Outsider's Reverie Author:Leslie Evans Leslie Evans grew up in a home steeped in the lore of ghostly apparitions, star charts, and the astral plane. His parents met at a séance conducted by a dead thirteenth century crusader. He called himself an outsider, on a quest for mystic experience. He organized a student political party with black nationalist ideologue Ron Karenga. — In 1961 h... more »e was recruited to the Socialist Workers Party, American followers of Leon Trotsky, where he served as managing editor of the Trotskyist Fourth International's news service, under Joseph Hansen, who had been Trotsky's secretary and had captured Trotsky's assassin. He was the group's China specialist, where he befriended Peng Shu-tse, who once outranked Mao Zedong in the Chinese Communist Party.
The SWP masterminded antiwar demonstrations that brought more protesters to Washington, D.C., than the entire city population. Evans spent three years on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, where he worked in the iron mines. In later years he was a web journalist for UCLA's International Institute, and carried out assignments for the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Along the way he:
* Organized an antinuclear rally from the home of the Pentagon's top nuclear war strategist;
* Was enlisted by SWP founder James P. Cannon to challenge what Cannon saw as the party's fatally self-isolating policy;
* Was put on the FBI's list for immediate detention in a national emergency;
* Worked with Jerry Rubin to build the May 1965 Berkeley teach-in of 30,000;
* Knew Lyndon LaRouche and watched as his organization careened into madness;
* Served for two years as production editor on a World Health Organization report documenting the failure to invest in research on diseases that ravage the third world;
* Restored a 1910 house in South Los Angeles that became a city Historic Cultural Monument, in the process probing deeply into the lives of its former residents, founders of the privately owned industrial city of Vernon.« less