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You can browse the biographies and click on any name below to view their interview. All interviews are posted on YouTube. Alternatively you can go directly to YouTube for access to the interviews, but scrolling through the biographies on YouTube will not be as easy as doing it on this page.

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If you want to search the list of keywords created for the interviews, go to the Search Interview and Document Keywords page. If your interest is to browse the biographies of the interviewees, best to stay on this page.

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Larry Aaronson - Larry Aaronson grew up in Washington DC, where he began a teaching career after college. He cut his political teeth in the local civil rights movement, moving later to Cambridge, MA to teach in public schools for over forty years. Larry maintains that he has learned more from his hundreds of students than they ever learned from him.

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Gar Alperovitz - Gar Alperovitz has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, university professor, activist, writer, and government official.

He is the author of critically acclaimed books on the atomic bomb and diplomacy. The books, written in the 1960s and the 1990s, convincingly challenged long-held claims by President Truman and other defenders of early U.S. atomic policy that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to save thousands of American troops’ lives. Rather he wrote, citing newly declassified evidence, U.S. policymakers based their strategy toward the Soviet Union on the judgment that the atomic bomb, once demonstrated, would provide leverage in negotiating the postwar world order.

From 1966 to 1968, while a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, Alperovitz developed the "Vietnam Summer" campaign centered on canvassing and teaching to motivate undecideds and non-activists into taking action against the war. Although his role only became known more than 45 years later, Alperovitz in 1971 worked with Daniel Ellsberg to keep the publication of the Pentagon Papers going -- after the initial publication by The New York Times was halted by a court challenge by the Nixon administration -- by secretly arranging to hand off portions of the report to one news outlet at a time, beginning with The Washington Post.

In the decades since then, the D.C.-based Alperovitz has worked on issues relating to inequality and participatory democracy. In that regard, he is the president of the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives and is a founding principal of the Democracy Collaborative, a research institution developing “practical, policy-focused, and systematic paths toward ecologically sustainable, community-oriented change and the democratization of wealth.”

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Lou Aronica -- Long-time activist Lou Aronica is one of the Founding Fathers of the continuing D.C. statehood movement. Back in the early 1970s, Lou was one of the co-founders of the D.C. Statehood Party (now Statehood Green), along with such veterans of local civil rights and social justice struggles as Julius Hobson, Hilda Mason, Josephine Butler and Charles Cassell. More than any other Washingtonian, Lou has served as a leading tactician and the institutional memory for the statehood movement and as an historian of the District's long struggle to have the same rights as all Americans in the 50 states.

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Juliana Barnet -- Juliana Barnet is an artist, community organizer, anthropologist, and writer who grew up in Washington, DC in a socially conscious household after her family moved here in the early 60s during the Kennedy administration. After an education in public and private schools in Washington, DC, Juliana moved to Mexico for college, studied anthropology there, and participated in social justice activities in Mexico. Her special interests are alternative education and cultivating an “activist culture.” She has written a novel, Rainwood House Sings: A Social Justice Mystery, on this topic.

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Eddie Becker - Lifelong activist who has used his technical and research skills in the service of movements for social change in the U.S. and around the globe.

 

Sally Benson -- Sally Benson is a long-time antiwar activist who determined, after college, to live “a meaningful and independent life.” Originally from Western Massachusetts, she found herself drawn to Asia, and in 1966 secured a teaching position in Vietnam through the International Volunteer Service. She lived and worked in Saigon and experienced the 1968 Tet Offensive up close, with her landlady warning her to cancel a planned visit to a friend the very night that the National Liberation Front troops moved in. Returning to the US in 1969, she and her partner Steve Nichols purchased a house in Washington, DC and became stalwarts of the local anti-war movement there, as well as well as working with national anti-war organizations through the end of the war. Today Sally still works on issues of reconstruction and reconciliation, travelling frequently to Southeast Asia. 

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William Blum (1933-2018) - William Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer because of his opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first “alternative” newspaper in the capital. Beginning in the early 1970s, Bill was a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America.  His stay in Chile in 1972-1973, writing about the Allende government’s “socialist experiment” and its overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, led him to a heightened interest in what his government was doing in various parts of the world. In the mid-1970’s, he worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds. His book on U.S. foreign policy, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, first published in 1995 and updated since, received international acclaim.  Noam Chomsky called it “far and away the best book on the topic.” Blum, who died in late 2018, was also the author of four other books, the last one being America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy — The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else (2013). His books have been translated into more than 15 languages. Bill’s lifelong work was to educate the American public about the reality of US foreign policy and its global impacts.

