How did i miss hearing of the passing of Nick Salvatore? What a legacy this man has left behind. He authored one of my all-time favorite biographies, "Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist." Salvatore also authored a biography on civil rights leader C. L. Franklin and Amos Weber an African American Civil War Vet.

Salvatore experienced many things in his 82 year life. He spent a year in the seminary in the 60's, worked as a teamster, and became deeply involved in the civil rights movement in New York City.

“June 1963 was the turning point for me,” he later recalled in an unpublished manuscript. Joining protesters from the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who demanded that Black workers be hired to build the Downstate Medical Center, he experienced his first arrest. He also began hearing about Malcolm X. Not long after, he journeyed with fellow CORE activist Arnie Goldwag to Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm speak, noting that he “both educated me and moved me.”

What I, myself loved of Salvatore was his courageous honesty. In his book on Deb's, he saw the same faults i did in Debs and the early labor movement. Dissent magazine sums it up well:

Salvatore highlighted Debs’s failure to make the fight against white supremacy central to socialism’s mission. Until very late in his life, Debs adhered to what Salvatore called a “one-dimensional analysis” that saw racial prejudice as a mere outgrowth of class oppression, claiming “there is no ‘Negro problem’ apart from the general labor problem.” As someone who’d fought to integrate Brooklyn’s construction sites and been told by the president of Teamster Local 808, “You march with the n*****s in Harlem, you have no place in my union,” Salvatore knew better.

His subsequent biographies focused on men who, in W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous formulation, grappled with the “twoness” of being Black and American. His discovery of the extensive journals kept by Amos Webber, a Black veteran and worker who lived in the postbellum North, sparked a remarkable act of historical reconstruction. Mining the material in Webber’s “memory books,” he traced his creation of a moral universe grounded in personal integrity, a rich associational life in Black organizations, and the exploration of opportunities for interracial cooperation. The title of the book, We All Got History, underscored Salvatore’s belief that ordinary people led consequential lives. Webber’s story revealed “the complex pain and joy of being both black and American.”

Just a side note. While at a DSA convention a few years back, a young lady stopped me in a hallway and said. "excuse me Mr. Salvatore, i want to tell you how much I enjoyed reading your books. LOL!!! Anyone see the resemblance? scroll down for his image.