Background
Rawick was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, and died in 1990 in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Rawick was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, and died in 1990 in Saint Louis, Missouri.
He was educated in the New York City public schools and attended Oberlin College in Ohio. He subsequently earned a Doctor of Philosophy in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He studied under Professor Merle Curti, who was one of the leading American historians of the era.
Rawick completed his dissertation, The New Deal and Youth: The Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and the American Youth Congress, in 1957: in that work, he contrasted the conservative, authoritarian, Army-run Civilian Conservation Corps with the leftish, democratically-run National Youth Administration, which allowed him to discuss the often contradictory impulses underlying the New Deal generally.
Over his long career in academia, Rawick taught at Washington University, Wayne State University, State University of New York, the University of Chicago, and the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, among others He participated in a number of left organizations including the Socialist Party, Correspondence Publishing Committee and Facing Reality. He was associated with the ideas of C.L.R. James and was co-author of a Facing Reality pamphlet, with C.L.R. James, Martin Glaberman, and William Gorman.
He also wrote for the journal Radical America, which published his important essay, "Working Class Self Activity," in 1969.
This collection began publication in 1972. The interviews which this set contains were taken under the auspices of the Works Projects Administration (World Pet Association), a New Deal program
They remained in typescript until Rawick took on the task of supervising their preparation for publication. Volume One of the series consists of Rawick"s contribution to the historical literature of American slavery, an important book titled From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community.
This book has been translated into 12 languages, and was one of the first books to take American slaves seriously as actors in their own history.
His papers are held at the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis.
Rawick was involved in leftist politics from his earliest days at Oberlin College, staking out a career as an anti-Stalinist socialist in the United States.