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Hope Boylston - Lynda Tredway and Hope Boylston met in the middle 60s when both enrolled as undergraduates at George Washington University. Both had a strong interest in politics, Lynda influenced by John Kennedy’s call to action and Hope planning to study anthropology and see the world to “escape her privileged life.” A life-long friendship developed from their shared experience as roommates, activists, mothers and educators, with Hope’s human rights work around Chile informing her later teaching career in Pennsylvania, and Lynda’s teaching experience and expertise making her a national authority on public secondary education, training and professional development. Hope authored a book, “Hoy Locos,” about her time in Chile. Lynda, now retired from teaching at Berkeley and back in DC, is an accomplished artist and is currently working on an art project that addresses lynching.

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Jeremy Brecher – Historian of labor struggles who was an antiwar activist, a regional organizer for SDS, an Associate Fellow at IPJeremy Brecher was a student activist living in Washington DC from 1965-70. He later became a labor historian, a documentary filmmaker and a writer on social change. He has authored more than a dozen books, including Strike, a history of American labor.S, and an active community organizer in the DC suburbs in the late 60s and early 70s.

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Dale Brown - High school activist who was arrested distributing anti-Vietnam War material at a military base. Also headed up a students' committee against the war in 1971 for May Day, an attempted shut-down of the US government by the peace movement.

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Charles Cassell (1924-2021) – Prominent hometown civil rights activist; active in picketing D.C stores that wouldn’t hire blacks, and in the anti-freeway fight; co-founder D.C. Statehood Party, and later D.C. Board of Education member, and chair of the historic D.C. Statehood Constitutional Convention.

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Steve Clark - Steve Clark went through many stages of activism. He was a protester, revolutionary, and organizer. Locally he is best known as the driving force behind Stone Soup, a non-profit food store in Adams-Morgan.

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Columbia Road Children's Center - Three staff members (Paulette Saunders, Susie Solf, Faye Allen) from Columbia Road Children’s Center in the early 1970s talk about getting their jobs, the ideology of the school, and the long term effects of this multicultural experience on the lives of the students and staff.

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Malcolm Davis Remembered (1937-2011) - Ecumenical campus chaplain at GWU from 1967 until 1984. Throughout the late 1960s-early 1970s, Mal Davis’s campus office served as a gathering and planning spot for civil rights and antiwar activists. Davis personally fought for social justice -- in the South organizing civil rights bus caravans and sit-ins, leading voter registration drives, confronting the Ku Klux Klan; in D.C. helping organize the Poor People’s Campaign and its accompanying Resurrection City in 1968, and helping organize anti-war protests during the Vietnam War. He later became renowned for his porcelain pottery. Panel participants, all of whom were student activists at George Washington during the late 1960s and early 1970s, were: Sally Benbasset Tim Frasca Lexi Freeman Richard Lipsitz Esther Siegel George Virkus

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Onka Dekker and Susie (Solf) Phillips - Onka and Susie discuss some of their experiences with the Earth Onion women's improvisational theater group.

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James Drew -- James (Jim) Drew is a lawyer who embedded himself deeply into the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the city of Washington, DC after moving here in 1968. He served two four-year terms as president of the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and was legal counsel for the Black Panthers. Jim remains politically active with NLG.

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James Dugan – Hyattsville native who was Local 6 president in pressmen's 1975-1977 strike at Washington Post

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Earth Onion - Earth Onion was a women’s improvisational theater group in Washington, D.C. from 1970 to 1975. It began through the Women’s Liberation Movement and worked very closely with many other political groups and movements in the area. It performed extensively around the Washington, D.C. area and toured around the country for about three years. Lynn (Glixon) Ditchfield, Julie Huff and Susie (Solf) Philips describe the creation of the Earth Onion Theater Group, which performed from 1970-75, the experiences of the group, its impact on themselves and others, its connections to the political and cultural movements of the time, reasons for its ending in 1975, and its long-term influence on them in the work each of them did in the following decades.

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David Eisner -- U. of Maryland activist during antiwar blockade of Route 1; then owner of head shop Maggie’s Farm and boutique until the early 1970s; and owner House of Musical Traditions in Takoma Park since the early 1970s.

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Jan Pergot Fenty and Susie (Solf) Phillips - Jan and Susie discuss their experiences in the Women's Movement during 1968-71.

