LOWENSTEIN, ALLARD KENNETH

LOWENSTEIN, ALLARD KENNETH (1929–1980), U.S. political activist. Born in Newark, NJ, Lowenstein was raised in Westchester County, NY, and educated at the Horace Mann School, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (B.A. 1949) and Yale Law School (LL.B. 1954). After graduating from UNC, Lowenstein became an aide to liberal North Carolina senator Frank P. Graham. Later he became president of the National Student Association (an organization substantially funded by the CIA unbeknownst to Lowenstein and other NSA leaders). He worked for Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign in 1952. After the campaign he went to work for Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations. After law school and two years in the U.S. Army, Lowenstein undertook a dangerous fact-finding trip to South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) to investigate apart-heid, and wrote a book, Brutal Mandate (1962), about his findings. While practicing law in New York in 1960, he worked in the election campaign of liberal Democratic congressman William Fitts Ryan. In 1961 he began teaching at Stanford University, and became involved in student and civil rights activities. Fired for his activities at Stanford, he took a position at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, where he became a civil rights activist. A talented organizer, known as a kind of "pied piper" for idealistic students, Lowenstein soon became a strategist with movement leaders in the South, including Martin Luther King, Jr. He took a leading role in recruiting young white volunteers – many of whom were Jewish – for Freedom Summer, the campaign to register voters in Mississippi and other Southern states in 1964, on behalf of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But he fell out with the organizers over his attempts to control their activities and limit their ideas to those of traditional liberalism. At the 1964 Democratic Convention Lowenstein supported the compromise imposed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson over the struggle to seat an integrated delegation in place of the official white segregationist delegation from Mississippi. In 1967 as opposition to the Vietnam War increased Lowenstein, from his teaching perch at City College of New York, began the Dump Johnson movement within the Democratic Party over the Vietnam War. He is credited with persuading Senator Eugene McCarthy to run against President Johnson in the party primaries in 1968, eventually causing Johnson to withdraw his candidacy. That year Lowenstein ran for, and won, a congressional seat from a largely Black and Jewish district centered in Long Beach. In Congress he was an outspoken voice against the Vietnam War and for draft reform. He failed to win reelection in 1970, and also lost subsequent attempts in primaries to win election in other New York districts in 1972 and 1974. Various hasidic factions in Brooklyn opposed his election. In 1971 Lowenstein became the chairman of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. In 1977 he was appointed by President Carter as the U.S. representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. His later years were relatively quiet. However, in 1980 Lowenstein was shot to death in his law office in New York City by a mentally ill former associate from the civil rights movement. His funeral gathered many of those who had participated in his many causes. (Drew Silver (2nd ed.)