He was active in causes such as preventing censorship, ending racial segregation and stopping the Vietnam war, while gaining distinction in his professional career.
[1] He co-founded the Untide Press in 1943 with poet William Everson, architect and printer Kemper Nomland and actor Kermit Sheets.
The faculty of L.A. State College elected him to the Academic Senate, the first librarian to serve on that body.
While he was editor of the California Librarian, the magazine earned the H. W. Wilson Library Periodical Award for the best state or regional journal.
[3] In California he chaired the Librarian Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee which opposed censorship efforts of lawmakers, initiated the Fiske study of self-censorship in school libraries, and joined the national journals in their efforts to support the desegregation of public libraries in the South.