Question. You referred to some of the important developments in the civil rights struggles that were taking place when you joined the communist movement in Chicago in 1962 and later. You mentioned the campaign to defend Robert F. Williams and others in Monroe, North Carolina, where Black rights fighters had organized armed self-defense of their community against racist thugs and night riders. As you explained, socialists took part in the defense campaign for Williams, who had left the country to avoid arrest on FBI frame-up charges of kidnapping. Could you say more about your activity in the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance during these and other events in the Black liberation struggle?

Answer. In Chicago during those years, our movement helped organize speaking engagements for fighters from Monroe to tell their story. This was part of the defense campaign, not only for Robert Williams, who by then was in exile in Cuba, but for others who faced frame-up charges. We organized meetings on campuses and other public events.

In the fall of 1962 I helped organize a visit to Chicago by William Worthy, a journalist for the Baltimore Afro-American and an outspoken advocate of Black rights. He was sentenced to jail after defying Washington’s bans on travel to China and Cuba. Following his conviction he spoke in a number of cities to publicize his case.

We also worked with young supporters of Worthy in Washington, D.C., to organize a demonstration outside a ceremony in which the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith gave a civil liberties award to Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general. The students used the occasion to win support for Worthy’s fight. Students were at the beginning of organizing what led, on a mass scale, to the establishment of Black student unions on campuses across the country. It was a time when there were still no Black Studies departments.  
 
Self-defense of Black communities
In the spring of 1963 I traveled to Atlanta to a gathering of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee —SNCC—as part of a delegation of young socialists from Chicago. Two white guys and a Black woman driving through the South at that time was quite a head-turner—I thought some of those heads were going to snap off!

In early 1965 I visited McComb, Mississippi, where there had been some of the heaviest Ku Klux Klan bombing attacks against the civil rights movement. I spoke with young Black rights fighters there who explained how they would organize, all through the night, to have an armed guard on at least one porch on every block of the Black community to deter the Klan from driving through. This example of armed self-defense was not reported in the media generally, but I covered it for the Militant at the time.

From there I went to Jackson, Mississippi, where the Freedom Democratic Party held a one-day convention.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed by Blacks in that state who had been excluded from the Democratic Party’s segregated delegate selection process. Rebuffed at the national convention in its challenge to the “regular” Mississippi delegates, the group, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, announced its own candidates in the November 1964 elections. The gathering I attended, on February 21, was adjourned following the announcement that Malcolm X had just been assassinated in New York.

In Montgomery, Alabama, I visited E.D. Nixon, a seasoned leader of the NAACP and of a local of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters who had been a central initiator of the bus boycott there in 1955-56. Black working people and youth in that city boycotted the buses because of segregationist policies that forced Blacks to give up bus seats to whites. In the years following that successful battle the civil rights movement grew into the massive struggle that overthrew the system of legal segregation in the South known as Jim Crow.

I met with Nixon in his living room at a time when this fight was still on. He explained how he and other working-class leaders of the bus boycott had persuaded a new minister in the area, the young Rev. Martin Luther King to stand at the head of the movement. They needed a preacher to be most effective in this fight and the older and more established ones, he said, were under many pressures. Much of the media coverage of these events has implied that Rosa Parks—who had refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested—acted simply as an individual. But she had been E.D. Nixon’s secretary and her action took place in the context of a broader fight.

E.D. Nixon was an outstanding example of the working-class base of the Southern civil rights movement and the savvy of its leadership.

From speaking with Farrell Dobbs and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party I had learned that SWP members had worked within their unions to get station wagons donated in response to an appeal from the bus boycott movement in Montgomery. Farrell had driven the first of many station wagons to Montgomery, collaborated with Nixon, and spoke out in support of the boycott as the party’s presidential candidate in 1956.

Q. Can you say something about your participation in the protests against the “Willis Wagons” in Chicago?

A. In 1963-64 there were protests against the school board because of the temporary, trailer-type buildings that were used to supplement the over-crowded public schools in Chicago. Those buildings were called “Willis Wagons”—Willis was the school superintendent. The Militant reported that 225,000 people took part in a school boycott there, which we supported, of course. It was the largest school boycott up to that point, although it would soon be exceeded by one in New York.

I recall joining in protests at one of the sites where the “Willis Wagons” were being used and participated in one demonstration of 75,000 that filled Soldier Field, the stadium of the Chicago Bears. It was the largest demonstration I had been at. The march was in solidarity with the struggle against Jim Crow in the South but many who joined in from the big South and West side Black communities had the Willis Wagons, Chicago’s segregated housing, schools, and job market on their minds as well.

Q. You mentioned watching Malcolm X on the late-night TV show hosted by Irv Kupcinet in 1962 and the impact he had on you. Were there other occasions when you met or heard Malcolm?

