2-02. Family History and Childhood: From Birth to Today, An Overview, Part 2

2-02. Family History and Childhood: From Birth to Today, An Overview, Part 2

In this recording, part of a larger video memoir project, lifetime activist and educator Suzanne Ross provides an overview of her life, part 2 of 2. From Suzanne: "I was born in 1937 in Antwerp Belgium. By 1940 the Nazis invaded the country and my parents, brother, and I separated from our extended family to find sanctuary. We went from country to country in Europe for a full year, before finally finding a haven in Mozambique for 3 years. We lost this haven in 1944, and we were forced to leave by the colonial Portuguese government. We immediately got, I think through my father’s work in Mozambique with the British and US intelligence services, entrance into Palestine as the British were the colonial power at that time for Palestine. My parents did not want to stay in Palestine as living conditions were difficult and so when we were able to get a visa for the US we left. No sadness about leaving the Holy Land, or dreaming to live in a Jewish state, only regrets about leaving our family once again. We arrived in the US on December 25, 1945 and soon became part of an orthodox Jewish community in Far Rockaway, Queens. My brother and I attended a Yeshiva. Though I enjoyed being a cherished member of this new school and community, I was a very religious pre teen and loved Jewish studies, particular the debating culture, by the time I was 16 my interests changed. I was now attending a public high school, was increasingly losing interest in religion and was much more focused on intellectual interests and hoping to attend an elite college. I went to school at Barnard College, though experiencing a meltdown as a result of a difficult struggle to become independent of my parents, I recovered enough to becoming deeply engaged in studying psychology and graduate college, and then a PhD program at Columbia, began working as a psychologist, and was immediately horrified by the inhumane, racist, classist, and male supremacist services offered to young people. I became alienated from the mental health field and began seeing the limitations of psychological approaches to helping people in crisis. As the US War on Vietnam was commanding more and more of my attention, I became increasingly politicized about the world. The centrality of the civil rights movement in this country was educating me about racism and horrifying me into standing up against it. Just around that time, the student uprising at Columbia took off. I was totally into it, not able to stay away from the campus, nor work on my dissertation, while learning at a rapid pace. After the Columbia experience, I began teaching at Lehman College, for the next five years. My campus activism, organizing dozens and dozens of students, sometimes even hundreds, and in the process disrupting “business as usual” at the campus, to the chagrin of many of the administrators and faculty. I could not be fired since nothing I did was challengeable until I came up for tenure where more issues, even if irrelevant to my teaching could be raised. I was, predictably, then fired. A long battle by students and supporters such as the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Professor Martin Duberman, and CUNY professors across the city ensued. At Lehman the Chairperson of the Math Department and Philosophy Department as well as the Academic Freedom Committee also stood up for me. I definitely had a shot at winning an appeal but did not want to continue the union appeal or the NYCLU appeal as they both involved considerable bureaucratic effort which I didn’t think was worth the effort. Instead, I decided to go underground with Weather. I had been a supporter of the organization since 1970 but wanted to now make a fulltime commitment. Within a few years of my “disappearing” the Weather Underground dissolved. I was upset by this dissolution but after a few years of addressing survival issues and intense study and review of errors made, I decided to continue international solidarity work. I went back to working with the Vietnamese who were dealing with post-war challenges, such as the struggle over the Pol Pot regime, the invasion of China, and the horrendous aftermath of the damage caused by the war. Having left CISPES and no longer attached to a Vietnam-based organization, I accepted an invitation to join the leadership of Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC). I worked with that organization for the following year deeply immersed in the struggle to establish a leadership role for the people of color members and trying to engage the organization in supporting our political prisoners. Though CALC did not take on an active role in political prisoner work it did offer endorsements of support campaigns, including writing letters of support for people such as Alan Berkman. This meant that I became more engaged in political prisoner work, supporting in particular not only Alan Berkman, but Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Dhoruba Bin-Wahad."

2022

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MP4

English

Video memoir

AV-ROSS.006

MP4

00:03:51