Interviewing Staughton and Alice Lynd
Alice and Staughton Lynd met in the early 1950s, and they worked and lived together until Staughton’s death in 2022. Staughton Lynd was the child of renowned sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, who wrote “Middletown,” studies on Muncie, Indiana. Both Staughton and Alice had activist, very left-leaning parents, and Staughton and Alice followed suit. Like Staughton’s parents, they co-authored numerous books, including a 1973 oral history project entitled Rank and File: Personal Histories of Working Class Organizers. Together they transformed academic approaches to oral history through their embrace of a bottom-up approach.
The Lynds spent the early part of their marriage in the South, spending some time at a Quaker commune in Georgia. After he earned his doctorate in history from Columbia University, Staughton taught at Spelman College in Atlanta where he worked alongside historian Howard Zinn. In 1964, Staughton directed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Schools in Mississippi. That fall, Staughton took up a teaching position at Yale University. Following a trip he took in 1965 to North Vietnam, where he critiqued US involvement in the war, Lynd was denied tenure at Yale, and he was blacklisted from working in academia. The Lynds then moved to Chicago in the late 1960s. While in Chicago, Staughton earned his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1976. Alice also switched careers at this point from working in early childhood education to working as a draft counselor and paralegal. In 1976, the Lynds relocated once again, this time to Youngstown, Ohio. Alice went on to earn her law degree in 1982.
The Lynds have worked with many organizations and on many projects. In the early 1970s, they worked on an oral history project on the working class, which eventually produced the book Rank and File. They worked with the Freedom Schools and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi, and Staughton was one of the main organizers of the Freedom Summer in 1964. After moving to Youngstown, Ohio, the Lynds worked with union workers and leaders in their battle with steel mill owners over the mills’ impending closure.
Even though the Lynds ‘retired’ in 1996, they continue to work for social justice. Among the many causes they worked on, they advocated for the abolition of the death penalty death penalty and sought to bring about prison reform.
The Interviews
This oral history project was conceived by Dr. Dan Kerr and independent documentarian Catherine Murphy, who were both interested in interviewing the Lynds. Kerr was interested in interviewing them about radical oral history practice and their experiences with oral history. Murphy was interested in the work that the Lynds had done with SNCC during Freedom Summer.
These interviews took place over three days in January 2017 in the Lynds home in Niles, Ohio. They are life histories, going through the Lynds individual upbringings, to their varied work through the 20th-century, to the work they were then doing with prison reform.