Vol. 80/No. 16 April 25, 2016
(special feature)
NY meeting celebrates Natalie Bombaro’s life as
SWP cadre
Bombaro died March 20 from a stroke. The night before she had participated in a New York meeting to hear a delegation from the Federation of Cuban Women.
Among the 95 people at the celebration were Bombaro’s sister, Gerre Carr, and many relatives of her longtime companion, John Studer.
“Meetings like the one today tell you a great deal about an individual like Natalie,” said Sandler, organizer of the SWP in New York, “but also about what her party was part of over five tumultuous decades.”
Other speakers were Janet Post, a leader of the party in Philadelphia, and Don Mackle. Gale Shangold chaired the meeting. Mackle and Shangold are supporters of the SWP and members of the Print Project, made up of some 250 volunteers who produce the books on working-class politics used by the party in its work. Bombaro was one of these volunteers since the project’s inception 18 years ago.
Bombaro grew up in South Philadelphia and graduated from a Catholic girls’ high school that tracked students to become secretaries. Young men at Catholic schools in that area were directed to the nearby shipyard. She became a secretary at the University of Pennsylvania, where students and others introduced her to the civil rights movement, the Cuban Revolution, the growing struggle against the Vietnam War and the women’s liberation movement.
She joined the Young Socialist Alliance and later the SWP in 1969, “convinced that to be effective she needed to be part of a party with a continuity going back to the Russian Revolution and before, with a leadership of current mass struggles and a clear programmatic course for the working class’s march to power,” Sandler said.
Photos on displays prepared for the meeting gave a feel for the times. One showed young Black Panther members in 1970, stripped to their underwear and lined up in public against a wall by Philadelphia cops under Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo. Bombaro was part of the SWP and YSA speaking out against this attack on political rights.
In a poster put out to build the April 24, 1971, march in Washington, D.C., against the war in Vietnam, Bombaro is marching arm-in-arm with a whole group, including an active-duty GI.
Another photo showed the August 1970 Chicano Moratorium march in Los Angeles of 25,000 against the war, the largest working-class protest opposing the war up to that point. Bombaro, at the request of the party, moved to Los Angeles in 1971.
Learned organization and discipline
“I learned organization and discipline from her example,” Jim Gotesky, who was a new party member in Los Angeles at the time, said in a message. “Natalie was full of fun, optimism, and good humor. I will always remember her standing big-eyed, bouncing with energy, and grinning ear to ear with a stack of the Militant newspaper under her arm or walking on the beach handing out flyers for an anti-war march.”In the mid-1970s she took an assignment in New York as part of the secretarial staff under the direction of the central leadership of the SWP. She had special responsibility in relation to the party’s international work, including handling correspondence to and from comrades in countries where there was dangerous political repression and a misaddressed letter could cost lives.
She was part of the party leadership’s secretariat at the 1979 world congress of the Fourth International, at the time the international organization of the communist movement. It was an important meeting. To be part of a new rise of resistance among working people, the Socialist Workers Party had organized over the preceding year to get the majority of its members into industrial workplaces organized by the trade unions. Similar opportunities existed in other countries.
Also that year working people in Iran overthrew the hated U.S.-supported shah. And in Nicaragua and Grenada, popular revolutions overthrew dictators and established workers and farmers governments.
“The debates and fights over these questions were decisive in winning the forces in Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere who are today part of our world movement,” Sandler said. “Natalie knew in her bones the strengths of our program and her loyalty and party patriotism never wavered.”
In 1988 Mark Curtis, a union packinghouse worker and member of the SWP in Des Moines, Iowa, was framed up on rape charges while part of a fight against an immigration raid targeting some of his co-workers. Bombaro and Studer moved to Des Moines. Studer organized the more than seven-year defense effort and Bombaro was a stalwart of the work.
“Natalie was right in the thick of the battle with us,” Kate Kaku, Curtis’ wife, wrote in a message signed by both. “She had such a way with people, making them feel welcome and appreciated. This was very important since we had to take the fight to the people and win over supporters, especially in Iowa.”
Over the years, Bombaro also built the party in San Antonio, Phoenix, Boston and Chicago.
After leaving active party membership in the early 1990s, Bombaro remained a supporter for the rest of her life, taking on various responsibilities.
When Studer and Bombaro moved to Philadelphia in 1999, Post said, the party mostly carried out propaganda work in the northern part of the city, which was majority African-American. “Natalie was confident that workers in South Philly — with its mix of Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Latino and Black workers — would be just as interested in the Militant and Pathfinder books,” Post said. She was right.
In recent years in New York, Mackle told the meeting, Bombaro helped strengthen the Supporters Monthly Appeal, which raises monthly contributions to sustain the party’s work.
In concluding, Sandler noted that the best tribute to Bombaro was to “build the SWP and a powerful movement that can fight for the emancipation of the great majority of humanity.”
Before and after the program participants enjoyed a plentiful spread of food. A fund appeal raised $5,216 to build the party.
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