Marshall Bloom

Early life and education Marshall Bloom was born in Denver, Colorado. He attended Amherst College and graduated in 1966. While there, he served as chairman of The Student publication and received the Samuel Bowles Prize for his accomplishments in journalism. During the summer of 1965, Bloom worked as a Montgomery, Alabama, correspondent for The Southern Courier, reporting on the Civil rights movement.

Bloom was one of the 20 Amherst graduates who walked out during their own commencement to protest the awarding of an honorary degree to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

Bloom achieved some national notoriety in England, where he attended the London School of Economics as a graduate student and was elected as president of its student union. He had a prominent role in the sit-ins and demonstrations there in the spring of 1967, protesting the appointment of Sir Walter Adams as the school's next director. Bloom was suspended and his suspension sparked further demonstrations.

Liberation News Service In the summer of 1967, Bloom was elected director of the United States Student Press Association (USSPA), which ran the Collegiate Press Service (CPS) news service. At an organizational meeting in Minneapolis in August, however, Bloom was purged from the USSPA because of his radical politics, which included a push to send student editors to Cuba and defy the U.S. travel ban. (Others thought that Bloom's purging was additionally because of what historian John McMillian refers to as his "effeminate demeanor").

The inaugural issue of the Liberation News Service, a mimeographed news packet, was sent in the summer of 1967. By February 1968, LNS was becoming the hub for alternative journalism in the United States, supplying the growing movement media with interpretive coverage of current events and reports on movement activities and the Sixties counterculture.

In 1968, the LNS moved to New York, and in August, an internal split developed. In August 1968, a successful fundraising event led to an ugly fight over control of the organization's funds. Bloom's intention was to abandon political activism in an urban setting, and supplant it with a Thoreauvian lifestyle. Aspiring to contribute to the counterculture phenomenon of rural communes in the late '60s, The charges were later dismissed.

For the next six months, Bloom published the "LNS of the New Age," with subscribers receiving rival news packets from LNS-Montague and LNS-New York. But Bloom's group was understaffed, underfunded, and isolated on a remote (and cold) country farm, and the project died when the ink froze in the mimeograph.

Death On November 1, 1969, Bloom committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. He was found dead in his car with the tailpipe connected to the window. Many theories have emerged as to why he killed himself; Allen Young and Amy Stevens have both suggested that it was because he was unhappily closeted.