BY JOHN SARGE
DETROIT - Helene Millington, a member of the Socialist
Workers Party for more than two decades, died here October 21
while hospitalized for heart surgery. She was 86 years old and
had been a member of the communist movement since 1975.
Helene was born in Hammond, Indiana, where her father worked at the Lever Brothers Soap Co.
Helene moved to Detroit in 1932 and spent most of her adult life in this area. She explained once that she was drawn here by the desire to escape the isolation and unpromising future offered to working people in small towns and rural areas like Hammond at the height of the depression. She enthusiastically solidarized with the labor battles out of which the industrial unions grew.
Like many women of her generation, Millington spent much of her adult life raising a family. She married and had four children, three daughters and a son.
Fighter against racism and segregation
With the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and
'60s, Helene was again drawn into political life, initially
with activists who organized themselves through their churches.
She supported the fight against Jim Crow segregation. As she
took part in the civil rights movement, she became acquainted
with many of the fighters in that movement.
One of her friends was civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. Millington planned to go to Mississippi in 1965 to take part in civil rights protests there, but became ill and had to cancel her plans. Helene agreed to watch Liuzzo's children so that Liuzzo could make the trip south. Liuzzo, who was white, was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama following a march of 25,000 people from Selma to Montgomery demanding voting rights for Blacks.
Helene became active in the movement against the war in Vietnam, and joined in support of the struggle of farm workers in California to build a union, the United Farm Workers. She was a regular participant in the grape boycott activities that took on a mass character in Detroit, a heavily union town.
Helene was later involved in a number of new struggles that erupted in the 1970s against racism and for Black rights. She took part in protests against cop brutality, including the fight against a Detroit police operation known as STRESS - an acronym the police use for the unit they named Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets - that targeted the Black community.
Millington also got involved in the fight to defend desegregation of the Boston schools. In 1974, as the result of a court suit won by the NAACP on behalf on Blacks demanding their right to an equal education, court-ordered busing of Black students to previously all white schools began. Racists mobilized to attack the school buses carrying Black youths entering South Boston. In May of 1975, Helene made the 11-hour bus trip to Boston, along with other activists from the Detroit area, in order to participate in a demonstration called by the NAACP and others to defend school desegregation. She was 62 years old.
That same year, 1975, Helene met the Socialist Workers Party. A party member she met on the bus trip to Boston showed her the Militant newspaper and struck up a conversation.
Through her life experiences Helene had concluded that all the particular acts of injustice she fought against were not really individual acts but a product of the capitalist system, and that it was that system that she needed to fight against. She was looking for an organization that could explain what had to be done to replace the system of dog-eat-dog competition with one based on human solidarity. In the pages of the Militant and in working with the cadre of the Socialist Workers Party, Helene found the answers she was searching for.
Not long after returning from the demonstration in Boston Helene became a regular attendee at the Militant Labor Forum. That summer she also attended a socialist summer school sponsored by the Detroit branch of the Socialist Workers Party. She became a member of the party not long afterwards.
Tireless promoter of the `Militant'
She embraced the Militant as her newspaper, and she
campaigned with a passion to win new readers to the paper. She
was a stalwart of circulation drives, for many years the top
subscription salesperson in Detroit and regularly one of the
highest subscription sellers in the country. Millington was
tireless. She would go door-to-door in working-class
communities, make many trips to college campuses in the city,
or climb in a car and head out into the region, wherever other
members of the party were going to introduce the paper to young
people or workers in struggle.
She developed a systematic approach to the neighborhood around her home, dividing it in small sections and going out door-to-door on her own to win new readers. Looking over the subscription list at the end of a subscription campaign, Helene's neighborhood would often have the highest subscription concentration in the city.
While distributing the paper or campaigning for the Socialist Workers candidates, other Militant supporters would often meet workers and young people who had bought copies from Millington. They would remark how much they appreciated the time Helene had taken to explain what the paper was all about.
The year Helene joined the movement, 1975, marked the beginning of an orientation by the Socialist Workers Party to new opportunities to do political work in the working class.
In this period one of the actions taken by the party to take advantage of these opportunities was to reorganize what were large city wide branches of the Socialist Workers Party and divide them up into smaller community branches to extend the party's reach. Helene was part of the process and became a member of the Northwest Detroit branch. She spearheaded the branch's effort to establish a presence at Herman Gardens, a sprawling public housing project, bringing residents to the Pathfinder Bookstore on Wyoming Ave. and to Militant Labor Forums held there.
As the capitalist class more directly turned their fire on the industrial working class and its basic form of organization, the unions, as workers responded to defend themselves, and as the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system became more apparent, the party made a turn to get the big majority of its members into the industrial unions. In Detroit, that meant building party fractions in the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers Union, and other unions.
Helene was 65. She had no industrial experience and could not become an active industrial union member, but that did not stop her from pitching in. She carried out regular sales of the Militant and Pathfinder books at the big auto assembly plants and later at meatpacking plants in the area.
Once Millington joined the communist movement, she was committed to the revolutionary perspective, and held it through good times and bad. She was inspired by the triumph of the Nicaraguan and Grenadian revolutions in 1979, and visited Cuba in 1980. That experience marked her political work for the rest of her life. She was a tireless supporter of the Cuban revolution, constantly pointing to the ability of the Cuban workers and peasants to take their destiny into their own hands and explaining that this is the only road for the U.S. working class. But she didn't hide from the set backs. When the Grenadian revolution was overthrown by a Stalinist clique in 1983, laying the basis for a U.S. invasion, Helene reached out to explain the real lesson of that defeat.
As part of her approach to building the revolutionary movement she spent many hours trying to win youth to the communist movement. Besides the hours discussing politics, she actively socialized with young people around the movement, often being the first on the dance floor and the last off at parties.
As her health worsened Millington was forced to shift her political activity. This coincided with steps the Detroit branch was taking to improve the local Pathfinder Bookstore, which included expanding the hours the store was open. Helene became a mainstay of that effort, taking regular shifts in the store, working to improve its appearance, and spending hours discussing politics and the world with visitors to the store. But she never let age or other considerations stand in her way when fights broke out. From defending abortion clinics in face of harassment to workers struggles, Helene was there. When 2,500 newspaper workers struck the Detroit News and Free Press in 1995, she joined their picket lines in all kinds of weather.
Helene was an active builder of the party even after worsening health forced her to retire from day-to-day participation in the Socialist Workers Party. She never stopped fighting to expand the influence of the movement, even among others in the retirement community where she lived. As recently as August she brought one of her neighbors to a Militant Labor Forum.