1. Clinton Jencks was an American lifelong activist in labor and social justice causes, most famous for union organizing among New Mexico's miners, acting in the 1954 film Salt of the Earth, and enduring years of government prosecution for allegedly falsifying a Taft-Hartley non-communist affidavit.
Clinton Jencks's father was a mail carrier and his mother an active member of the Methodist Church.
Clinton Jencks graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1939, then moved to St Louis, where he became active in the Interfaith Youth Council and met his future wife, Virginia Derr.
Clinton Jencks served in the Air Force during World War II, and after his honorable discharge he worked at Asarco's Globe Smelter in Denver.
Clinton Jencks joined the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, a radical union of metal miners.
Clinton and Virginia Jencks helped consolidate a Chicano leadership of Mine-Mill Local 890 and encouraged miners' wives to participate in union affairs.
In October 1952, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee called on Clinton Jencks to testify in its hearings on communism in Mine-Mill, and on April 23,1953, during the furor over the production of Salt of the Earth, federal agents arrested him on charges of falsifying a noncommunist affidavit he had signed in 1950.
Clinton Jencks went to trial in federal court in January 1954 and was convicted, largely on the testimony of Harvey Matusow, a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In Jencks v United States, a landmark decision that later played a minor role in the Watergate prosecutions, the Court overturned Jencks's conviction and held that defense counsel had the right to see FBI reports.
Clinton Jencks found himself blacklisted from employment throughout the Southwest, but in the early 1960s, he won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Clinton Jencks completed his doctorate and taught at San Diego State University until his retirement.
Clinton Jencks continued his social activism as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America until his death on December 15,2005, at the age of 87.