1960s
Fredi Dworkin
Fredi grew up in the 60s in Newark, the kid of two community activists. She now lives in Boston - a happy radical feminist, elder lesbian and proud Jewish activist for righteous justice for Palestinians!Michael Bronski
Michael Bronski is an independent scholar, journalist, and writer who has been involved in social justice movements since the 1960s. He has been active in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, editor, publisher and theorist since 1969. He is the author of numerous books.
His book, A Queer History of the United States, won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best Non-Fiction, as well as the 2011 American Library Association Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Best Non-Fiction. "You Can Tell Just By Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People" (coauthored...
Amina Baraka
Born Sylvia Robinson, born 1942, in Charlotte, North Carolina – multi-talented artist (dancer, actress, singer/poet, and political activist).Parents Ruth (garment worker) and James C Robinson were divorced when she was five. She was sent to her grandparents, Leona (domestic worker) and Patrick Bacote (construction worker). Sylvia grew up in Newark, New Jersey. She attended Arts High School where she majored in Art.
Sylvia early in life developed a love and respect for the working class and the labor union movement.
In 1960, Sylvia married Walter...
Gail Malmgreen
Gail Malmgreen (b.1942) grew up mostly in Weequahic, where her parents were active in Left politics. After attending Swarthmore, the University of Rhode Island, Indiana University, and Columbia University, Gail held a variety of archival and academic appointments, including serving as associate editor of the Eugene V. Debs Papers, visiting lecturer at Harvard, and associate head for archival collections at New York University’s Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. She has published in labor history and women’s history, has spearheaded several oral history projects, and is the...Terri Suess
Terri was born and raised in Seattle, Wa. and has made Newark, NJ her home with her life partner. She studied communications at the University of Washington, Seattle and worked several years as a journalist in the Pacific Northwest. In the mid-70s, she moved to New York City to earn a Master’s Degree in Urban Affairs and public policy from City University of New York, Hunter College.
As a young person, she saw the power of community organizing in Seattle, when neighbors circulated petitions to stop freeways, marched against the Vietnam War, Saved the Pike Place Market and...
Joseph Canarelli
Joseph Canarelli was born and lived in Newark from 1949 through the mid-70’s. A student at Rutgers Newark in the late 60’s – early 70’s, he feels fortunate to have been on campus—and come out—during a period of much political activism and cultural change. Along with a handful of other lesbians and gay male students, he co-founded RAGE (Rutgers Activists for Gay Education), the first glbtq group at the college. During this time, he also joined the Gay Liberation Front in New York City. He ultimately relocated to the New York where he lived for 30 years or so before moving to Seattle. A psycho-...* John
John (b.1938) grew up in North Newark, in an Irish Catholic family. As a teenager, he participated in Newark's thriving gay social world, and this interview recounts bars, movie theaters, cruising spaces, and other important sites of gay life in the 1950s and 60s, before John left Newark in the late Sixties.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...