Vol. 73/No. 44      November 16, 2009

Following a well-prepared dinner, Lea Sherman, on behalf of the SWP branch in San Francisco, welcomed those attending. Paul Mailhot, a member of the SWP National Committee, chaired and gave extended remarks.

“In paying tribute to some 50 years of Mary’s life spent participating in the class struggle and building the Socialist Workers Party, we also pay tribute to the party she joined in 1945 and then rejoined in 1961,” Mailhot said.

In 1945, at age 21 Lipman joined a party that “was deeply involved in the class struggle,” Mailhot said. The party had fought against the second imperialist slaughter leading up to and during the war. Its leaders were just getting out of jail after being locked up for 18 months because of the party’s principled stand and its working-class activity. The party and its members in the auto, steel, electrical, and other unions were then part of “the sweeping tide of labor revolt” in the aftermath of World War II.

Later as revolutionary developments in Western Europe and other parts of the world were derailed by Stalinist parties that supported Moscow’s accommodation to imperialism, and as U.S. capitalism established its dominance in the world coming out of the war, a period of reaction set in, Mailhot said. Most union leaders in this country succumbed to the relative economic prosperity and the McCarthyite witch hunt. In the early 1950s, Lipman and her husband Stanley, who had been in the SWP since its founding in 1938, resigned.  
 
Cuban Revolution
In 1961 Lipman rejoined the party, attracted by the SWP’s work to defend the Cuban Revolution and by its participation in the mass proletarian-led struggle for Black civil rights.

Also speaking at the meeting, Jacob Perasso, a member of the SWP National Committee, described how Lipman along with other party members helped to recruit a layer of students, including himself, to the Young Socialists at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1998 the Young Socialists helped organize a protest at the campus in opposition to Proposition 227, which sought to eliminate bilingual education in California. And in 1999 they joined with other student groups and academic departments to organize a meeting on campus to hear two youths from Cuba who were touring the country.

Perasso said Lipman “kept up a consistent propaganda campaign” in Santa Cruz, selling the Militant and Pathfinder literature. She regularly invited young people to her home for informal discussion and snacks. “We browsed her library, and she never hesitated to lend us any book that we wanted to read unless she was reading it,” Perasso added.

Mailhot said he first got to know Lipman in 1974 in Boston. That year racist forces began mobilizing against the busing of Black students to all-white schools in the city. These mobilizations, organized out of city hall by well-known Democratic Party politicians, included violent attacks on Black students and other Blacks.  
 
Boston busing fight
To get out the facts about this fight, the Militant printed an expanded edition to explain the issues and make clear that the racists didn’t own the streets of Boston. Mailhot recalled the Boston SWP branch ordered 4,500 copies of the Militant one week and fanned out across the city to get the truth out about the racist violence and the need to desegregate Boston schools.

This exemplary propaganda campaign helped lay the basis for the party’s work with others to build the teach-ins, picket lines, and demonstrations that helped to turn back the racist assault against busing.

Nan Bailey, a Socialist Workers Party member who was a leader of that fight, said in her message to the meeting, “We played a role unparalleled by any other organization calling itself socialist or communist that was on the scene. We participated in heated political debates and we stood up to physical threats and actions against us by political opponents on the right and left.”

“That was the branch,” Mailhot said, “that Mary Lipman was part of and contributed to.”

Betsey Stone, a member of the San Francisco branch, said that in recent years Lipman continued to be politically active. She helped raise money for national party fund drives, placed Pathfinder books in bookstores and libraries in Santa Cruz, and participated in Militant Labor Forums.

A fund appeal to honor Lipman’s party building efforts—a tradition of the communist movement at such meetings—raised more than $1,700.  
 
 
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