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Freeway Forum -- Angela Rooney, Brookland neighborhood leader in Emergency Committee on Transportation Crisis, Arturo Griffiths, DC Jobs with Justice, Parisa Narouzi, Empower DC, Andria Swanson, Ivy City Civic Association, Derrick Nabors, Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 689, Moderator: John Hanrahan, writer and former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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Madeleine Golde -- Came to Washington, DC in 1967  in the era of President Johnson’s Great Society programs to try to make a difference in terms of social programs for the poor.   During her seven years in HEW, she was an outspoken activist against the war in Vietnam within the federal bureaucracy, including helping to form  government-wide anti-war organizations; launched an underground newspaper that circulated widely throughout the Dept for 5 years, tackling issues ranging from treatment of minorities in HEW, to effectiveness of HEW programs and free speech rights for employees; and helped and played an important role in activating a moribund union local in her Department. For the past 40 years, she has continued to be an active participant in advocating for the rights of workers and the protection of our communities.

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Sanford Gottlieb (1926 - 2022) -- Head of SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), which was a major organizer of Vietnam antiwar protests; a key lobbyist in support of the partial nuclear test-ban treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union

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Art Grosman – A civil rights and antiwar activist while a student at Howard University in the early 1960s, Art Grosman made his biggest mark on local activism beginning in 1966 as one of the co-founders of the Washington Free Press. The WFP was the first and most influential D.C. underground newspaper for almost 4 years, folding after constantly being subjected to police suppression, infiltrators, and FBI pressures against printers. 

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Debby Hanrahan - Debby Hanrahan has a 50-plus-year history of local activism in civil rights, social justice and antiwar campaigns. From the ‘60s and ‘70s, these include the continuing decades-long fight for D.C. statehood; the successful citizen campaign to stop destructive freeways through the heart of D.C.; the local organizing around the United Farmworkers Union grape boycott. Since then, her activism has included local public school advocacy; successful petitioning for statehood, nuclear freeze and medical marijuana ballot initiatives; and rallying and marching repeatedly against U.S. wars and for whistleblowers. 

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John Hanrahan -- Former Washington Post reporter/union activist in support of 1975 pressmen's strike at the Post; also a DC community activist on voting rights, other local issues. 

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Richard Harrington -- Editor of alternative publications Woodwind and Unicorn Times, chronicler of D.C. music scene for more than 40 years with first the alternative press and then the Washington Post.

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Sandy Barrett Hassan – Third generation Washingtonian who was a Howard University civil rights activist, later an education and community organizer. Met Malcom X at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. Also an artist and maker of quilts that chronicle the civil rights movement.

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Lillian Peterson Herz - Lillian Peterson Herz discusses her pacifist upbringing and beliefs that led to her involvement in the civil rights movement, including SNCC voter registration campaigns in Georgia and Mississippi, and efforts to end the war in Vietnam.

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Tina Hobson - part 1 and Tina Hobson - part 2 -- An environmental and clean energy activist, Tina spent many years in various government posts in which she promoted civil rights, improved equal opportunities for women in the federal government, and worked with employment and training programs to assist the poor. During her interview for the Lessons of the 60s project, Tina spoke extensively about her late husband, Julius Hobson, the famed D.C. civil rights leader (and later D.C. Council member), whose leadership was most responsible for ending discrimination in hiring in local retail stores and in overturning racially discriminatory practices in the city's public schools.

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Julie Huff -- Julie Huff grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia in the 1950s and 1960s. Exposure to segregation, the civil rights movement in the early 1960s and the anti-war movement led her to a lifetime of activism for civil rights and women’s rights and against the vietnam war, beginning in high school and continuing in the Washington, D.C. area following college. She later became a nurse and worked in women’s health and public health for over 30 years.

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Sharlene Kranz - High school civil rights activist who staffed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) office in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1964, when the MFDP challenged the legitimacy of the Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City. Also, an early member of Jews for Urban Justice. 

 

Paul Kuntzler - Paul Kuntzler has been one of the most influential figures in the Washington, D.C. gay rights movement for well over 50 years. No one, aside from Franklin Kameny, the founder of the D.C. Mattachine Society, has had a bigger impact over the last 5 decades. From his membership on the board of the Mattachine Society at age 19, to the first gay rights protest at the White House in 1965, to his roles in the establishment of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, the creation of the Getrude Stein Democratic Club, and the development of the gay/lesbian community into one of the city’s most potent political forces, Paul has been in the forefront of the movement right on down to the present day. 

