i actually have two credentials for being for speaking here this evening number one when erwin and barbara met i met them on their first state in san francisco that's a major production another conventional is i am probably the only person in this room who can say that i had a wonderful dinner at a chinese restaurant with irwin and barber in beijing in shanghai engine non and many other cities in china because irwin had organized the for the trip to china for american progress of this bunch of us went there for a couple of weeks when the war in vietnam was at its height and had changed from a ground war of g i s on the ground fighting to an air force war in an effort to obliterate the people of  i s in the air force at mountain home idaho got together and organized a group and it was a powerful group probably the single most important antiwar movement among the g i s in america carolyn mubarak was the major organizer of that and one day the people who oppose that activity burned down the covered wagon which was the name of the place where you all met within a very short period of time barbara arrived while the way to mountain home idaho to talk to the g r i z and saying and remind them that it was the phoenix which rose from the ashes as it did with her help wherever they had and there was an effort to think about not the america that is never ending wars injustice intolerance but the think about america that could be the one that we have not ever yet seen but may yet see and that's how i think of erwin and barber in terms of what they stood for and what they fought the freedom singers emerged out of the civil rights struggles in the one nine hundred sixty s they were musical group founded by bernie's reagan and was here peacock one of the original freedom singers joins us today mexico and nicaragua and nineteen eighty three we were in mexico celebrating the the revolutionary songs ca things like that and we had a wonderful time it was a wonderful experience that expanded me further and maybe more resolute doing what i do in the struggle i met later after i came to the bay area to live in an eighty nine and he and barbara invited me to around to doing that but his wonderful life reflects to me tonight think i also want to just want to point out that when grabbed right on to the he was so thrilled with the fact that a real live movement which was really moving society also was a singing movement that was was a close comrade and friend of earl whens who worked with him from the time when our one came to california on a series of projects including the marxist party that marked that or when it was in through the crossroads magazine and in that magazine one was not a man to stick to a set of politics because of habit the sense the challenging way he advanced his positions his passion what's even been referred to here is  stubbornness may have hidden this to most of the world but the truth is that that challenging approach irwin applied first and foremost to himself and to his own  and his own thinking because this was a man that was on a quest from very early in his life he believed that the u s left needed fresh ideas and a fresh start and he applied that approach to all of his activities and as we've heard a big part of that was in the cultural realm but also when he thought opportunities were available in the realms of theory organizing strategy and organization he threw himself into those as well and he wasn't afraid to make changes in how he thought about things or how he did things or how he organized his life was one of the few people who moved from a central position in what was then termed the old left when he joined the national guard in into a centerpiece of the new left the absurds that irwin spoke about in the film in the slideshow clip which was central to the upsurge of the late one nine hundred sixty s and then in the guardian irwin played a key role as executive editor in having that newspaper take much of that energy from the sixty's and those people who came out of the sixty's with a lifelong commitment to radical politics to try to give that focus and direction and he brought to that paper not only a tremendous sense of international sm and all the provocative movie reviews but pushing the paper to see itself as more than a newspaper but as a vehicle to try to revitalize a much needed us left in the late seventy's his opinions diverged from those of other members of the guardian staff and irwin again was not afraid to make a change a major change in his life he moved from new york to california to work on a new project which later became the line of march political organization at that time that was a fresh start trying to infuse the us left with some new ideas about the relationship between the class struggle racism and the us empire that project did not ultimately work out but along the way made many contributions to mass struggles from the rainbow coalition to the central america in anti apartheid movements the movement for immigrant rights labor struggles and other struggles and the way the u s left thought about its position in the world and its relationships to the struggles against racism and the struggle for internationalism irwin played a particularly key role in that organization as editor of the newspaper frontline newspaper and the line of march journal my partner ellen kaiser and i were privileged to be coeditors with irwin on the newspaper and that's where irwin taught us what it means to be a radical editor and how did you use that challenging style to question the news to go deeper than simply reporting the facts but to try to take an analytic approach and get underneath the news he left a real mark on our generation and it was private it was very vivid last week on c span book talk when phyllis bennis one of the outstanding journalists today that works at i p s an i p s fellow on the middle east in the united nations named irwin as one of her mentors from the time that she wrote for frontline and urban was her at its or  same ideas are now being passed on the two a crew of twenty and thirty year old radical journalists as a lot of the workshops that irwin led the curricula in those workshops have flowed into a new set of curricula that's being used in the war times anti war project to train a dozen new younger radical journalists the line of march group like much more important forces in the world communist movement on the left hit a dead end in the late one nine hundred eighty s but that didn't stop irwin from continuing his quest he took part in forming crossroads magazine which was an effort to develop a more ecumenical view of socialism and break down some of the sectarian barriers that had obstructed left unity in the seventy's and in the eighty's and he took up theoretically  strategically an effort to make a probing reexamination of the ideas and positions including some of the central tenets of marxism leninism which had informed irwin's politics since he was a teenager he wrote the initial articles in crossroads magazine that later became his book socialism what went wrong which was an effort to try to sort through and preserve and carry into the twenty first century the humane values of socialism peace and