Western Massachusetts has long been home to deeply committed, lifelong activists whose impact has been felt well beyond the borders of the four counties that make up our region. We lost one of the great ones late last month when Bob Winston, a quiet leader who throughout his life effortlessly navigated between the worlds of social service and social change, died on June 25. He was 84.
Social justice was the centerpiece of Bob’s life. In the 1960s, he was a civil rights organizer working to end housing discrimination in Louisville, Kentucky. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the city in 1967 to support a local open housing campaign, it was being led by his brother, Rev. A.D. King, and local activists, Bob prominent among them. The Louisville Courier-Journal covered the daily marches, including the eventual passage of the city’s open housing ordinance. Bob led a contingent of 40 students to Rev. A.D. King’s Zion Baptist Church, where they joined MLK to block access to Churchill Downs during the Kentucky Derby.
Through the 1980s, he and his wife Janet offered a nurturing home to a dozen foster children who came to live in the Amherst residence where the Winstons were raising their daughter and two sons.
To Bob, social service and social change were interchangeable. Consider this parable: Neighbors are rushing to a river bank to pull out babies who keep floating downstream. But Bob and other activists head upstream to find out who the hell is throwing the babies into the water in the first place. The neighbors on the bank are doing social service; those investigating upstream are committed to social change.
In my 45-year friendship with Bob, I never saw him make that distinction. He innately saw the connection between the cries emotionally troubled youth were expressing and the unheeded cries of the nation’s ignored minorities. He founded a pioneering agency to serve young people in Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties, knowing their struggles were tied to the frayed economic and social fabric that produced their pain in the first place. That was social service.
During the Vietnam War, Bob was a professor at the University of New Hampshire and a prominent leader of the campus anti-war movement. That was social change. Protesting the war cost him his job, but it cemented Bob’s commitment to doing what was right rather than what was expedient. He never compromised his values. In 1970, after moving to Amherst, Bob became director of the Valley Peace Center, offering draft counseling and coordinating demonstrations at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee.
Bob wasn’t religious in the conventional sense, but he was always guided by the Jewish values of “Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue,” and tikkun olam — the imperative for each of us to do our part to repair the world. That vision guided his work. He stood with the movement to deinstitutionalize incarcerated youth and oversaw programs offering comprehensive services to court-involved and severely emotionally disturbed adolescents. And, as a professor in the UMass prisoners’ education program, for more than 12 years he taught inmates political science and criminology in jails and prisons across Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Away from the activist trenches, Bob deepened his love of the natural world first kindled as a child at a progressive summer camp. Friends and acquaintances regularly called on him to teach them about edible mushrooms or the finer points of beekeeping. To call him a master gardener would have been an understatement.
Bob Winston didn’t have a “career” as a social justice activist — it was a calling. His voluminous archives are now housed at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections at UMass Amherst. From peaking out about the climate crisis to international peace-building, they cover the depth and breadth of his activism, including his traveling on two missions to the Middle East with Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. He also championed the intersection of art and cultural change. (At Bob’s and Jan’s legendary Left-Wing Chicken barbecues — the last one was held just weeks before he died — as a benefit for the Performance Project.)
Bob was active in an array of causes across his lifetime, on both the micro and macro levels. He famously located and publicized the site of the annual spotted salamander migration on Henry Street in North Amherst, standing with a flashlight on the first warm, drizzly night in April to help the creatures cross safely to their mating ponds. I dubbed him “Commander Salamander.” Word spread, and soon he was appearing on “The Today Show,” Japanese television, and Australian radio. Interviewed at home in 1989, Bob shared that even if the role the salamander played was one of nature’s mysteries, nevertheless they deserved to be protected.
The same could be said of the young people he spent his life serving — troubled, sometimes violent, on the surface seeming to have no sense of purpose in life. For Bob, though, they had as much right to a purposeful life as the most gifted child. Bob knew they had much to teach us.
Bob Winston may be gone in body, but for me his spirit is still out there — in the rain, flashlight in hand, helping all of us cross darkened roads to safety.
Rob Okun (robokun50@gmail.com) of Amherst, syndicated by Peace Voice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male, a magazine that has been chronicling the profeminist men’s movement for more than 30 years. It is now published by the Canadian NGO, Next Gen Men. The Gazette published a column Okun wrote about Bob Winston, 39 years ago, in 1987.