Belden Fields

Belden Fields died on Saturday, November 30, 2024. He was born in Chicago on September 30, 1937, the only child of Irving and Dorothy Mendheim Fields. He leaves behind his wife, Jane Mohraz; his cousin, Arlyne Cohan; her sons, Jason and Evan Cohan; Jason's wife, Amy Cohan, and their children, Olivia and Jordan; his brother- and sister-in-law, James Anderson and Terry Anderson; and his nephew, Ryan Anderson, and Ryan's partner, Nickie Frezoco. He attended public schools in Chicago, graduating from Senn High School in 1956. He went to the University of Illinois at Chicago, then located on Navy Pier, finished his B.A. on the Urbana campus in 1960, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He was briefly a case worker for the Cook County Department of Aid at Cabrini Green Homes, a huge public housing complex in Chicago, where he learned important lessons about economic and social inequality and racism. He did his graduate studies in political science at Yale and, from 1963 to 1965, his dissertation research at the Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He received his PhD from Yale in 1968. He joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1965. He loved teaching and received teaching awards at the departmental, College of Liberal Arts, and all-campus levels. For many years, he supervised student internships in the British Parliament and the French National Assembly, as well as in other French institutions. In addition to many articles, essays, and conference papers, he authored four books: Student Politics in France; Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States; Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium; and, with Walter Feinberg, Education and Democratic Theory. He was a member of the editorial review board of The Human Rights Quarterly. Throughout his career at the university, he was a campus activist. In 1968, he co-founded the Citizens for Racial Justice and chaired its Committee on Non-Academic Employment, trying to get the U of I to hire more minorities in non-academic positions. On other committees, he worked to bring more minority students and professors to the university. He was also a member of the University Senate for many years. During that time, he served on the Senate Committee on Equal Opportunity. He also served on the Chancellor's Committee on Equal Opportunity for several years after his retirement in 2000. In the 1960s, he co-founded the Faculty Committee Against the War in Vietnam and worked tirelessly in opposition to the war in Vietnam. During the 1980s, he was one of the founders of the Faculty Committee on Central America, which then merged with the largely student group to become the Peoples Alliance on Central America, a solidarity group opposed to human rights violations and U.S. intervention in Central America. He supported the Sanctuary Movement aimed at protecting victims of oppression and forcing the U.S. government to uphold its own laws and international legal obligations. He was also an advocate for abolishing Chief Illiniwek as a university mascot. In that same period, he was a co-founder of the Union of Professional Employees, which later became the Campus Faculty Association. He served on its Executive Committee and as its delegate to the Champaign County AFL-CIO for over two decades. He was also a community activist. His activism centered on defending working people and the poor and combating racism. In the 1980s, he chaired the Champaign County AFL-CIO's Union Label Committee, which was a force in the lettuce and grape boycotts, and served as both treasurer and recording secretary of the county AFL-CIO. He was a co-founder of Socialist Forum, a democratic socialist discussion and action group. In the 1990s, he was co-chair of the local Living Wage Campaign and was a founding member of the Central Illinois Jobs with Justice, an outgrowth of the Living Wage Campaign. He was active in the Education for Employment's Summer Construction Task Force, designed to get more minority youth and young women interested in the construction trades. He worked with C-U Citizens for Peace and Justice, primarily on injustices in the criminal justice system and often represented CUCPJ at meetings of the Midwest Coalition on Human Rights. A member of the University YMCA, he served on its Friday Forum Committee for several years, and in 2004 received the Y's Frederick Miller Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service. In 2013, he received the Victor J. Stone Bill of Rights Award for a lifetime of service to the cause of civil liberties from the Champaign County chapter of the ACLU. He was co-founder and editor/facilitator/writer for the Public I, a community-based newspaper of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center that focuses on topics and voices often underrepresented in the dominant media. Throughout the years he has been a contributor to the News-Gazette's Commentary and Letters sections. After moving to Clark-Lindsey Village in 2020, he became an active member of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. He continued to attend zoom meetings of the U of I Philosophy Club and to write articles for the Public I until the end of his life. Above all, Belden was a people person. He loved traveling and meeting new people and maintained life-long relationships with friends both here and abroad. His greatest joy in life was being with people and working on social justice issues. And for pure pleasure, nothing gave him greater delight than preparing a good meal for friends and family. He was a man who enjoyed life to the fullest. Donations in his honor may be made to the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, Champaign County Health Care Consumers, the Champaign County ACLU, or a charity To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Belden Fields, please visit our floral store.