio,
in which nine prisoners and a hostage were killed.
As Ohio residents and retired
Legal Services lawyers, both Lynd and his wife, Alice, took an interest in the
1993 prison siege, became convinced of the convicted men’s innocence and worked
as researchers for their defense. They have visited one defendant, “Big George,”
monthly for seven years.
In Lucasville , Lynd offers an inside look at the
riot and describes his outrage at “the great injustice” done the five men now on
Ohio’s death row, who were convicted as a result of “prosecutorial misconduct”
and the testimony of prison informants. He demands that Ohio authorities pardon
the Lucasville defendants. He also explains how he has been heartened by the way
the defendants—both black and white—have overcome sharp differences: “We may yet
be able to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,” he writes.
“Another world is possible.”
The son of sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, who wrote
Middletown
, the classic 1929 study of Muncie, Ind., Lynd had just
gotten his Ph.D. at Columbia when his friend Howard Zinn hired him in 1961 to
teach history at Georgia’s Spelman College. He coordinated the Freedom Schools
of Mississippi in 1964 and then joined Yale, where he became an early opponent
of the Vietnam War. Denied tenure after his Hanoi jaunt, he became a community
organizer and then, after attending law school, an activist
attorney.
“I’m probably the world’s only
Marxist Quaker,” says Lynd, noting that an officer of the American Friends
Service Committee will manage his author tour. He will be in Temple’s booth
(4145) today, noon–2 p.m. “Next, I want to write an autobiography based on
snapshots I found in my parents’ apartment,” he says. “I have all these visual
memories of the Civil Rights, antiwar and labor movements. I’d like to share
some of those pictures.”
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