Following are excerpts from several of the dozen messages that were sent to the Oakland meeting celebrating the life of Robert DesVerney.
I met Bob at the end of 1949 when the Socialist Workers Party set up a youth branch in New York City. He was about 18 years old at the time and I believe a pre-med student for a while. In a very short time he dropped those plans for the role of a revolutionist, which he sustained for the rest of his life....
Bob was drafted into the army as part of a wide draft of young people to fight U.S. imperialism's war in Korea. We had a going away party for him in the basement of a new member's home. At that moment we were in the process of recruiting about a dozen young people who were all in a Stalinist youth club in Astoria, Queens. I recall that he was in a cheerful mood and not at all depressed about being drafted. And as I later discovered when I, as the organizer of the branch, received numerous letters from him that he felt that the experiences he was going through were important to him....
He came back in good shape and returned to being an active and dependable member of the branch. He had the ability of gathering information on the latest developments in the Black struggle. He attended meetings of other groups and sensed shifts in their positions, which was why he could later play such a leading role in the party's understanding of Black nationalism and Malcolm X.
Ethel Lobman
New York, NY
It was in 1966 that I first encountered Bob. A carload of us had driven up from Georgia to Tennessee for a gathering of activists from the new antiwar committees that had been springing up around the South. In the course of the meeting, a tall, thin Black man with striking sharp features and green eyes took the floor and announced he was from the Harlem Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
At the time, Harlem stood as something of a symbol of Black militancy and self-confidence, and we all listened with great interest as he began to speak in a distinctive New York accent. The young people in the room were overwhelmingly white, a reflection of the composition of the antiwar movement at that stage. I'm sure it occurred to most of us that this meeting was even more important than we thought if this Black leader had come so far to offer advice and assistance. He said that many in Harlem were becoming aware of the war and they were against it. As far as they were concerned, their enemy was not in Vietnam but right here.
Later, as I was talking with members of the Young Socialist Alliance who had also come down for the meeting (there were then no YSAers or Socialist Workers Party members in the deep South), it was suggested that I might already know the man from Harlem - who had given his name as Robert DesVerney - as Robert Vernon, his pen name. And indeed I knew the name well. The previous year, a friend had sent me a copy of "The Black Ghetto." It had been an eye-opener, enabling me to understand for the first time what was happening in the big cities of the North....
Like anybody else who ever knew Bob, I was often awed by the breadth of his knowledge. The ruling class likes to think they have a monopoly on learning. Bob was among many I was to meet in the SWP who proved them wrong. In truth, they haven't a clue about the fundamental forces at work in the world today and where it's all taking them. By becoming part of a party that is a product of the history and lessons of working class struggles, Bob - through word and deed - was able to make a contribution of his own, one that will be well remembered. I join you today in celebrating his life.
Nelson Blackstock
Los Angeles
I was the organizer of the Oakland branch executive committee while Bob DesVerney was a member of the branch [in the mid-1980s]....
When the appeal was made for help with translation for the first volume of the Comintern series (Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International-Documents, 1907-1916; The Preparatory Years) Bob came to life with the joy of helping...He felt strongly that this series was a big priority for the party to reconquer our knowledge of our place in history....
Bob was also determined to do his weekly plant gate sale even in the rain. I was most often his sales partner and had to brave all kinds of obstacles because we would do that sale no matter what. Bob even had backup places for us to go to if the shift at the oil refinery was working late and the workers weren't there when we were. He was working at the post office and knew where workers would go to hang out....So we would go there and talk politics with a few workers and sell the Militant....
[Bob] really loved to be around the young people coming into the socialist movement. A couple of young YSAers lived next door to Bob and whenever some of us would get together over there Bob would come out from under his books to sit out and mostly listen. He'd want to know what the young folks were cooking up. He really believed in us and the future.
Miesa Patterson-Zarate
Atlanta, Georgia