Georgakas, Dan

GEORGAKAS, DAN (1938-2021). A prolific Greek American scholar, poet and activist, Georgakas was also a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. Born and raised in Detroit, the child of Greek immigrants, Georgakas became interested in socialist causes as a teen, thanks to the civil rights movement but equally to the Militant Labor Forum (of the Socialist Workers Party) and its somewhat eclectic combination of radical speakers.

Georgakas began writing poetry as a teen, an inclination that would lead him in time to publishing poetry books and other books on a variety of topics, some with his own imprint, Smyrna Press. By his early twenties, he came to view his Greek heritage as unique and important to him, something to sustain his scholarly as well as wider cultural and political work.

By the middle 1960s, Georgakas had moved to the first of many locations within Greater New York. An avant-gardist by his own lights, he joined with artist-poet and leftwing provocateur Ben Morea in creating the political art group Black Mask. This non-organization, heavily anarchist in tone, located its milieu in the bubbling youth culture of the Lower East Side. He also connected himself, in 1968, to the new Students for a Democratic Society magazine, Radical America, to which he would supply a continuing series of poems (mostly by Black authors he had befriended), cultural documents of various kinds, and material from the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in Detroit.

Georgakas helped lead the US support of the 1960s Greek anti-Junta movement, Demokratia, and was among the leading speakers at the UN protest event of 1967. He rallied Greek Americans around the US through several tours, speaking on campuses and Greek American community centers. For more than fifty years, he worked in various capacities for the Pella Press, publishers of Greek and Greek American works.

During the 1970s, Georgakas joined the editorial board of the film magazine Cineaste, working closely with lead editor Gary Crowdus, and remained an editor of the magazine for most of the rest of his life. He attended and wrote about film festivals across the world and was often seen commentating on films, making appearances on the History Channel, the Canadian Broadcasting System, the Voice of America, and Greek National Television. Meanwhile, he continued his activity among Greek Americans, including columns for Greek language newspapers, participation in forums and events hosting Greek government legations in New York, and writing his own versions of Greek American labor and Left history. With the first edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990) he became an indispensable co-editor, contacting old-timers, and writing many entries.

In later years, Georgakas taught at Empire State University in New York. He also served as Director of the Greek American Studies Project at the Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queens College, CUNY and became editor of the American Journal of Contemporary Hellenic Issues. He was also a columnist for the Greek American publication, The National Herald, for many years.

Georgakas, Dan. Growing Up Greek and American in the Motor City. New York: Pella Press, 2006.
Documentary film: Dan Georgakas: A Diaspora Rebel (2015), by Kostas Vakkas.”

Dan Georgakas Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. http://archives.wayne.edu/repositories/2/resources/1140