founded Radical America at age 22, in 1967 and grew into the part. He left the Board in 1973, founded the inconsistently annual Cultural Correspondence (1975-83), the Oral History of the American Left (NYU) and co-founded the Rhode Island Labor History Society, during the same period. He stood on street corners in Chicago, Summer 1964, collecting signatures to get the Socialist Labor Party on the ballot in Illinois. It was tough going.
Think of Occupy, Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders Campaign as waves, all of them leading to the next wave. Instead of measuring one against another, we would do better to see their connections and possible relations. In order to unite people belonging to different movements into a longterm, organized radical force in this country, we would do well to begin, as C.L.R. James advised, with what they do.
We founded Radical America in the 1960s to recuperate what was called, by radical historians in those years, a “useable past,” that is, something to build upon.
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