Vol. 75/No. 40      November 7, 2011

Thomas was a writer, a fighter for Puerto Rican independence, a defender of victims of capitalist injustice, a former prisoner who campaigned against the indignities and injustices of U.S. jails, and a critic of the policies of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. He spoke and performed at thousands of schools, political rallies, prisons and other places, reading his works and campaigning against the brutalities of capitalism.

Born of Cuban and Puerto Rican parents at Harlem Hospital in New York, the staff named him John Peter, in what Thomas called just the first of many efforts by U.S. institutions to “assimilate” him. His mother named him Piri.

His family—his mother was a garment worker and his father was unemployed—struggled during the depression years of the 1930s. In his books Thomas described how he got by hustling on the city streets, rebelling against racist injustice and conditions imposed on working people he saw all around him.

Thomas got out of the New York street life for a few years, serving in the Merchant Marine in the Jim Crow South. On an earlier trip to the South, Thomas recalled, when the bus hit the Mason-Dixon line, the driver ordered all the “coloreds” to get to the back of the bus. Thomas didn’t move, replying proudly, “I am Puertorriqueño.” The driver retorted, “I don’t care what kind of nigger you are,” and forced him to move.

He returned to el barrio in New York when his mother was dying in the “poor people’s ward” at Metropolitan Hospital, and resumed hustling and petty theft. During a robbery, Thomas wounded a cop and was convicted on felony charges and sent to Sing Sing state prison for seven years.

Thomas transformed himself while incarcerated, becoming the writer and political activist he remained for the rest of his life. He began composing Down These Mean Streets in prison.

After the book was published, it caused an uproar. For years it was banned from school and city libraries. In 1976 the Island Tree School Board in Levittown, N.Y., voted to ban the book, along with works of Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Bernard Malamud.

Throughout his life Thomas joined protests and speakouts against the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico. “Black slaves were brought to the Caribbean islands in the same European-forged chains which dragged other native Africans to the cotton fields of the South of the United States,” Thomas wrote on his website, where they were intermingled with “a large number of Chinese” brought “as cheap labor, one minuscule half-step removed from the bonds of human slavery.” This, Thomas explained, formed the “basis for nationhood” for Puerto Rico.

He spoke out for working people, against capitalist exploitation. “When the economy goes into a slump,” he wrote in 1997, “Americans of all colors fall into worse living conditions.” He pointed to the propertied rulers as the source of the problem, the “2 percent of the population” that takes 98 percent of the wealth. And he added, “Who created their wealth in the first place?”

Thomas despised the way ex-prisoners were discriminated against. He organized an extensive fight to regain his right to vote after he was paroled, which he won in 1968.

He joined the fight to win freedom for Mark Curtis, a packinghouse worker in Des Moines, Iowa, and member of the Socialist Workers Party, who was framed up and railroaded to prison in 1988 while participating in actions in defense of undocumented workers.

Thomas spoke at a rally of 400 on the eve of Curtis’s trial, along with Jack Barnes, national secretary of the SWP; Edna Griffin, a long-time fighter for Black rights in Des Moines; Susan Mnumzana of the African National Congress; and others.

Eight years later, when Curtis won parole, Thomas joined a San Francisco meeting to celebrate his return to the class struggle. Thomas said that he talked to Curtis at the meeting about his experiences in prison. “Now,” Thomas said, “we’re celebrating our brother’s return to the struggle, and I am glad to be part of this today.”

He spoke out in defense of political activists imprisoned for their efforts all over the world. In 2001 he joined two members of the Irish political party Sinn Fein at a Militant Labor Forum in San Francisco. He read two poems by Bobby Sands, and spoke about the similarities between the Puerto Rican struggle against U.S. imperialism and the fight for a united Ireland against the British.

In an editorial noting Thomas’s death, the New York Daily News said, “Author and poet Piri Thomas knew a very different New York City than the one we know today.” That statement stands in sharp contrast to Thomas’s view. “The reason that Down These Mean Streets continues to be controversial,” he wrote, “is that it shows the truth that is still happening today.”

Thomas’s family and friends are organizing celebrations of his life and work, to be held in San Francisco, New York and Orlando, Florida.  
 
 
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