Guest post by Dr Andrew Fearnley, Lecturer in Twentieth Century US History and Programme Director for American Studies, University of Manchester
Between 1981 and 1997, University of Manchester sociologist Lou Kushnick carried out almost one hundred interviews with sixty of the leading figures in America’s social justice and progressive movements. Around Boston and New York, across the heartlands of the Midwest, and occasionally in Washington, DC and its beltway, Kushnick sat in offices, diners, kitchens, and campaign centres and spoke with union organizers, mayoral advisors, city alderman, lawyers and legal campaigners, civil rights activists, tenant organizers, police officers, and church ministers.
What the individuals he spoke with held in common was their membership in America’s ‘Rainbow Left,’ that loose multi-ethnic grouping that sought advancement on an array of progressive causes. Together these interviews, most of which now exist as digital files, offer an extraordinary resource for students and scholars, providing unique insights into an array of subjects and inspiring fresh discussion about the contours and trajectory of US politics in the late twentieth century.
The group Kushnick interviewed ranged from some of America’s best-known political theorists, such James and Grace Lee Boggs, the intellectual heavyweights of American Marxism, to organizers like Mel King, who twice ran as mayor of Boston, and whose death in March 2023 occasioned a city-wide ‘day of remembrance’. But it also includes scores of lesser-known activists and organizations, whose conversations with Kushnick capture how America’s radical politics were being refreshed and redirected at a time largely believed to have been one of conservative hegemony.
The interviews comprise one series of the Lou Kushnick Collection and are held at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre. In spring 2023, with support from the School of Arts, Languages, and Culture’s Social Responsibility Fund, archivist and library manager Lianne Smith and historian Andrew Fearnley oversaw a project to improve access to the collection, making it possible for students, researchers, and other patrons to work with these materials. We are now delighted to share some of the research that undergraduate students on the second-year American Studies module, AMER20022: US History Long Essay, undertook in spring 2024, working with this collection.
Several of the posts testify to the collection’s coverage of politics, particularly the landmark municipal elections of these years. Drawing on Kushnick’s interviews with grassroots activists, and journalists, as well as political appointees, Bertie Small’s study focuses on one of the most important political victories of the period, the historic election of Black Democrat Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago in 1983. Alis Kelly’s study uses some of the interviews that Kushnick did with Boston activist and mayoral candidate Mel King, to consider how the latter’s 1979 bid prepared the way for his better-known campaign in ‘83, when he became the first African American candidate in Boston’s history to proceed to the general election for mayor. David Dinkins’ victory as the first African American mayor of New York City, in late 1989, is the focus of Callum Lee’s post, which sheds new light on what political commentators were starting to call New York’s “Latino vote.” Working with Kushnick’s interviews with Puerto Rican political scientist Angelo Falcón, and Ruben Franco, head of the Puerto Rican Legal Defence and Education Fund, Lee’s project also captures the ethnic and neighbourhood tensions within the coalition that elected Dinkins, and the growing disaffection towards his administration among those constituencies. Cecily Hood’s post similarly considers how ethnic tensions and racism played out in political campaigns at the national level, offering a comparative analysis of the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns, inspired by the contemporaneous interviews Kushnick did with political scientist David Bositis, and lawyer and executive director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers Adjoa Aiyetoro.
These projects also suggest how the Kushnick collection will open up exciting future perspectives on these decades. One of the figures with whom Kushnick spoke was Jim Haughton, a veteran New York activist and labour organizer. Here Ben Davidson offers an intellectual history of Haughton, positioning him amid a group of similar-minded Black commentators, activists, and scholars, who from the mid-1980s on began to question the achievements of America’s civil rights movement, and to highlight the worsening conditions among the Black working class.
The five interviews Haughton did with Kushnick between 1987 and 1994 frequently touch on his experiences in America’s labour movement, and union organizing is a salient topic across the collection. With many of the interviews recorded in the 1980s, this was a moment when opposition to labour was ascendent, as signalled by President Reagan’s decision to break the strike of the country’s air traffic controllers, in 1981. Yet a number of interviewees suggest such interpretations are too linear, and certainly their testimonies propose a more variegated picture. Alfred Stein’s post captures how some unions in certain industries and locations were in fact able to make notable gains, in spite of this wider inhospitable climate.
One of the hallmarks of this collection is the place of women, with comprise about a fifth of the recordings. The collection includes those who joined America’s workforce and became labour organizers, such as Dorine Levasseur and Cheryl Schaffer, as well as those who advocated on behalf of America’s urban poor, campaigned for better housing and accessible healthcare, or who brought the challenges of raising families on welfare to the forefront of the state politics. One such figure is Dottie Stevens, an anti-poverty advocate and founding member of the Coalition for Basic Human Needs in Boston. Steven’s interview in 1989 was a major influence for Anya Burns’ research which shows how, perhaps ironically, amid the retrenchment of the federal government, which cut more than $20 billion from America’s social welfare provisions in the 1980s, there was a growth in grassroots anti-poverty organizing in some urban centres.
A similar pattern can be discerned in the American criminal justice system, where the rapid rise of America’s ‘carceral state,’ and escalating incarceration, was also accompanied by the emergence of a group of progressive lawyers, reformers, and prison activists who worked from within to contest and push back against such policies. Kushnick interviewed Chicago-based lawyers Bernadine Dohrn, and Erica Thompson, who defended single parents and children in Chicago’s court system, and who pressed for the abolition of more punitive styles of prisons, and Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project in Washington, DC. Drawing on these and other sources Anton Plotnek offers one of the first histories of Mauer’s Sentencing Project, contextualizing it amid the rise of other legal advocacy groups in Washington during these years and the broader transformation of the prison rights movement.
Together the Kushnick interviews comprise an iridescent set of materials, and one which will surely continue to invite further opportunities to re-evaluate the history of late twentieth century US politics and society.
You can read all of the students’ work on the University of Manchester Special Collections Medium site at https://medium.com/special-collections
