The Militant - November 28, 2011 -- ‘Militant’ makes changes to volunteer staff

Vol. 75/No. 43 November 28, 2011

‘Militant’ makes changes
to volunteer staff

BY SETH GALINSKY
As part of moves to strengthen the Militant, John Studer is joining the volunteer editorial staff and a business manager, Lea Sherman, is being added to the masthead. Doug Nelson is now the managing editor.

Nelson, 35, joined the communist movement in 1995 in Minneapolis. The following year he was the Socialist Workers Party candidate for Minnesota state assembly in District 63-A. In 1997 he ran for mayor of Atlanta, where the party pushed back attempts by city officials to keep him off the ballot. From 1998 to 2003 he volunteered in the print shop that produced the Militant and books on revolutionary working-class politics by Pathfinder Press.

In 2004-2005 Nelson was an editorial volunteer for the Militant and worked in the SWP National Office. In 2007 he moved from Washington, D.C., where he was working in a meatpacking plant, to volunteer again for the paper. Earlier this year he was part of a Militant reporting team at the Havana International Book Fair.

Studer, 65, has moved to New York from Philadelphia, where he worked at a Hyundai-Rotem rail car plant. He has been active in politics ever since high school when he joined the Congress of Racial Equality in Freeport, N.Y.

As a student at Antioch College in Ohio, Studer was chair of the campus chapter of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. There he joined the Young Socialist Alliance and in 1968 joined the SWP.

From 1981 to 2007, Studer was executive director of the Political Rights Defense Fund. Founded in 1973, PRDF organized support for the SWP and YSA lawsuit against the FBI and other government agencies for wiretapping, burglary, bombing, and other harassment against members and supporters of the communist movement.

Sherman, 63, joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1977 in Dallas, where she was a leader of the National Organization for Women chapter. After moving to Birmingham, Ala., Sherman was one of five women hired at Ingalls Iron Works in 1981 as a result of an antidiscrimination lawsuit.

Sherman has been an SWP candidate for public office numerous times, most recently running for San Francisco mayor in the November elections. Before becoming business manager she was organizer of the executive committee of the party’s San Francisco branch and worked at an airline catering company.

As the worldwide economic crisis deepens, the Militant will be organizing more systematic coverage from outside the United States, including Canada, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, and the Pacific.

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