 

Saul Landau (1936-2013) - Internationally known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker who worked for 40 years on social, political, and human rights issues. He produced more than 40 films, and won several awards, including an Emmy. Among his D.C.-produced films was the Edgar Allan Poe Award-winner, "Assassination on Embassy Row," an investigation into the mid-'70s murders in Washington of exiled Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his Institute for Policy Studies colleague, Ronni Moffitt.

 

Roger Lesser – Social worker, antiwar activist, early IPS Fellow.

 

Joann Malone - Joann Malone was a member of the Sisters of Loretto for almost twelve years, her first teaching assignment beginning in Montgomery Alabama in 1963.  The Civil Rights Movement transformed her into an activist for life in efforts to end poverty, war, racism and sexism.  After hearing Thich Nhat Hanh speak in 1968 about the war in Vietnam, she joined the DC-9 in an action in DC against Dow Chemical’s production of napalm, nerve gas and defoliants.  Her “claim to fame” is being the first nun in US history to commit five federal felonies, be convicted and face 35 years in prison.  Once the DC area became a permanent home, she continued working with revolutionary groups, organizing unions at area factories and hospitals and teaching Social Studies in DC and MD public high schools for twenty-one years.  She worked at IPS on a prison project, wrote for Off Our Backs, was a member of the DC Unite to Fight Back and of Earth Onion Women’s Improvisational Theater. 

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Rick Margolies - Richard Margolies was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and participant and chronicler of the intentional community movement with its values of sharing and equality that blossomed during the 1960s and 1970s. He later had a long career as a clinical psychologist.

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Erich Martel - Erich Martel came to Washington in 1961 to attend Geogetown University. He participated in social causes, joined the Army, later earned a teaching degree and began teaching at an African-American high school. He was active in teachers' unions. His last 25 years of teaching were at Wilson High School  where his history classes were legendary and often included visits from activists such as Seymour Hersh.

 

Hilda Mason Remembered (1916-2007) - Hilda and Charles (Charlie) Mason are remembered by Lawrence Guyot and Debbie Hanrahan - donated to the Lessons of the Sixties Project by the D.C. Statehood Green Party. Hilda and Charlie were Washington, D.C.'s most significant activist couple from the early 1960s to the 2000s. From the time they were married until their deaths 40-some years later, Hilda -- the public school teacher and assistant principal and great granddaughter of a slave -- and Charlie -- the government civil servant, later attorney, and heir to a sizable fortune -- were seldom referred to in the singular; to those in the activist and electoral politics communities, they were always one entity -- Hilda and Charlie

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Reverend Douglas Moore (1928-2019) - Civil rights leader, head of D.C. Black United Front; later, member D.C. Council.

 

Thomas P. Morgan Community School - Panel discussion on the campaign in the late 1960s to establish a community-run school in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Participants were parents, activists, teachers and other school personnel who were involved in that campaign. The panel of Morgan School supporters included Edward G. Jackson Sr., president of the Morgan PTA when this effort started, and later chair of the Morgan Community School Board and an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner; Irene Elkin, then an Adams Morgan community activist and chair of the Schools Committee of the Adams Morgan Community Council; Marcus Raskin, co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies; Harrison Owen, then executive director of the Adams Morgan Community Council; and teachers Dorothy L. Artis and Dorothy Chappell. Also participating were school personnel Joan Broadus and Ida Mae Beasley.

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Luci Murphy - Human rights activist and topical/jazz singer who for more than four decades has been the musical voice of progressive social justice movements in the District of Columbia. She graduated WIlson High School the spring of 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and began a life of musical activism at that time. 

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Marie Nahikian - Activist involved in struggles around fair and affordable housing, civil rights, the anti-war movement and local D.C. politics.

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Marcus Raskin (1934-2017) -  Marcus Raskin was a prominent American social critic, political activist, intellectual, author, and philosopher. He was a leading figure in the Vietnam anti-war movement and the co-founder, with former State Department official Richard Barnet, of the progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), in Washington, D.C.

 

A child prodigy on the piano, Raskin gave up a music career after receiving undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Chicago. Moving to Washington, D.C. in 1958, Raskin served as legislative counsel to a group of liberal congressmen. In 1961, he became assistant on national security affairs and disarmament as a member of the Special Staff of the National Security Council under President Kennedy’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy. In disagreement with the Kennedy administration’s Cold War policies, Raskin left his government post to co-found IPS in 1963.

