[1] He has worked with the Congress of Racial Equality, Newark Community Union Project, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, the United Automobile Workers (including eight years on auto assembly lines) and the New Directions Movement.
[2] He was arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs[3][4] and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were fired through a window of the Cambridge police headquarters on November 8, 1969.
[6][7] Mann has been credited for helping to shape the environmental justice movement in the U.S.[8] He founded the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, California and has been its director for 25 years.
In addition, Mann is founder and co-chair of the Bus Riders Union, which sued the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for what it called “transit racism”, resulting in a precedent-setting civil rights lawsuit, Labor Community Strategy Center et al. v.
Eric Mann was born December 4, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, into a Jewish home rooted in what he described as "anti-fascist, working class, pro-union, pro-'Negro', internationalist, and socialist traditions."
Longtime Black and Latino porters had been refused job promotions; the workers were willing to lead the fight but wanted CORE's organizational support.
[2] Mann and 20 others were arrested in September 1969 for participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA), which the Revolutionary Youth Movement saw as a university-sponsored institution for counter-insurgency.
They wound up leaving knowing they had a tiger by the tail!”[26] While at GM, Mann was active in the New Directions Movement, a national UAW reform group founded by Jerry Tucker in 1986.
[31] According to reviewer Barry Commoner, Mann's 1992 book L.A.’s Lethal Air, documented how class, race, and gender were the unspoken categories of environmental injustice.
[33] This document linked transportation, the environment, and unemployment, advocating for rebuilding the manufacturing sector through “environmentally-sound production of technologies, focusing on solar electricity, non-polluting, prefabricated housing materials, electric car components, and public transportation vehicles, both buses and trains”—and called for "the social justice state not the police state".
[34] Prompted by the LCSC's efforts, the South Coast Air Quality Management District implemented a “right to know” statute in which community residents were given information about the chemicals they were exposed to and the corporations that were producing them.
[44] In the early 2000s, Mann helped lead the Community Rights Campaign which took up the cause of serving the transportation needs of minority students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which it linked with "transit racism".
This campaign produced numerous reports and helped lead to the rolling back of truancy tickets and charges of willful defiance, as maintained in Mann's disquisition Black, Brown, and Overpoliced in 2014.
According to Mann, it opposes privatization, pollution, policing and corporate interests and proposes cities putting the Black and Latino working class as its core.