Abby London Crawford, the widow of Marc Crawford, is a teacher and an accomplished photographer, whose work has appeared in the national and radical press. Marc Crawford, a journalist, civil rights activists and university teacher, collaborated with William Loren Katz on The Lincoln Brigade: A Picture History (Atheneum, 1989). In the course of preparing that book, and for several years afterward, Marc and Abby Crawford attended veterans' gatherings in the U.S. and Spain, and she documented those events in hundreds of photographs. She had been specially invited by the veterans to photograph their 1986 reunion for a planned Brigade history for young people, a project that was eventually transformed, with the enthusiastic support of Brigade Commander, Steve Nelson, into the Crawford-Katz pictorial history. After Marc Crawford's death in 1996, Abby Crawford continued to be involved with the Lincoln veterans, and to record their recent history in photographs.
After many years as a classroom teacher, Abby Crawford developed a special Music Appreciation/Choral Singing/Language Arts program at the Ella Baker School. With her friend Frances Patai, a writer who documented women's participation in the volunteer medical services during the Spanish Civil War, she sang in the New York City Labor Chorus.
From the guide to the Marc Crawford and Abby London Crawford Photographs, 1987-1998, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)