 

The Vietnam War became a major area of concentration for Raskin and IPS. With noted scholar Bernard Fall, Raskin co-authored the Vietnam Reader, which was used in teach-ins against the war across the country. In 1967, he co-authored with Arthur Waskow, a colleague at IPS, "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," which urged support for those who resisted the draft and the Vietnam War. The "Call to Resist" was signed by thousands of people, and because of it Raskin and Waskow took part in turning in 1,000 draft cards to the government. In 1968, Raskin was indicted -— along with William Sloane Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Michael Ferber and Mitchell Goodman—for conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft. The group became known as the “Boston Five.” Raskin was acquitted.

 

One of Raskin’s children is Jamie Raskin, who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing, Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District since 2017. 

(Edited interview) (Full interview)

 

Irv Riskin (1918-2014) - Union organizer, McCarthy-era political witch-hunt victim, and life-long activist for peace and social justice. His Washington area activities included leadership in the Gray Panthers and the Grape Boycott, and as a key Washington Post strike supporter; and mentor to a generation of social justice activists in Washington, D.C. 

 

Betty Garman Robinson (1939-2020) -- Betty Garman Robinson moved to Washington DC in 1965 to help run the SNCC office, then headed by Marion Barry, also new to town as National Chairman of SNCC. A graduate of Skidmore College and an early member of SNCC, Betty was already a dedicated civil rights activist and quickly became a key organizer for various initiatives of the “Free DC Movement” which was headed by Barry. Home Rule for DC was the overriding local civil rights issue in the 60s and 70s for Washingtonians. Later Betty assumed leadership positions in grassroots efforts to end the Vietnam War, including chairing the DC Committee to Defend the Conspiracy during the 1969-70 trial of antiwar leaders in Chicago, and her work in organizing a 1971 conference of Vietnamese, Cambodian and American women in Canada. Betty remains an active participant in the fight for racial justice, working with the anti-racist organization SURJ (Standing Up for Racial Justice) Hands on the Freedom Plow, published in 2010, is a collection of personal accounts by Betty and 51 other women about their experiences working in the civil rights movement.

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Angela Rooney (1920-2016) - Environmental and neighborhood activist. She was a leading figure in the 1960s and 1970s Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC) which waged a successful anti-North Central Freeway / 3 Sisters Bridge campaign.

 

Larry Rubin - Larry Rubin is a life-long activist born into a progressive, secular Jewish family. Growing up in the McCarthy years, he attended the 1958 March on Washington and other political events as a teenager. While a student at Antioch in the early 60s he visited the SNCC Albany Project in Southwest Georgia, which was the immediate spur to his involvement in the civil rights movement, claiming “I never thought of not going South—It’s what we do.” He took his first job in Washington in 1962 as a community organizer at Southeast Neighborhood House. After other organizing stints in Kentucky and Mississippi, Larry returned permanently to Washington, DC, just as the major push for DC voting rights and Home Rule was gaining momentum. Working with SNCC leaders Marion Barry and Ivanhoe Donaldson, he participated in this successful campaign of the mid-to-late 70s. Larry also worked in the labor movement for many years as a lobbyist for United Electrical Workers and served four terms on the Takoma Park (MD) City Council.

 

Gerry Schwinn – With an initial interest in civil rights and nuclear testing, Gerry Schwinn, a Baltimore native, found his way to a conference in Port Huron, Michigan in 1962 that proved to be seminal. The Port Huron Statement launched the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a key organization in the development of the anti-war movement and the New Left. Later that same year Gerry experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis up close in the military town of Hampton, Virginia, where the Norfolk Naval Base “almost sank from military activity.” Needing a break, he joined the Peace Corps and spent 1963-65 in Nigeria, returning to Washington, DC just as the big anti-Vietnam War marches organized by SDS and other groups were beginning. Most of Gerry’s anti-war work was done through the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV) founded by returnees of Peace Corps, International Volunteer Service (IVS), American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) among others. Gerry and John McAuliff of AFSC were founding members of this group, which soon came out in opposition to the Vietnam War on the premise that it undermined democratic traditions. CRV made history in 1970 when, during a massive demonstration after the invasion of Cambodia, several members took over the Peace Corps office for 36 hours and displayed a huge Viet Cong flag on the building within sight of the White House. Gerry Schwinn remains a committed activist in Washington, DC. 

 

Cliff Smith - Former State Department Foreign Service Officer who was forced out of State due to his increasing opposition to the war in Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy and who became a lifelong activist for democracy.

 

Frank Smith - Frank Smith, born in Georgia, was a founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He came to Washington in the 1960s. He was elected to the Board of Education and the District of Columbia City Council where he served for 16 years. His passion for African-American history led to his work establishing the African-American Civil War Memorial.

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Norman Solomon – DC-area high school civil rights and anti-war activist targeted by FBI in the 1960s and early 1970s; later, noted author of numerous anti-war and press criticism books, anti-war filmmaker ("War Made Easy"), founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of the national group RootsAction.org.

 

Roberta Spalter-Roth and Roger Lesser - Roberta and Roger discuss some of their experiences in the movements of the 1960s. 

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James Stockard Family -- The three adult children of James G. Stockard ( James G. Stockard Jr, Ruth Stockard Flynn, and Janet Stockard de Merode ) discuss their father and what it was like growing up in Arlington Virginia while their father was a civil rights activist. Stockard served on the Arlington County School Board from 1955 to 1968. This was a time of great turmoil over integration. Stockard’s was a wise, tolerant, and pro-integration voice. 

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Susan Stewart Stockard -- Susan Stewart Stockard, now married to Jim, was a student at the first school integrated in Arlington County and the state of Virginia. Her family was part of the activist group that worked with Stockard. 

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Michael Tabor - Jews for Urban Justice (JUJ) and Michael Tabor - Challenging Segregation - An activist and organizer in the Washington, D.C. area for more than five decades on a wide array of issues, including free speech rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, for racial justice and for sustainable agriculture. In the first interview, Michael describes his work over several years with Jews for Urban Justice, including their work challenging Jewish apartment owners and the Jewish community leadership in perpetuating slum housing, redlining and other housing inequities, and their work with Arthur Waskow organizing the first Freedom Seder.  The second interview covers his civil rights and anti-Vietnam War organizing in the Maryland suburbs, including active involvement in local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapters, his activism while working at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), his work with the Jewish Renewal Movement, and the beginnings of his long-term ownership of Licking Creek Bend Farm and its focus on sustainably grown produce.

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William Treanor -- Bill Treanor has been a Washington, DC fixture since the early 1960s, first as a student activist at Georgetown University, then as an organizer for SCLC, one of the great civil rights organizations of the 60s, later as an elected official to DC’s first elected School Board and, finally, as an advocate for youth. A high school dropout himself, Bill served in the US Army before entering Georgetown University in 1963. His civil rights experience included staff work for the 1968 Poor Peoples’ Campaign. He is best known for his long time leadership in support of youth services, which included the founding of Runaway House and the publication of Youth Today, a monthly national periodical for people working in the field.

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Lynda Tredway - Lynda Tredway and Hope Boylston met in the middle 60s when both enrolled as undergraduates at George Washington University. Both had a strong interest in politics, Lynda influenced by John Kennedy’s call to action and Hope planning to study anthropology and see the world to “escape her privileged life.” A life-long friendship developed from their shared experience as roommates, activists, mothers and educators, with Hope’s human rights work around Chile informing her later teaching career in Pennsylvania, and Lynda’s teaching experience and expertise making her a national authority on public secondary education, training and professional development. Hope authored a book, “Hoy Locos,” about her time in Chile. Lynda, now retired from teaching at Berkeley and back in DC, is an accomplished artist and is currently working on an art project that addresses lynching.

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Kitty Tucker (1944-2019) - Environmental, health and anti-nuclear activist who was a leader of the Washington, D.C. Karen Silkwood campaign and a key participant in the Washington, D.C. coalition to impeach President Nixon.

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Vietnam Moratorium Committee at NIH/NIMH - The Vietnam Moratorium Committee at NIH/NIMH was active in the broad movement against the Vietnam War from the committee's formation in 1969 - inspired by the national Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam - until the end of the war in 1975. They worked to educate and mobilize federal workers at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health while also participating in events under the umbrella of Federal Employees for Peace. They organized events, published a regular newsletter (The Rainbow Sign), and distributed educational materials, while standing up to attempts from senior government officials to interfere with their efforts. This oral  history was conducted on December 9, 2005 by Victoria Harden, Director of the Office of NIH History. Raw footage provided to the Lessons of the Sixites Project. Active Moratorium Committee members who participated in this oral history were: Martin Blumsack, Irene Elkin, Madeleine Golde, Zona Hostetler, Carl Leventhal, Mark Leventhal, Mike Mage, Rose Mage, Robert Martin, Natasha Reatig, David Reiss, Marianne Ross, Phil Ross, Elliott Schiffmann, Audrey Stone, Stefanie Weldon, Robert White, John Zinner.

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Harold White (1932-2015) - Rabbi Harold White was a long-time activist for civil rights, social justice, peace and interfaith dialogue.  Beginning in 1968, he was an active member of Jews for Urban Justice (JUJ), which began by challenging the Jewish community of the Washington area to confront discriminatory housing practices by Jewish landlords. He was an active contributor to the first Freedom Seder in 1968. He was the first rabbi hired full-time by a U.S. Catholic university, spending more than half a century at Georgetown University teaching and counseling and promoting interreligious understanding. He was one of the first in the Washington area to perform interfaith marriages.

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Alice Wolfson - Alice Wolfson is a veteran political activist and a pioneer in the women’s health movement. She belonged to DC Women’s Liberation, and was a member of “The Daughters of Lilith” collective.
Hers was one of the leading voices protesting the lack of female participation in the 1970 Pill Hearings, as
well as the deliberate withholding of information regarding oral contraceptives’ dangerous side effects.
Alice was one of the founders of the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN) and organized many
other actions during the NWHN’s early years, including a sit-in in the office of the Secretary of the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and the first FDA Protest. Alice served on the NWHN
board of directors for several years. She also co-founded the Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights,
which fought for and won both California state regulations protecting women against sterilization abuse
and court decisions guaranteeing MediCal coverage of abortion. Today, Alice is a lawyer fighting for the
rights of disabled individuals who have been discriminated against by their insurance companies.

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Donors of Historical Materials to our Archive

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An important part of our project is collection of historical materials - artifacts, pamphlets, buttons, photos, diaries, newsletters, leaflets, manifestos - that help document the work for peace and social justice during this period. Donated materials will be archived at the Gelman Library at George Washington University. Below are the initial contributors. Donate now! Your memorabilia will be archived at the Gelman Library under your name for the next generation of activists and for posterity. Don't let you heirs toss out your stuff! Contact us at dcproject60@gmail.com.

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Dale Brown - see bio above in Interviews section

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Tim Butz - 

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Malcolm Davis  - see bio above in Interviews section

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​​Irene Elkin - Irene Elkin has been an activist from the 1950s through the 2010s.  During the '60s and early '70s, she was chair of the Schools Committee of the Adams-Morgan Community Council, fighting successfully for community control of Morgan School (now the Marie Reed Community Learning Center). (see Morgan School interview above).  As a government employee, Elkin was active in the Vietnam Moratorium Committee at NIH/NIMH (VNMC) and Federal Employees for Peace. On the Moratorium Committee, she served as one of the coordinators of the group and was one of the plaintiffs in a case brought against the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare for use of the NIH auditorium for speakers invited by the VNMC

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Madeleine Golde - see bio above in Interviews section

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John Hanrahan - see bio above in Interviews section

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Joann Malone - see bio above in Interviews section

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Norman Oslik - Norman Oslik’s first activism began when he joined the Vietnam Moritorium Committee at NIH/NIMH in 1970 as part of his growing opposition to the war in Vietnam. During this period he also worked on various labor and community issues with the Alliance for Labor and Community Action, including helping to publish a community newsletter, supporting workers in various labor conflicts and working on the Alliance’s Unemployment Committee. Over the next several decades he has continued his activism in a variety of arenas, including local environmental protection issues, community involvement in local development projects, and union organizing as well as serving for six years as an elected Town Council Member.

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Natasha Reatig (1941-2019) - Natasha Reatig was an active participant and leader in the Vietnam Moratorium Committee at NIH/NIMH, the Federal Employees for Peace and the League of Federal Voters, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, working to educate federal employees and mobilize them to help end the war in Vietnam. See In Remembrance page for full obituary.

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Irv Riskin - see bio above in Interviews section

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Marcia Sprinkle - Marcia Sprinkle was influenced as a teenager by the civil rights movement, joined SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) while in college and moved to Washington, D.C. to continue her activism. She worked for many years as a community organizer, working primarily “across the color line” as a white person working in the black community.

