NEW YORK: Todd Gitlin, a prominent anti-war and campus activist of the 1960s who drew on his experiences and influenced many others as an author, sociologist and educator, has died at the age of 79 .
His sister Judy Gitlin confirmed his death on Saturday, but declined to give details beyond saying that he had been hospitalized late last year. Gitlin’s friend and fellow writer Peter Dreyer posted a tribute on his Facebook page, calling him a prolific writer, a profound thinker, a progressive political activist, and a respected and respected mentor to many generations of activists, writers, and scholars. .
A Manhattan native, Gitlin was one-time president of one of the major campus organizations of the Democratic Society of Students of the 1960s and was involved in organizing one of the first major protests against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. in 1965. helped. That same year he helped lead an anti-apartheid strike at the Wall Street headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank, the lender to South Africa’s racist regime.
This is what inspired me most about SDS Circle: Everything these people did was intensely charged, Gitlin wrote in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, a comprehensive form published in 1987. From is an acclaimed book that combines history and personal memories. They were at once analytically curious and politically committed, but at the same time, with a thousand gestures of affection, these fearless moralists cared for one another.
Gitlin’s activism goes back to the beginning of the decade, when he was a graduate student at Harvard University. He became the leader of the Harvard group opposing nuclear weapons and helped organize a demonstration in Washington in 1962. He later received a master’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan, where Tom Hayden and others earned an SDS, and a Ph.D. D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Gitlin remained politically involved even after the 1960s, but at times clashed with fellow liberals. In the 1990s, he was critical of literary theory and some of the academic debates over the primacy of male white writers. In his 1995 book The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wrecked by Culture Wars,” he alleged that the focus on what he and others called identity politics was undermining the Left as a whole, it Writing that while Republicans were gaining power in Washington, the Left “is marching on the English Department.
In 2020, he was among the signatories to a widely debated letter that appeared in Harper’s magazine and denounced “sharp and severe retaliation” in response to so-called “cancelling culture” and alleged crimes of speech and thought.
Gitlin taught at several schools before joining Columbia University in 2002 as a professor of journalism and sociology. His writings appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and other publications. His books also include Occupy Nation and Letters to a Young Activist, in which he advises his prospective reader to be original. Let’s see what happens.
He was married three times, most recently to Laurel Ann Cook, whom he married in 1995.
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