urban democrats for you

By
Here's list of writers, thinkers, artists and leaders who lived in cities, who embraced the life of cities and their citizens. They are democrats, free thinkers and reformers in the simplest sense of those words:

Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Dorothy Day, James Baldwin, Irving Howe, Langston Hughes, Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, Harvey Milk, Studs Terkel, Lou Reed, Sam Adams, Malcolm X, Horace Mann, Bernard Malamud, Helen Levitt, Bella Abzug, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Fiorello LaGuardia, June Jordan, Emma Goldberg, John Dos Passos, Claude Brown, Diane Arbus, Jim Jarmusch, Joseph Mitchell, Saul Alinsky, Barbara Jordan, Susan Sontag, Hart Crane, Richard Avedon, Spike Lee, Thomas Paine, Ralph Ellison, Sekou Sundiata, Julia Ward Howe, Sidney Lumet, Saul Bellow, Audre Lorde, Jacob Riis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Lupe Valdez, Walter Reuther, Mike Davis, Jesse Jackson, Alfred Kazin, WEB DuBois, Michael Harrington, Clarence Darrow, Robert Frank, Jane Jacobs, WH Auden, Jaime Escalante, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Waters, Patti Smith, Victor Navasky, Frank O'Hara, Chuck D, Ishmael Reed, Richard Rodriguez, Teri Gros, Nelson Algren, Pauline Kael, Paul Auster, Vaclav Havel...(to be continued...with your help...)

Comments

JoieDe said…
How can you forget Jane Jacobs, who wrote the CLASSIC "Death and Life of American Cities". She's now in Toronto, but a Democrat at heart.

From Wikipedia... [it's] quite possibly the most influential American book on urban planning. Widely read by both planning professionals and the general public, the book is a strong critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s which, she claimed, destroyed communities and created isolated, unnatural urban spaces. Jacobs advocated dense, mixed-use neighborhoods and frequently cited New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community.
9:44 PM
kid oakland said…
Yes! Jane Jacobs. I've been trying to remember her name all night.....
9:49 PM
Ripley said…
I posted 'Howl' on my blog a few days ago - just thinking, y'know, sometimes we have to get off the political horse and stretch our legs and remember that we have lives.

Glad to see you writing again, and in your own house. Great fortune!

Rip -
11:26 PM
grishaxxx said…
Pauline Kael
2:41 AM
Anonymous said…
Paul Auster, NYC
7:48 AM
kid oakland said…
Pauline Kael, Nelson Algren, Paul Auster.....

yes! yes! yes!

Thank you.
8:49 AM
Anonymous said…
vaclav havel
2:16 AM
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