justice and separated from the encrusted dogma some of the false hopes and some of the illusions that had afflicted it and which mar called the tradition of all the dead generations which weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living irwin was on continues here is work and the work of so many other dedicated people in this room in this country all around the world to put the left on a firm foundation and develop a clear path for the twenty first century that work is not is not complete and as we look around the world today i think a case can be made it is more urgent than it ever was and irwin leaves us a body of ideas an example of commitment and values that willingness to adjust change reorganize your own life if necessary where you live and what your priorities are in order to advance that quest he leaves us that legacy he certainly did more than his share along the way and leaves us a rich legacy as we try to do or our share thank you and good afternoon i come to california on this occasion in my facial capacity is director of cultural heritage policy at the center for folklife and cultural heritage at the smithsonian institution which is a national museum of the united states dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge i come in my official capacity on the taxpayers  dollar as i am a federal employee and i make that introduction because it sets the context for what i would like to conclude with shortly in my b i want to share a personal testimony about her when i must have been about twenty eight years old when i met her when sober in my work with the puerto rican solidarity committee  working on the independence of puerto rico and i went to cuba on my first trip now i probably been to cuba seventy five eighty times with or when s first international conference for the independence of puerto rico in the midst of the great polemic of the sino soviet split i was a graduate student my heart was beating and reflecting the tenor of the times was no real sense of what my future would be were that sense of social justice that was burgeoning and my heart would take me but in meeting sober i met someone who began to fit my conception probably of what a man should be doing i was probably thinking in those terms what his son saw as overly engaging i saw it as forthright and aggressive man of principle one who drew a line in the sand and stood his ground and as the years rolled  working the puerto rican solidarity committee meeting friend below was of your community out here and spending many hours in the two brownstones in brooklyn drinking johnny walk a block i think that was his favorite read and that i could stand in the public space not just on the margins and have a rhetorical view but i could actually engage in real civic and governance institutions and stand my ground with a left wing ideological outlook but for our greater purpose that was motivating me and that was a sentiment about the imagination and the creativity and the production of ordinary people that i discovered irwin were had a long and rich history with people song the way that people express their views and their aspirations through their sense of beauty stew their sandberg as we said drinking scotch sometimes up to one to two in the morning that are when i would pull the book out and we to us the three of us sitting there in a basement so i saw a deep side of what struggle was really about and which was for a better humanity and when irwin entered my house along with miriam and our two young kids they took to him and he took to them and today at thirty five years of age and thirty one years of age they still we ferdie him as uncle or when our thirty five year or wrote me last week from london where he lives to say dad i know it's a sad occasion for you to go out for once memorial but you will see a lot of your friends and a lot of your comrades and it was irwin who connected me really to people like linda burnham to phil gardner to and swartz and so many more of you who are sitting in this audience whose names i know from our organized struggle but home i have never met some i'm meeting for the first time this evening so irwin looms very very large in my own individual and professional life and i wanted to share that with you because it's connected to me coming here and my official capacity let me just share of few things with you or when did so much and we have so little time to really think about in the deep ways that we might what he did on his passing here are some of the quotes about irwin silver he was present at the creation of many of the cultural landmarks of the past century a craftsman of the urban folk revival championed the folk music revival non singing father of the folk song revival giants and folk music and the december twenty fourth two thousand and seven issue of newsweek magazine garrison a prairie home companion fame was asked to name his five most important books his second choice after the acts of the apostles is a folk saying those words book by or when sober so like the smithsonian institution in the late eighty's perhaps the early ninety's or when you called me and said that barbara and i want to donate paragon records to the smithsonian institution well of course was a partner of moses as the founder of folkways records they had collaborated together as business partners and so that collection collects important community based recording companies and parrot on records is a part of that so last year when president abel medallists came to the smithsonian institution and i walked up to him and gave him a copy of  chase speaks pete seeger sweet honey in the rock that's barbara dane that's irwin so that's the community of interests that we sit here today that's the extended family of people all over that we never know whom we meet will touch thousands of people as or when sober life has touched thousands of people so i bring you official greetings on behalf of the center for folklife and cultural heritage at the national museum of the united states where we wrote in our early and folkways magazine so that millions of people across this country and around the world will look at that validat institution what hear the voice and the values of an era when sober and a barbara dane and that a new generation of young scholars all too often off into specific expressions very bright who were born when they were born not their fault not in the midst of struggle i wrote that so that they will see that they are the stewards of a very important social political legacy that irwin soberer was one of the founding stewards along with woody guthrie and pete seeger and the remaining of spread like pete and bernie so we're going to sweet honey in the rock so as we go forth this evening i hope that we don't just think about or when in our own personal memories and in historical terms i hope that we will think about the principles to which are one stood all of his life and we will pass those principles on to the young people in our lives and ask them to be as a maginot is and as creative and as forthright in their principles as our one was to create the new world that we all want to see and earl over and dedicated his life to see come into existence thank you