Shoreditch is an area in London, England and is located in the London Borough of Hackney alongside neighbouring parts of Tower Hamlets, which are also perceived as part of the area due to historic ecclesiastical links. Shoreditch lies just north-east of the border with the City of London and is considered to be a part of London's East End.
David Ernest McReynolds was an American politician and social activist who was a prominent democratic socialist and pacifist activist. He described himself as "a peace movement bureaucrat" during his 40-year career with the War Resisters League. He was a resident of New York City. McReynolds was twice a candidate for President of the United States, running atop the ticket of the Socialist Party USA in 1980 and 2000. He was America's first openly gay presidential candidate.
Ronald David Laing, usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness—in particular, psychosis and schizophrenia. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing took the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of personal experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. Though associated in the public mind with the anti-psychiatry movement, he rejected the label. Laing regarded schizophrenia as the normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context, although later in life he revised his views.
Bob Cobbing was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival.
Leonard P. Liggio was a classical liberal author, research professor of law at George Mason University and executive vice president of the Atlas Network in Fairfax, Virginia.
The Curtain Theatre was an Elizabethan playhouse located in Hewett Street, Shoreditch, just outside the City of London. It opened in 1577, and continued staging plays until 1624.
Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. He was married to the artist Iris Lezak from 1962 to 1978, and to the poet Anne Tardos from 1990 until his death.
Antisexualism is opposition or hostility towards sexual behavior and sexuality.
Stanley Aronowitz was an American sociologist, trade union official, and political activist. A professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center, his longtime political activism and cultural criticism was influential in the New Left movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. He was also an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook University.
Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg was an American counterculture poet, author, singer, cartoonist, publisher, and co-founder of the rock band The Fugs.
Lee Raymond Baxandall was an American writer, translator, editor, and activist. He was first known for his New Left engagement with cultural topics and then as a leader of the naturist movement.
Calvin Coolidge Hernton was an American sociologist, poet and author, particularly renowned for his 1965 study Sex and Racism in America, which has been described as "a frank look at the role sexual tensions played in the American racial divide, and it helped set the tone for much African-American social criticism over the following decade."
Bradford Lyttle is an American pacifist and peace activist. He was an organizer with the Committee for Non-Violent Action of several major campaigns against militarism, including "Omaha Action", against land-based nuclear missiles (1959) and "Polaris Action" against submarine-based nuclear missiles (1960). Lyttle and several others walked from San Francisco to New York City, and then through parts of Europe to Moscow, Russia, from December 1960 until late 1961. The action was called the San Francisco to Moscow March for Peace. Several participants, including Lyttle, walked the entire distance. He also walked in the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Peace Walk (1963).
Robert Roth was an active member in the anti-war, anti-racism and anti-imperialism movements of the 1960s and 70s, and key member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) political movement in the Columbia University Chapter in New York, where he eventually presided. Later, as a member of the Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization he used militant tactics to oppose the Vietnam War and racism. After the war ended, Roth surfaced from his underground status and has been involved in a variety of social causes to this day.
Compendium Books was an independent bookstore in London specialising in experimental literary and theoretical publications, from 1968 until its closure in 2000. The Guardian's John Williams described it as "Britain's pre-eminent radical bookstore. Whether you wanted books on anarchism, drugs, poststructuralism, feminism or Buddhism, Compendium was the place to go."
Obi Benue Egbuna was a Nigerian-born novelist, playwright and political activist known for leading the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) and being a member of the British Black Panther Movement (1968–72) during the years when he lived in England, between 1961 and 1973. Egbuna published several texts on Marxist–Black Power, including Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain (1971) and The ABC of Black Power Thought (1973).
The congress on the Dialectics of Liberation was an international congress organised in London between 15 and 30 July 1967. It was organised by the American educationalist Joe Berke. The scope of the conference was to "demystify human violence in all its forms, and the social systems from which it emanates, and to explore new forms of action". A short film, Ah, Sunflower, directed by Robert Klinkert and Iain Sinclair, and featuring R. D. Laing, Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael and others, was filmed around the Dialectics of Liberation conference.
The Free University of New York (FUNY) was an educational social enterprise initiated by Allen Krebs, his wife Sharon Krebs, and James Mellen in July 1965.
Allen Martin Krebs was a sociology professor and Marxist educationalist known for co-founding the Free University of New York and the Antiuniversity of London.
Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.
