An activist ahead of his time, Richard L. Grossman, a community organizer, galvanized work on a variety of progressive causes during his remarkable four-decade career. This article appeared in The Nation magazine on November 29, 2011.

An activist ahead of his time, Richard L. Grossman, a community organizer who galvanized work on a variety of progressive causes during his four-decade career, died on November 22 at a hospital in New York City, the city in which he was born sixty-eight years ago.

Grossman attended Columbia University, graduating in 1965. He then served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, while living in the Washington, DC area, Grossman founded Environmentalists for Full Employment, a group that sought to unite environmental activists and unions years before the critical importance of this alliance was clear to grassroots activists of all stripes.

In the 1980s, he worked at the Highlander Research and Education Center, a social justice organization in Tennessee, and was executive director of Greenpeace USA.

In the 1990s, Grossman co-founded the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, a group of activists that continues to pursue historical and legal research to “contest the authority of corporations to govern,” as the mission is described on the organization’s Web site, another prescient response to the growth of the corporate sector pre-Citizens United.

“There’s a corporate class that has enormous wealth, and the power of law behind it,” he told the Progressive in a 2001 interview with Ruth Conniff. “Is it really true that the majority of the American people over the last twenty-five years didn’t want a major transition in energy to move to efficiency and solar, didn’t want universal health care, but wanted pig genes in fish?” …

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