Biography
Sidney Lipshires was a Communist Party member who joined the Communist Party in 1939 and in 1947 ran for city alderman in Springfield, Massachusetts on the Communist ticket. On May 29, 1956 — the day his daughter was born — he was arrested under the Smith Act for his Communist Party activities, and he went on to serve as executive secretary of the Massachusetts Smith Act Defendants Committee, publishing a pamphlet exposing the law and the tactics used against the accused. The case never reached trial: the Smith Act prosecution collapsed after the Supreme Court's 1957 Yates decision. Lipshires later left the Party, remained active in organized labor, earned a Ph.D., and taught history at Manchester Community College in Connecticut for some thirty years.
