Born into a farm family in southern Indiana in 1949, Schenk joined the Young Socialist Alliance, the forerunner of today's Young Socialists, in the early 1970s and the Socialist Workers Party several years later. Schenk was the party's candidate for Congress in Colorado in 1976, where she had moved to build the YSA and party in the midst of the struggle for Chicano liberation and for bilingual education, as well as the nationwide fight to defend school desegregation and busing.

Schenk held a number of industrial jobs, working together with other party members to join proletarian struggles and discuss socialism with co-workers. As a sewing machine operator in Newark in 1984, Schenk was the Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Senate. While working at an auto parts plant in Des Moines, Iowa, she campaigned against imperialism and its war against the people of Iraq in 1990-91. She was well known for her socialist views among co-workers and ran for school board in the midst of the war.

On Jan. 18, 1991, two days after Washington began its six-week bombing campaign against the Iraqi people, she and another co-worker were called into company offices where two agents from the U.S. Secret Service and the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigations tried to interrogate them. Schenk and her co-worker refused to submit to the questioning, standing up to intimidation by the cops who told them, "You're not going anywhere."

Schenk used her industrial skills and political capacities as a volunteer in the Pathfinder printshop for five years, running printing equipment and serving as a bookkeeper.

She took on leadership responsibility for party branches, serving on branch executive committees and as branch organizer. Schenk helped to lead several major party defense efforts, including the fight to stop the U.S. government from deporting Hector Marroquín, a party member who came to the United States following student protests he participated in that were brutally suppressed by the Mexican government. She was also a leader of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee in Des Moines, which fought against a frame-up of Curtis, a meat packer and SWP member who was active in struggles of working people in the area.

The October 28 meeting will be held at the Dag Hammarskjold Room, 6th Floor, at 420 West 118th St. at Amsterdam Ave., on the Columbia University campus. It is sponsored by the New York and Newark branches of the Socialist Workers Party.

There will be a reception at 1:00 p.m. followed by the meeting at 2:00 p.m. Messages honoring Priscilla Schenk's contributions to building the communist movement can be sent to the Newark Socialist Workers Party at Riverfront Plaza, P.O. Box 200117, Newark, New Jersey, 07102-0302; by fax: 973-643-3342; or e-mail: swpnewark@yahoo.com.  
 
 
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