MD

I’m currently writing a book about the 1960s with a particular emphasis on activists from “ordinary” backgrounds like my own, without heroic family histories on the Left. But, as I’ve discovered, there were almost always predispositions to dissent in our genealogies, sometimes very subtle.

In my case there were three: my dad’s intense dedication to the meat cutters union (he was a founding member of his local); having black and Asian cousins by marriage; and the shanty-Irish class consciousness of my nominally Republican mother (she despised the Kennedys as “lace-curtain, castle Catholics”).

The source of my father and uncle’s exceptional antiracism was long a mystery to me until in the 1970s I revisited the family hearth in Ohio: the tiny hamlet of Venedocia (now, population 140), founded by my father’s ancestors in the 1840s, where Welsh was the primary language until the early twentieth century.

The penny dropped when I spent an afternoon in the little cemetery looking at the headstones of the Union dead — Jones, Davis, Evans, Howell, and so on. These Welsh forebears, among the first settlers of Ohio’s Black Swamp, were fierce abolitionists.

This DNA, as it were, was activated when I was sixteen in 1962 — alcoholic, delinquent, and suicidal — and my cousin, then married to a man who would be one of the founders of black studies in San Diego, invited me to a protest organized by the San Diego chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This was my burning bush moment and — forgive the melodrama — gave my life its direction.

Like so many others caught up in the courage and beauty of the civil rights campaign, I lived the movement, stage by stage, from CORE, to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS — I was a full-timer for three years), to the Marxist left (the heretical, pro-Dubček Southern California district of the Communist Party in my case).

If my mind has an eccentric and unorthodox bent and my temperament inclines toward Celtic melancholia, my core values and self-definition remain stalwartly, even soldierly socialist.