Elliot Linzer Papers

Elliot Linzer was born on July 11, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York, but his family later moved to Rosedale in Queens. By the time Linzer entered high school, he had become interested in pacifist and civil rights activism, and joined the War Resisters League at age 14. The press coverage of the 1961 Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C. to Montgomery, Alabama left a strong impression on Linzer.

Upon enrolling at Queens College as an engineering student in August 1963, he joined the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the organization which initiated the Freedom Ride. He had already participated in some CORE activities the previous summer, attending lectures by CORE officers and selling tickets to a CORE benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.

Linzer's involvement with CORE coincided with the organization's zenith in power and membership, a period of rapid expansion in the wake of the 1962 Freedom Ride through the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. Since he graduated early from high school, Linzer was just a few months too young to meet the criteria for involvement with Freedom Summer Project, which provided voter registration services to disenfranchised southern Blacks. However, Linzer did manage a Freedom School in St. Alban's, Queens during a CORE-sponsored school boycott in early 1964. Although he joined CORE through the Queens College chapter, Linzer participated in a number of other chapters, most notably South Jamaica CORE.

Linzer never held office but he worked as a staff member for the March of Washington of 1963, which was sponsored by CORE and other civil rights organizations. His CORE activities included frequent attendance on picket lines, and publicity tasks such as the creation of flyers and handbills for events, pickets, and meetings.

In 1967, Linzer suspended his studies at Queens College and enrolled in an interdisciplinary sociology program at the New School for Social Research. He obtained his B.A. from the New School in 1969 and began working on a Ph.D. in Sociology. Later he received an M.A. in Sociology from Queens College. During his graduate education, he worked as a freelance bibliographic indexer and indexing continues to be his livelihood. He currently lives in Flushing, New York.