Among the more than 100 people in attendance were many members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party who worked with DeBerry over the course of his decades of political activity. DeBerry died March 24 at the age of 82.

A display of photos and news clippings depicted events in the history of the working class that DeBerry lived through and that impacted his political activity. These included the post-World War II strike wave, the rise of anticolonial revolutions in the l940s and ’50s, the Cuban Revolution, the development of the civil rights movement in the l950s, the anti-Vietnam War and Black rights movements in the l960s and early ’70s, and more recent struggles by working people against attacks by the ruling class.

Among the speakers was Julian Santana from Los Angeles, representing the Young Socialists. He described the large immigrant rights mobilizations in which he and many others at the meeting had recently participated.

“DeBerry is a role model for Young Socialists today,” said Santana. Pointing to DeBerry’s decision, at the age of 19, to go to the South in 1942 to help organize textile and other workers, Santana said, “He did this at a time when being a union organizer or outspoken in defense of civil rights could get you lynched.”

DeBerry’s early life was described by Tom Leonard, a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party’s activity in the trade union movement.

Born in l923 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, DeBerry was sent North to live with relatives and attend school in Chicago. His family hoped he would have better opportunities there than in the segregated Jim Crow South.  
 
Union battles
In his early 20s, DeBerry helped lead a successful walkout for higher pay at the large International Harvester plant near Chicago where he worked, Leonard related. Co-workers pressed him to run for shop steward. The union was dominated by members of the Stalinized Communist Party, who told him he had to join the CP if he wanted to be a shop steward. He decided to join.

As a member of the CP, DeBerry found himself increasingly critical of that party’s course of class collaboration and of its willingness to subordinate the fight for full equality for African-Americans to support for capitalist politicians. In 1953 he joined the Socialist Workers Party following a series of discussions with party leader Farrell Dobbs, who had been a central leader of the 1934 Teamsters strikes in Minneapolis.

Joel Britton, a member of the National Committee of the SWP, spoke about what it was like to join the branch of the SWP that had recruited DeBerry a decade earlier. Clifton and Carol DeBerry, also a member of the party, had moved to New York City in 1960 to take on party responsibilities there.

Britton said he learned about the struggles party members had taken part in, including union battles going back to the postwar strike wave. DeBerry and other SWP members were active in the NAACP and the Washington Park Forum, organizations that fought racist attacks and segregation in Chicago as well as supporting the southern civil rights movement.

Britton pointed to a display featuring a Militant article DeBerry wrote on the mass protest meeting he helped organize to condemn the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi.

That same year, Britton said, civil rights fighters launched the Montgomery bus boycott against segregation in public transportation. In response to an appeal from central boycott leader E.D. Nixon, DeBerry helped raise money for station wagons to Montgomery. He drove one down and stayed for a time with the Nixons.  
 
1964 SWP candidate for president
In 1964 DeBerry was the SWP’s candidate for U.S. president together with Ed Shaw for vice president. Britton described campaigning as part of Youth for DeBerry and Shaw. Many messages sent to the meeting were from individuals who were recruited or drawn closer to the Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party by that campaign.

Beverly Bernardo, a member of the Communist League in Canada, wrote of a 1964 meeting she attended for DeBerry at San Jose State College. She wasn’t convinced on the spot of what he said about the need for workers to break with the Democratic Party and form their own party, she wrote, but the meeting “opened my eyes to a revolutionary working-class perspective.”

“For DeBerry, the most important thing was building the party,” Sam Manuel told the meeting. Manuel, a SWP National Committee member and the Militant’s Washington correspondent, first met DeBerry at a 1969 Black Power conference at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a few months before joining the Young Socialist Alliance. He described how DeBerry was part of winning him to the party and training him and a whole layer of Black youth in revolutionary politics. “He had an attitude of seeing any task you take on through to the end,” said Manuel.

James Harris, who co-chaired the meeting along with Betsey Stone, pointed to the Socialist Workers Party’s efforts that DeBerry was part of to push forward developments toward independent working-class political action.

He read a message from Ken Morgan, who was a leader of the National Black Independent Political Party, formed at a 1980 convention of 1,500 in Philadelphia. Morgan wrote that DeBerry “is a shining example of a human being who worked with other dedicated toilers to change the miserable conditions that exist on this earth as Malcolm X so eloquently stated. His work should motivate all of us to continue his legacy and the work of the Socialist Workers Party.”

Norton Sandler and others noted in their messages that Clifton and Carol moved to the Bay Area in l970. Later, DeBerry, in his late 50s, joined the party’s turn to the industrial unions. He went to work as a painter at a Lockheed plant and was in the party’s Machinists union fraction.

SWP national secretary Jack Barnes was the final speaker. He said that DeBerry, who shouldered leadership responsibilities on the National Committee and then the Control Commission of the SWP, as well as on executive committees of branches, “never served on any without realizing that what he did, and how he worked, had consequences on others.”

DeBerry knew from direct experience, Barnes noted, that the civil rights movement did not conquer through nonviolence but by determined organization of workers like himself who were prepared to defend leaders and volunteers with serious organized defense, arms in hand. “There was not a night that Martin Luther King’s house was not defended by veterans, unionists, and sometimes little old ladies who had weapons in their purses or under a feathered hat,” Barnes said.

DeBerry was a major public figure in the anti-Vietnam War movement through the election campaigns he ran in, first against Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater in 1964 and then for mayor of New York in 1965. The middle-class left had supported Democratic president Johnson, who after his election immediately proceeded to escalate the war. The SWP campaign offered a clear working-class alternative to the twin capitalist parties of war and racism.

“DeBerry was a unique figure in communist history,” said Barnes. “He was the only cadre in the CP after World War II who we won who became a leader of the communist movement.” Many others were so embittered by their experience in the CP that they didn’t remain long in politics.

Barnes described the collaboration between DeBerry and Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs always considered DeBerry one of the handful of people who made it possible to link on a proletarian basis the oldest generation of the party with the new layers of youth coming around, Barnes said. He was an educator, always conscious of training new people and giving them an opportunity to take greater and greater responsibility, said Barnes.  
 
Collaboration with Malcolm X
DeBerry spent a lot of time talking to Malcolm X during the latter’s political evolution in the last year of his life, Barnes noted. “Malcolm’s growing conviction that he could function only by seeing things and acting on a world scale should not be taken for granted, given the narrowness of the movement he came out of,” he said. Malcolm was developing a way of judging people by their trajectory, their dependability and commitment to freedom by any means necessary. His growing convergence with revolutionary socialists “was something that both Farrell Dobbs and Clifton DeBerry took naturally,” growing out of their own experiences, said Barnes.

Among those in attendance were Carol DeBerry, Clifton's companion of more than 50 years, and their daughter Simone DeBerry. An excellent Vietnamese dinner preceded the meeting. A party-building collection for the SWP raised nearly $4,000 from those in attendance.  
 
 
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