Michael Myerson is an author and lifelong activist for civil rights, peace, and labor rights. He lives in the Hudson Valley and is currently at work on a memoir on his life on the Left.
The Communist Party USA had its share of bureaucrats, morons, sectarians, and incompetents, writes longtime leftist Michael Myerson. But it also included some of the best, most principled, courageous, and heroic fighters for social justice in US history.
If you believed the mainstream media portrait of Communism in the 1960s, you’d assume the Cubans, Russians, and Americans were in lockstep. But if you were inside the Communist Party USA, as Michael Myerson was, you knew the reality was far different.
Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.
Forty years ago this week, Michael Myerson was one of the organizers for the largest rally in American history against nuclear weapons. The real highlight for him, though, was getting to tell Mayor Ed Koch to go f— himself.
When Angela Davis was arrested after two months on the lam in 1971, Michael Myerson interviewed her and a codefendant in jail — turning him into a prosecution’s witness. He was now in a tough spot: Could he defy the prosecution without going to jail for perjury? Luckily, he figured out how.
Leftist lawyer Michael Tigar has spent his life in courtrooms defending a wide range of names big and small on the Left, from Vietnam War draft resisters to Bobby Seale and Angela Davis. He captures them all in a new memoir.