Staughton Lynd, the longtime peace and civil rights activist, lawyer and author, has died at the age of 92. In the early 1960s, Lynd taught alongside his friend Howard Zinn at Spelman College in Atlanta and served as director of the SNCC Freedom Schools of Mississippi. He was a leading early critic of the Vietnam War. The State Department stripped him of his passport after he traveled to North Vietnam in 1965. Staughton Lynd was a conscientious objector during the Korean War and later supported U.S. soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq. He appeared on Democracy Now! in 2006.

Staughton Lynd: “The logic of those precedents is that a soldier in Iraq or, like Lieutenant Ehren Watada, under orders to be deployed to Iraq can say, 'I consider this to be a war crime. Even if my superiors tell me something different, I am obliged to use my own judgment, my own conscience. And so I say no.'”