Newark Community Union Project

Carol Glassman

 Carol Glassman was born in Brooklyn in 1942 to a first-generation large Jewish immigrant family. She went to public school and then Smith College, where she got involved with the student movement that became known as the New Left. Her activism eventually brought her to Newark, where she was a central member of the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP), part of the Students for a Democratic Society-led effort to organize in poor communities with the eventual goal of creating an “interracial movement of the poor.”

In this oral history, she discusses coming into her lesbian identity...

Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden (1939-2016) was a major figure in the New Left of the 1960s. A young white man from Michigan, he was physically attacked by racist white Southerners when he accompanied the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on “freedom rides” in the South.  He was also an early leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the flagship organization of the student left and anti-war movement. As the author of the famous 1962 SDS Port Huron Statement, he spoke for white middle-class activists, with the opening line, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort,...