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Fred Solowey - A native New Yorker, Fred Solowey has lived in Washington, DC since October, 1973. He worked full time coordinating the efforts of the Local Six Legal Defense Committee, during the Washington Post strike and its aftermath. Active in many organizations, he helped found and coordinated the Washington Area Labor Committee on Central America and the Caribbean and was the founding executive director of the Coalition to End Grand Jury Abuse. For the past 35 years he has been a labor journalist and editor for a number of unions.

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James Stockard - see bio above in Interviews section

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Alice Wolfson - see bio above in Interviews section

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Public Forums 

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Traveling Hopefully: A Series to Promote Intergenerational Discussion

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The Lessons of the Sixties project also periodically holds public forums as part of our Traveling Hopefully series on issues from the 1960s and 1970s and the lessons that can be applied to similar struggles today.

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One such event, which we filmed, was held on September 12, 2013 in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast Washington, D.C. The event, which drew an audience of more than 50 people of all ages, addressed the issue of “What does it take to save a neighborhood these days?” (View event flyer) The forum was structured to contrast -- and draw lessons from -- Washington, D.C.’s successful anti-freeway campaign of the 1960s and early 1970s in the context of current-day neighborhood struggles for social justice. Brookland resident Angela Rooney, now in her 90s and one of the few surviving strategists of the anti-freeway Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), spoke of ECTC’s direct action organizing, education and legal campaigns. The other panelists detailed current-day campaigns city-wide and in individual neighborhoods over issues of housing, jobs, transportation, pollution and gentrification.

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Organized all over the city and in neighboring Takoma Park, Md., ECTC’s efforts united black and white, rich and poor, left and right and those in between, in a campaign to stop a network of freeways that would have demolished thousands of houses on a path from Takoma Park through Brookland and other working-class neighborhoods, as well as impacting downtown D.C. and even affluent Georgetown with a strongly-opposed span called the Three Sisters Bridge. The graphic we used for the forum was from ECTC’s poster of the time: “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes.” Co sponsors for the event were D.C. Jobs with Justice, Empower D.C., the Institute for Policy Studies and the Ivy City Civic Association. Participants included:

Angela Rooney, Brookland neighborhood leader in Emergency Committee on Transportation Crisis
Arturo Griffiths, DC Jobs with Justice
Parisa Narouzi, Empower DC
Andria Swanson, Ivy City Civic Association
Derrick Nabors, Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 689
Moderator: John Hanrahan, writer and former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism

 

An earlier event (not filmed) on November 11, 2012 was a panel discussion about the decline of the newspaper, the rise of social media, and the impact and opportunities these pose for social justice organizing, including a revealing presentation on how the huge, but little known 1975 strike at the Washington Post crippled unions. There was also live entertainment with Jonathan B. Tucker, performance poet, Split This Rock.  Co-sponsors included the Institute for Policy Studies, the Washington Peace Center and Teaching for Change. Panelists:included:

• John Hanrahan, former Washington Post reporter and long-time investigative journalist who refused to cross the picket lines during the 1975 Washington Post pressmen's strike

• Pete Tucker, independent journalist who reports at TheFightBack.org,

• Julia Kann, Assistant Mobilizer for Metro Washington Council, AFL-CIO

 (View event flyer) 

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On October 23, 2014, we held a forum titled "Teach-ins, Sit-ins. Marches and Seizures - GW Student Activism in the 60s", with several George Washington University student activists from that period speaking and participating in an intergenerational dialogue with current GW student activists.  Co-sponsors were the Institute for Policy Studies and GW Libraries.(See event flyer)

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Other Events - The Lessons of the Sixties Project occasionally films public events that feature activists from the '60s and '70s, with the intention of incorporating footage into future edited interviews. One example was a panel discussion of civil rights “Elders” we filmed at The Institute for Policy Studies in October 2012 following the national dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial on the Mall. This panel included Bernice Reagon of the legendary singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock and former IPS Fellow Arthur Waskow.

 

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Further use of this material: The broadest possible use of the materials we collect has always been the key goal of this project. In order to do that, all the oral histories collected by the project are available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. If you are not familiar with Creative Commons, you can read about the organization at http://creativecommons.org/about. The key point is that Creative Commons licenses allow creators of content to better control the terms of public use of their products, without having to contend with the traditional restrictive and cumbersome copyright rules. In this case, the Attribution 3.0 Unported License allows others the right to use this material without restriction, but with attribution back to each interviewee, to Lessons of the Sixties, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, and George Washington University as the copyright holders. EXAMPLE:  Angela Rooney, Lessons of the Sixties, IPS, GWU