A. I had a brief encounter as I was selling the Militant at the Chicago opera house where Malcolm X was appearing in a debate. We didn’t have tickets to go in, so we were in the foyer. Malcolm, who was with Kupcinet, walked into the building near where a couple of us were hawking the Militant. Malcolm greeted us and told Kup, “It’s a good paper. You should buy it.” My recollection is that he did.

In November 1963 I attended the big public meeting in Detroit where Malcolm spoke the weekend of the Grassroots Leadership Conference. The talk he gave became known as the “Message to the Grass Roots”—it’s published in Malcolm X Speaks.

The response of the audience to Malcolm’s speech had a big impact on me. There were 700-800 people there, mostly workers, overwhelmingly Black. Seeing working people in those numbers cheer Malcolm’s staunch presentation of his revolutionary views—his support for the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the colonial revolution, and his revolutionary opposition to the rulers in this country—convinced me totally of the revolutionary potential of the working class in the United States. I was already convinced of this intellectually, from reading about what the Cuban workers and farmers had accomplished. But this experience had a deeper impact than just reading.

Q. You are listed on the ballot as a “retired meat packer.” From your campaign literature it’s clear you have been involved in the labor movement for many years. What has been your activity in the unions?

A. For the recall election, candidates were allowed three words to designate their occupation or vocation. “Retired meat packer” was my second choice, given the “nonpartisan” provisions of the election code. I had chosen “A socialist worker,” but that designation was not allowed by the election authorities, among other reasons because it’s similar to the name of a party—my party. So I chose “Retired meat packer.”

It’s worth noting that there is a lot of interest among reporters in finding out my views as a retired meat packer.

In recent years I was part of a fight by members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union at the American Meatpacking Corp. in Chicago, where I worked, against the illegal shutdown of that plant in 2001. I was one of the dozen named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against AMPAC. A judge denied our claim, but we made our mark, hitting the company for what it had done.

Earlier, I was an oil worker at two refineries in Southern California for more than 10 years, and an active member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers [OCAW].  
 
Union solidarity
In the 1980s and early 1990s, I worked with others in my union to organize public meetings in solidarity with the South African liberation struggle. I also collaborated with other members of my union locals to build actions opposing U.S. military intervention in Central America.

When I ran for mayor of Los Angeles as the Socialist Workers candidate in 1989, we had a very successful campaign forum at my union hall. The convener of that meeting was one of my co-workers at the Chevron refinery and the elected head of the OCAW unit at Chevron.

As an active member of my local I went to Austin, Minnesota, to promote solidarity with the meat packers striking Hormel during the 1985-86 walkout by members of Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. After visiting their picket line, I helped organize to get union fighters from P-9 to speak before my local on several occasions to win support for their battle.

I also worked with other OCAW members to take part in actions in support of the strikes in 1989-91 by members of the Machinists union against Eastern Airlines and by the United Mine Workers against Pittston Coal.

Q. To return to a point we began the interview with, the leading Democratic and Republican candidates—Cruz Bustamante and Arnold Schwarzenegger—have both dismissed accusations by their critics about their past as “follies of youth.”

As we discussed, for example, right-wing commentators and politicians have attacked Bustamante for having been a member of the Chicano student group MEChA, which they portray as radical. You have defended MEChA against the slanderous accusation that it was “violent” and racist” [see last week’s issue].

In trying to fend off these criticisms, Bustamante has said that his friends who were student activists during his college days are now professionals who are “mainstream” and doing well. What about you?

A. I remember that in October 1968, after right-wing Cuban-Americans set off a bomb at the SWP headquarters in Los Angeles, we immediately held a press conference. We told the press we weren’t going to be intimidated. We said we were not going to back away from our defense of the Cuban Revolution. We were not going to give up our determination to emulate the example of Cuban revolutionaries by building a movement that could lead a revolution of workers and farmers in the United States.

I retain these communist views today. And I’m proud of the revolutionary activities I was involved in during my youth and that I continue to be involved in.

Many of the people who were my comrades-in-arms in those years remain so today. We built a movement, an organization. My party, the Socialist Workers Party, has a continuity going back to the October 1917 Russian Revolution and to the founding of the modern communist movement in 1847. We have kept in print an arsenal of literature containing the political lessons of this movement that remain as valid today as when they were first published.

Unlike other candidates in the California governor’s race, my comrades are not professionals. They are professional revolutionaries. And I’m proud of that.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist Workers candidate for California governor addresses U.S. soldiers abroad
Vote Socialist Workers!
‘I see two Californias: that of the workers, that of the bosses’
California channel interviews Joel Britton  
 
 
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