I was saddened to read in the Yale Daily News of the death of labor historian David Montgomery, whose courses in 19th- and 20th-century labor history I took as a freshman.

Montgomery joined Yale’s History Department in 1979 after a 14-year career in the University of Pittsburgh’s history department, which he chaired from 1973 to 1976. Before entering academia, Montgomery organized labor protests for unions in St. Paul during the McCarthy era, and was ultimately blacklisted by a number of industrial companies in Minnesota for those efforts. Montgomery continued to support labor unions during his tenure at Yale, and helped organize members of the University’s Locals 34 and 35 in the 1984 Yale clerical workers strike.

That description doesn’t come close to capturing Montgomery’s passion. He believed deeply in the dignity of labor and the labor movement, and he conveyed his excitement about the history of American labor through intense, gripping lectures, occasionally punctuated by Montgomery bursting into labor work songs and protest chants. But Montgomery wasn’t just a cheerleader; he was a serious scholar, and these were quite difficult courses. (I didn’t do very well in them, for what that’s worth.)

The Times says this of Montgomery:

Known as a shy and humble man who came alive behind a lectern or on a soapbox, Mr. Montgomery won teaching awards at both Pittsburgh and Yale, where he gained local fame for, among other things, actively supporting the campus clerical workers in their 1984 strike.

“He was part stump speaker, part academic, part public intellectual,” said Shelton Stromquist, a professor of labor history at the University of Iowa who was Mr. Montgomery’s student at Pitt in the 1970s. “David was never shy about demonstrating the relationship between his scholarship and activist commitment. The same is true of a lot of us.”

I could never think of David Montgomery as shy; I never saw him away from the lecture hall, where he was so enamored of his material, so completely convinced of its import and, I think you could say, its beauty, that he lost himself in it entirely; he became a man transformed. I had never had a professor so passionate about a subject so foreign to me (I was 17 at the time).

David Montgomery really initiated whatever intellectual growth I had at Yale, and made me conscious of a world of workers I’d never previously given much thought to. I’ll always be grateful to him for that, and I am sorry to hear of his passing.