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Articles by Michael Myerson
I Was a Communist Party Activist for Decades - and I Don’t Regret It
One thousand-plus friends, comrades, and family members crowded into the Riverside Church memorial meeting for Sandy. Most were activists in the peace, disarmament, and solidarity movements. Sandy, who invariably took a seat in the back of any hall rather than the dais, was nevertheless known to all. The roster of speakers was comprised of leaders of these same movements. Speaking for the Communist Party was its chairperson, Henry Winston.
A Real, Live Communist Who Wrestled With the Real, Live Communist Party
One of my jobs at International was to conceive of and develop new works that we would want to print. I proposed to Jim that we approach the Cubans about publishing Fidel Castro’s collected speeches. The mass media in our country, without exception hostile to the Cuban revolution, used to caricature Fidel as a windbag and a narcissist for his speeches, many of which could last a few hours.
A Good Life Rule for Leftists: Never Talk to the FBI
For many years, I had a recurring dream of being chased by the FBI. What the hell could that have been about? During my childhood in the late 1940s and early ’50s, with the Cold War at its peak, the FBI’s infallibility was unquestionable. We knew this because a host of movies and television shows — I Led 3 Lives, I Was a Communist for the FBI, The Red Menace, I Married a Communist, My Son John, and more — boosted the feds to heroic proportions. The several-thousand-page file that J.
A Good Life Rule for Leftists: Never Talk to the FBI
During my childhood in the late 1940s and early ’50s, with the Cold War at its peak, the FBI’s infallibility was unquestionable. We knew this because a host of movies and television shows — I Led 3 Lives, I Was a Communist for the FBI, The Red Menace, I Married a Communist, My Son John, and more — boosted the feds to heroic proportions. For many years, I had a recurring dream of being chased by the FBI. What the hell could that have been about? Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments
A Good Life Rule for Leftists: Never Talk to the FBI
A couple years later, I graduated. It’s a brutal winter in 1961–62, and I’m twenty-one years old, recently moved to New York to head up organizing the US contingent to the World Youth Festival, to be held that summer in Helsinki. Eventually, four hundred fifty of us Americans would go — a pretty diverse collection of young folks from nearly every state, with a wide variety of mainly progressive politics (and of no politics).
Forty Years Ago, a Million People Descended on New York’s Central Park to Demand Peace
Sandy was hardly one to suffer fools gladly, but she had seemingly limitless patience and determination to suffer fools for lengthy periods of time. Mayor Edward Koch’s parks commissioner was Henry Stern, and while not a stupid man, he played the fool for the mayor. We could not use Central Park without Stern’s permission, and Stern would not issue a permit without Koch’s blessing. Koch was no friend of the movement and had no interest in giving us the park.
During the 1971 Prosecution of Angela Davis, I Fought the Law - And I Won
It was 1971 and, being young, single, a political activist, and a New Yorker, I wasn’t home much at my third-floor walkup in Greenwich Village except to sleep. One night in March, my across-the-hall neighbor poked her head out of her apartment to nervously tell me that “federal marshals” had been trying all day to find me. I couldn’t think why the feds wanted to talk to me but figured it couldn’t be anything good.
A Life on the Court’s Left
Review of Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change by Michael E. Tigar (Monthly Review, 2021). In the spring of 1960, in the wake of the Southern student sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counters in North Carolina, a group of us University of California, Berkeley students mounted solidarity picket lines at our own local Woolworths. Covering the demonstrations for radio station KPFA was a volunteer reporter and UC sophomore named Mike Tigar.
A Portrait of Gil Green
Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can afford a print subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one. Please visit the MR store for subscription options. Thank you very much. —Eds. by Michael Myerson and John J. Simon (Jan 01, 2021) Michael Myerson is an author and lifelong activist for civil rights, peace, and labor rights.
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