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Stanley Aronowitz, "Remembering Arthur Kinoy"

"Remembering Arthur Kinoy"

Stanley Aronowitz, September 29, 2003


Arthur Kinoy, best known as a leading civil rights attorney during the zenith of the protest phase of the movement during 1960s, and as a law professor who taught for some 20 years at Rutgers University, died in September 2003. He was 82 years old and lived in Montclair, New Jersey.Throughout his adult life Arthur was a professed radical. Having graduated from Harvard university and receiving his law degree from Columbia Law school, where he was executive editor of the Law Review, after graduation he served as a member of the legal staff of the United Electrical Workers (UE). As the Cold War heated up in the months after World War Two the union, the third largest in the CIO with half million members, became the prime target of the government's efforts to smash independent progressive unions, a campaign that was shamefully joined by the leadership of the CIO which finally expelled or forced out a dozen of its affiliates, including the UE. In 1949 Arthur was among the attorneys for the 11 national Communist leaders indicted for "conspiracy to advocate" the overthrow of the United States government. He was among the lawyers defending Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and never ceased, throughout his life, involving himself in unpopular cases and was often at the center of political controversy.


During the 1950s and 1960s Arthur was a leading theoretician of a substantial Left within the Civil Rights Movement, which embraced many, like Ella Baker and the Southern Conference Education Fund(SCEF) of which she was a staffer, and the Southern black student activists, who were closely associated with both Arthur and Ms. Baker. His basic argument was that the historic task of the movement was to complete the movement toward black freedom that had been thwarted by the two-party and Northern capitalists' betrayal of Reconstruction. In this Arthur was prescient. What Charles Beard had called the "second democratic revolution" became the substance of the radical wing of the movement's goals, especially in the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. For Arthur and many others winning voting rights and access to public accommodations and education was a necessary step in the course of the black freedom movement, but it was not sufficient.


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