Vol. 80/No. 11 March 21, 2016
Lea Bockman: 45-year cadre of the Socialist Workers Party
Bockman became a well-known and respected party spokesperson, on the front lines of many labor and social struggles.
Among the 64 people from the Atlanta region who attended were party members and supporters; others who did not agree with Bockman’s politics, but wanted to share their respect for her and her party that they gained while debating and discussing the way forward as they fought together side by side; friends and family; and those who wanted to learn more about her political life. Rachele Fruit from the Atlanta SWP chaired the meeting.
Bockman was born in 1923 into a prominent Atlanta family, married at age 21 and raised seven children. She said that her social position protected her from the Depression and isolated her from broader society. That started to change during the second imperialist World War when she began working at the Dobbins Air Force base in Marietta training pilots on flight simulators.
The Montgomery bus boycott and response to the racist lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 had a big impact on her. “I knew the racial situation was wrong, that I had to do something about it,” she told Southern Exposure magazine in 1979.
Raised in a Catholic family, Bockman was chosen as the Catholic representative on a religiously mixed panel of mothers, including Coretta Scott King, organized by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. They spoke out in the early 1960s for school desegregation before PTA meetings, in classrooms and on radio and TV. She joined in building support for the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s as they fought to desegregate interstate buses and bus terminals across the South.
“She came to the conclusion that the system cannot be sandpapered,” Prince explained, “and that a more fundamental question was involved: Which class will rule? Dictatorship of capital or dictatorship of the proletariat? She decided to join the party.”
“The Cuban Revolution of 1959, just 90 miles away, showed that what may have seemed impossible can be done, as did the Russian Revolution of 1917,” Prince said.
Helps establish SWP in South
Bockman helped establish the SWP in the South, when branches were formed in Atlanta and Houston.
The SWP ran Linda Jenness for mayor of Atlanta in 1969 and then for governor of Georgia in 1970. “Lea frequently spoke for the campaign,” SWP member Ilona Gersh wrote in one of a number of messages sent to the meeting. “She was inspired by the young people coming around the party and spent a lot of time working on winning them to the Young Socialist Alliance.”
“Lea’s response to the big events of the time was to go forward with that revolutionary continuity and program,” Prince said. “You can’t decide what times you are born in but you can decide where you cast your lot.
“This is what the SWP offers today as we’re living through 10 years of a smoldering depression, Washington’s war in the Middle East and the rulers’ disregard for human life in Syria,” he said, “the resistance that grows to that, and the big class battles, sooner or later, that loom ahead.”
Fighting frame-up of Mark Curtis
James Harris, SWP National Committee member from Washington, D.C., told the meeting that in 1972 the party supported an important strike here by more than 700 workers at the Mead Packaging plant. One of the leaders of that strike, Gary Washington, attended the meeting.
“Lea seemed like a seasoned member, I didn’t realize she had just recently joined the party,” Washington said at the reception afterwards. Twenty years later he and Bockman organized speaking engagements together in defense of SWP member Mark Curtis, who was framed up, brutally beaten by cops in Des Moines, Iowa, and imprisoned in 1988 on false charges of sexual abuse and burglary.
Curtis was a packinghouse worker involved in a fight to defend the rights of immigrant workers at the big Swift plant where they worked. Thousands of people worldwide joined the struggle to free Curtis. He was released on parole in 1996.
“In 1974 Lea and I were on the front lines in mass demonstrations against police killings here,” Harris said, “that eventually led to the firing of the police chief.” Harris also spoke about the party’s participation in Black farmer struggles in the late 1990s against systematic racial discrimination they faced from the U.S. government.
“Lea was part of the many trips we took to the countryside to get to know these farmers,” Harris said. “Some of them began to look broader and became interested in the Cuban Revolution, taking trips to Cuba to ‘learn how to fight,’ as they put it.”
Bockman helped organize a 2002 tour of the South for Víctor Dreke, who fought with Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolution and in the Congo and who remains active in Cuba today. “She was ready to serve in whatever capacity was needed and highly competent in whatever she did,” Harris said. “We had just finished a petitioning campaign to get a candidate on the ballot and we hadn’t planned how to get the petitions notarized. Lea announced she had become a notary public.”
In the mid-1970s a wave of struggles broke out by coal miners, steelworkers and others, signaling new opportunities to carry out communist politics in the industrial unions. The SWP decided to get its members into the unions, to wage fights from within the unions, to win solidarity for social struggles and revolutionary battles worldwide, and win recruits to the party.
Jeff Rogers from Atlanta described how he was one of 15 workers fired by Lockheed-Georgia in late 1980 and early 1981 for their connection with the SWP.
“The fight against these firings,” SWP member Chris Hoeppner, another of the fired workers, wrote in a message, “uncovered an elaborate network of company spies and surveillance aimed at the union and at all those who held ideas the company disagreed with.”
“This was part of the COINTELPRO program of the U.S. government against all kinds of organizations,” Rogers said. “Lea helped win broad support for our fight in the labor movement and from civil rights leaders and religious figures. She was 100 percent.”
The SWP filed a lawsuit in 1973 exposing decades of covert spying and disruption against the SWP by the FBI and other federal police agencies, Rogers said. The party won the suit, along with an injunction against the government using any of their spy files. This victory, he said, is a weapon in the hands of working people fighting today to keep open political space to speak, organize and act in our own interests.
“The party jumped into the explosive rise of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s,” Atlanta SWP leader Susan LaMont said. “Lea saw abortion rights as a central question for the working class in order for women to be part of coming class battles.
“She was a tenacious debater for the party’s program, explaining there are no personal solutions, no reforms to end women’s oppression within the framework of capitalist society,” LaMont said.
“I didn’t know her, I wish I had,” Devon Harris, a young retail worker, said after the meeting. “It leads me to want to act on what’s not right. And to know more about the party.”
There was a display of photos and other material on Bockman’s contributions to building the party and the class battles that shaped the party’s political activities over those years, along with a book of all the messages received for the meeting. Volunteers prepared a delicious spread of food. Participants at the meeting contributed $2,082 to advance the work of the party.
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