The intention is to re-ignite the American Enlightenment by revealing the long obscured authentic basis of liberalism. Liberalism, that is, not in its recent meanings of unprincipled compromise and government largess, but as the fair-minded and ever emerging, rational alternative to authoritarianism.
             --Jon Read

Photo of the author Jon Read with Jerelle Kraus at the 3rd anti-Vietnam War troop-train demonstration at the Santa Fe tracks in Berkeley, California in August 1965.

In 1963 Jon Read was investigated by the FBI and called before HUAC (House un-American Activities Committee) with which he refused to co-operate. In the summer of 1965 he was central to the Vietnam Day Committee's troop train demonstrations. He was Field Secretary for the San Francisco office of the War Resistors League, 1965-68, and the author of the Free Cities Plan (a constructive alternative to the Vietnam War) published in the 1968 Jan/Feb. issue of The Humanist (for the record, the listing of Paul Salstrom as co-author was an editor's error). In Berkeley, in the spring of 1969, he and Mike Delacour were the two activists considered most instrumental in initiating People's Park.

Jon Read was raised in Inglewood California and received his bachelor's degree in landscape architecture from the University of California at Berkeley in January 1961. He has been self-employed as a landscape architect and landscape contractor doing design/build for most of his life. When 21 he visited three countries in Latin America while on Navy Reserve duty. He hitchhiked to Alaska the next summer, and went around the world on his own when 23. He worked on a Norwegian freighter to cross the Pacific, spent three months traveling overland in four countries in South East Asia, and six weeks in India, Nepal and Sikkim. In May and June of 1962 he visited Cuba with a friend, Jim Dey, and on his return played a leading role in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York during the October missile crisis.

He wrote "The Activist" column for the Berkeley Gazette and for the Daily Cal (the UC Berkeley student newspaper) during the anti-apartheid protests of 1983-84. In the mid 1980s he was director of an urban-forestry, community-development agency in Oakland California planting street trees with neighborhood volunteers in low-income neighborhoods. He organized 600 volunteers for the planting of 505 fifteen-gallon trees in one morning along the seven and a half mile length of Martin Luther King Jr. Way. He also worked for seven months as a substitute teacher in the Oakland School District (and loved it). He had a 14-year marriage and a 17 1/2 year common law marriage. His father was born in Dublin, his mother in Manchester. He lived in Greenwich Village in 1962, North Beach during the Beatnik era, the Haight-Ashbury during the Hippie era, and Cambridge Massachusetts in 1995-96. Jon Read presently lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona.