Martin Bauml Duberman (born August 6, 1930) is an American historian, playwright, and gay-rights activist. He is Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York and was the founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. He has authored over twenty books including James Russell Lowell (a National Book Award finalist), Paul Robeson, Stonewall, and the memoir Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey. He is also a neoabolitionist scholar, as evidenced by his edited collection of essays, The Antislavery Vanguard. Reputedly, his play In White America won the Vernon Rice/Drama Desk Award for Best Off-Broadway Production in 1963.
In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[1] Around the same time, he wrote an article in the Partisan Review "criticiz[ing] SNCC and CORE for being 'anarchists,' for rejecting the authority of the state, for insisting that community be voluntary, and for stressing, along with SDS, participatory instead of representative democracy."[2] He wrote that:[2]
SNCC and CORE, like the Anarchists, talk increasingly of the supreme importance of the individual. They do so, paradoxically, in a rhetoric strongly reminiscent of that long associated with the right. It could be Herbert Hoover . . . but it is in fact Rap Brown who now reiterates the Negro's need to stand on his own two feet, to make his own decisions, to develop self-reliance and a sense of self-worth. SNCC may be scornful of present-day liberals and 'statism,' but it seems hardly to realize that the laissez-faire rhetoric it prefers derives almost verbatim from the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill.
In 2007, Duberman published The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, a biography of the man behind George Balanchine's New York City Ballet.