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Home > Spring 2012 > Richard Grossman ’65, Anti-Corporation Activist

Spring 2012

Obituaries

Richard Grossman ’65, Anti-Corporation Activist

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Spring 2012

PORTRAIT: ROBERT SHETTERLY, AMERICANSWHOTELLTHETRUTH.ORGPORTRAIT: ROBERT SHETTERLY, AMERICANSWHOTELLTHETRUTH.ORG

Richard Grossman ’65, a radical activist and ardent opponent of corporations’ influence on American politics, died on November 22, 2011. He was 68 and lived in West Hurley, N.Y.

Born on August 10, 1943, in Brooklyn, N.Y., Grossman majored in English at the College and was editor-in-chief of Jester. After graduation, he volunteered with the Peace Corps in the Philippines.

Grossman began his long and varied career as a community organizer and activist in the 1970s, when he founded Environmentalists for Full Employment, a group that worked to reconcile the interests of environmental activists and union members. In the 1980s, he worked and taught at the Highlander Research and Education Center, a social justice leadership school that trained Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and other Civil Rights movement leaders during the 1950s. He also was executive director of Greenpeace.

By the late 1980s, Grossman shifted his focus to opposing corporate personhood. He founded the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy in 1995, a group that “instigates democratic conversations” and challenges the authority of corporations to govern. He continued his advocacy work into his 60s, founding Frackbusters NY and the Sovereign People’s Action Network to draw attention to and criminalize the process of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in New York state.

Grossman also was a pro-lific author of books and pamphlets on legal history and corporations, publishing Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy: A Book of History & Strategy and Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation, among others.

His brother Lawrence ’52 says he saw Richard as a “passionate and uncompromising idealist who consistently took on huge world challenges that were too big to be dealt with by any one person.”

Grossman is survived by his wife, Mary L. MacArthur; daughter, Alyssa; brothers, Lawrence ’52 and Daniel; grandson; aunt, Shirley; and nieces, nephews and cousins.

Benjamin W. Gittelson ’15

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