George Philip Rawick (December 8, 1929 – June 27, 1990) was an American academic, historian, and socialist, best known for his editorship of a 41-volume set of oral histories of former slaves, titled The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Rawick revolutionized the study of slavery in the 1970s with his work, as he viewed the testimony of former slaves to be as serious as documentary left by slaveholders. As a white Jewish American, his support of the Black freedom movement was unique. During his teenage years, he witnessed the systematic extermination of Jewish people by the Nazi regime in World War II. These events initially drew Rawick to Communist politics. His involvement in various leftist groups led him to travel to London, to work with C. L. R. James. In London he met with many prominent Black intellectuals, which caused him to study more about race and slavery. Biography Rawick was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, and died in 1990 in St. Louis, Missouri. He grew up in a community of first and second generation Jewish Americans. He was educated in the New York City public schools and graduated with a bachelor's degree at Oberlin College. Rawick became more invested in civil rights activism while at Oberlin College. Later in his studies at the university he started to feel betrayed by the institution, as he believed they had thrown away their abolitionist heritage by suppressing a local Black community. He subsequently earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He studied under Professor Merle Curti, who was one of the leading American historians of the era. Rawick completed his dissertation, The New Deal and Youth: The Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and the American Youth Congress, in 1957: in that work, he contrasted the conservative, authoritarian, Army-run Civilian Conservation Corps with the leftist, democratically run National Youth Administration, which allowed him to discuss the often contradictory impulses underlying the New Deal generally. Over his long career in academia, Rawick taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Wayne State University, State University of New York, the University of Chicago, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, among others. Rawick held brief postings at Harvard University and Cornell University. Rawick produced very little academic writing in these positions, as he faced criticism from anti-radicals at the upper levels of academia because of his association with Marxist ideology.