Vol. 79/No. 14      April 20, 2015

“She was a cadre of the Socialist Workers Party in eight branches of the party over 45 years,” Frank Forrestal told the gathering. “She was always pushing the party outward toward the opportunities.”

Members and supporters of the party, as well as area unionists and political fighters came to the meeting. SWP leader Tom Fiske, Ellis’ longtime companion, and members of both of their families from California and Alabama, came. Three of Ellis’ co-workers at the credit union where she worked until recently attended, as well as immigrant rights activists who had worked with Ellis and Fiske. People came from Omaha, Nebraska; Chicago; and New York.

Ellis, 67, died of a stroke March 20. The meeting was hosted by the Minnesota SWP.

Forrestal, who worked with Ellis in the Twin Cities branch over the last five years, described the party’s experiences as part of the fight to establish, build and defend the union at the Dakota Premium Foods beef slaughterhouse.

“Speedup, working while hurt, and firings led workers to organize a sit-down strike in 2000 — a plantón, as it was called in Spanish,” Forrestal, a former butcher at Dakota, said. In a few weeks, the workers won a union representation election, then fought a two-year battle for their first contract. “There were challenges each step of the way. The party was smack in the middle of these experiences.”

“The party campaigned to get subscriptions to the Militant at the plant, in working-class neighborhoods nearby and in the region,” he said. “We ran Becky as our candidate for U.S. Senate in 2000 as part of our effort to support the organizing drive.”

Rafael Espinosa, union representative for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189, the union of the Dakota workers, attended the meeting.

When Ellis joined the party in 1971 in Texas, Norton Sandler, a member of the SWP National Committee, told the meeting, she was deeply affected by the fight against the U.S. war in Vietnam and inspired by the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle. The Black struggle and the rise of the Chicano movement also had an impact on her.

“Just before Becky joined the Houston branch, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the party’s headquarters,” he said. The attack on the party was one of a number of Klan assaults, including one against the local Pacifica radio station. “Becky was part of the party’s efforts to build a broad defense campaign that pushed the Klan back and defended free speech.”

“As part of that campaign,” Sandler said, “the party ran Debbie Leonard for mayor of Houston.” Leonard debated the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan on television.

“These experiences steeled Becky,” he said.

Sandler noted that Ellis did stints as an SWP branch organizer in Dallas, Miami, Atlanta and the Twin Cities. He read a message to the meeting from Lea Sherman in New York, who described meeting Ellis through their work together in the Dallas chapter of the National Organization for Women in the 1970s.

“She was unassuming, modest and set an example by doing,” Sherman wrote. “She was soft-spoken, but firm and clear. She didn’t raise her voice, but she held her ground. She had a great sense of humor. She was a home-grown Texan, a fighter, a worthy leader of the working class, standing up for what is right.”

Messages were displayed at the meeting from more than a dozen party members and supporters, former members, people who had worked with Ellis and members of Communist Leagues around the world.

“Becky was part of an important generation in the communist movement,” Sandler said, “a generation that advanced the struggle for a proletarian party, that pushed this course forward through the last 20 years of retreat of the labor movement.

“Becky understood the importance of what is opening up today with increased labor resistance and widespread struggles against cop brutality,” he said. “She knew these are our struggles. She also understood how this same generation that she was part of, and those that came after, must act on what is opening up for the communist movement. What we do today is decisive to recruiting fresh forces to the communist movement.”

Maggie Trowe, SWP candidate for U.S. Congress in New York, described the party’s work in the Midwest to organize its members to join with other workers in the meatpacking industry fighting boss attacks, and to participate in labor battles and social struggles.

In the late 1990s, Trowe and several other SWP members worked at the Hormel slaughterhouse in Austin, 100 miles south of here. “Party members from Twin Cities would regularly come down to sell the Militant outside the plant at shift change, helping us get to know workers beyond the departments we worked in,” Trowe said. “They also joined us going door to door with the Militant. And we brought interested co-workers to Friday night forums in Twin Cities.”

“The collaboration of the party branches in the Midwest was crucial for turning toward working-class struggles in the region, and remains so today,” Trowe said.

Ellis worked as a sewing machine operator and a member of the party’s fraction in the garment workers unions for more than 30 years in Miami; Atlanta; New York; St. Louis; Portland, Oregon; and the Twin Cities.

At Columbia Sportswear in Portland in the 1980s she joined co-workers in a series of fights around contract questions and against the bosses’ decision in 1985 to close the plant.

She and other unionists traveled to Austin that year to back the hard-fought strike of union meatpackers against Hormel. Partly through her efforts, her union local sent a message of solidarity to revolutionary Nicaragua, and sought to establish ties with workers there.

In a message sent to the meeting from London, Ögmundur Jónsson and Ólöf Andra Proppé recalled meeting Ellis and the Twin Cities branch in 1999. They were new to the communist movement and joined her and others in a car caravan to an SWP conference in Ohio, stopping to sell the Militant at shift change at Hormel packing plants in Austin and Beloit, Wisconsin.

“This was a new experience for us, and we were infected by comrades’ confidence that workers would be interested in, and needed, the Militant,” Jónsson and Proppé wrote. “Sure enough, a good number stopped their cars to pick up a copy of the paper or subscribe.”

August Nimtz, co-coordinator of the Minnesota Cuba Committee, told participants how Ellis and the SWP were part of building a “jury of millions” that won freedom for the Cuban Five. “Here in the Twin Cities they worked with the Minnesota Cuba Committee on many events we held to publicize their case, especially the exhibition of paintings and cartoons of two of the Five, Antonio Guerrero and Gerardo Hernández.”

Many participants stayed after the program to talk, look at all the messages, and study a panel display on Ellis’ 45 years building the SWP. The ample spread of food and drinks prepared by SWP supporters added to the celebratory air of the event. An appeal raised $1,763 for the Socialist Workers Party, a fitting way to salute Ellis’ life.  
 
 
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