Staughton Lynd, radical historian and activist, dies at 92

Staughton Lynd, a radical-leftist historian, civil rights organizer and antiwar activist who gained national prominence in 1965 when he traveled to Hanoi and denounced the Vietnam War as “immoral, illegal and antidemocratic,” then became a labor lawyer after saying he was “blacklisted” from his university teaching career, died Nov. 17 at a hospital in Warren, Ohio. He was 92.

The cause was multiple organ failure, said his biographer Carl Mirra, an associate professor and director of liberal studies at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.

Lynd, a self-styled Marxist, pacifist and existentialist — but not a communist — was “one of the visible saints of the modern American left,” a writer for the Nation magazine observed in 1997, describing him as a notable figure long after the 1960s. “His example, at once political, intellectual and even spiritual, continues to inspire.”