Todd Gitlin (born 1943)
Is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on themass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications.
New Left Activist
Gitlin became a political activist in 1960, when he joined a Harvard group called Tocsin, against nuclear weapons. In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society; he was elected, he writes, because "none of the other four candidates, each of whom was experienced, was willing to serve," since "we mistrusted power, including our own! Recruiting leaders was hard." (Letters to a Young Activist, p. 117) He helped organize the first[citation needed] national demonstration against the Vietnam War, held in Washington, D. C., on April 17, 1965, with 25,000 participants, as well as the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in South Africa - a sit-in at the Manhattan headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank on March 19, 1965.[2] In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[3] In the mid-1980s, he was a leader of Berkeley's Faculty for Full Divestment and president of Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni/-ae Against Apartheid. In 2013, he became involved in the alumni wing of the Divest Harvard [4] movement, seeking the university's exit from fossil fuel corporations, which fill the atmosphere with climate-changing carbon and fund anti-science propaganda.
