In the late 1990s Nelson Blackstock, a former member of the Socialist Workers Party and author of “Cointelpro”, began interviewing members of the party who had been active in the 40s and 50s as part of an oral history project, the final shape of which to be determined.
Not long after he began the project, he drafted me to make contact with some of the Cochranites I had met through Sol Dollinger, a Marxmail subscriber who died in 2001. The purpose of the interviews with these comrades was not so much to rehash the 1953 split but to get an idea of how they got involved with the party and what their experiences in a radical labor movement were like. We managed to set up interviews with Sol, Cynthia Cochran who died in 2006, and with Irwin Baur who is still alive and in his 90s. In this first interview we speak with Cynthia Cochran who was married to Bert Cochran, the co-leader with Harry Braverman of the American Union that put out the American Socialist magazine from 1954 to 1959, when the group disbanded. Bert co-edited the magazine with Braverman, who went on to work for Grove Press and then finally with Monthly Review. full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/08/17/the-cochranite-interviews-cynthia-cochran/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
