Staughton Lynd was one of the principal intellectuals and activists making the radical argument that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was illegal under domestic and international law. Lynd was uncompromising in his courageous stance that the U.S. should immediately withdraw from Vietnam, and that soldiers and draftees should refuse to participate in the war based on their individual conscience and the Nuremberg Principles of 1950.

Lynd's writings, speeches, and interviews against the war are collected in the recently released My Country is the World. For this launch event that volume's editor, Luke Stewart, will be joined by Cathy Wilkerson and Alice Lynd for a discussion of Staughton and Alice's activism against the war and its lessons for today's anti-imperialist struggles.

Get My Country is the World from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1956-my-country-is-the-world

Speakers:

Luke Stewart is a historian focusing on the antiwar movements during the Vietnam War and the global war on terror. He has co-edited Let Them Stay: U.S. War Resisters in Canada, 2004-2016. He currently lives in Nantes, France.

Cathy Wilkerson joined Students for a Democratic Society in 1963, supporting an active civil rights movement in Chester, PA. She continued with SDS after college, becoming editor of New Left Notes and then an organizer with the SDS Washington DC Region. After the assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969 she joined Weatherman, remaining a fugitive until 1980. After getting out of prison, she worked with the Attica civil suit, and then as an educator in NYC public schools for 20 years. See also Flying Close to the Sun, My Life as a Weatherman (2007).

Staughton and Alice Lynd (respondant) were married for more than 71 years, having met during Harvard Summer School in the summer of 1950.

While Staughton spoke, wrote, and in other ways opposed the Vietnam War, Alice expressed her concerns through collecting and publishing We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors (Beacon Press, 1968), and becoming a draft counselor.

We Won’t Go was the Lynds’ first venture into doing oral history or, as Staughton put it, Doing History from the Bottom Up! (Haymarket, 2014). The Lynds partnered in editing Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Haymarket, expanded edition, 2011).

See also, Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together (Lexington Books, 2009); Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistence: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in the Military and Behind Bars (PM Press, 2017); and Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History (Orbis Books, 3d ed. 2018).