Charles A. Haynie

Charles Haynie’s life as an activist and organizer began while he was a graduate student in Engineering Physics at Cornell University. He experienced a political awakening during the early antinuclear movement in the late 1950s. This began a long career of tireless fighting for social justice. In 1961 he helped organize, participated in, and was arrested as one of the Freedom Riders in Jackson, Mississippi, a courageous group who faced violence as they challenged segregated public transportation in the south. From 1963 to 1965 he was field director for a voter registration project in Tennessee, working with local black activists to register black voters. In 1967 he worked with the Massachusetts Political Action for Peace as an organizer of antiwar delegations. He came to UB in 1969 and helped found “Tolstoy College” an experimental academic community built on the anarchist and antiwar principles of Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy. When he passed away in 2001, a group of his colleagues established a fund to present a scholarship to a senior student in the Interdisciplinary Degree Program who has demonstrated a commitment to citizen political participation, democratic institutions, social justice, community development and racial equality.

To learn more about Charles Haynie, see A Memoir of the New Left: The Political Autobiography of Charles A. Haynie, University of Tennessee Press, 2009.