Vol. 81/No. 13 April 3, 2017
Anne Morrow: 20-year cadre of the Socialist
Workers Party
“She joined a party of industrial workers determined to build the kind of party necessary to lead the working class to power,” Britton said. “Anne’s road to her two decades of active participation in revolutionary party building was a long one, with numerous obstacles to overcome along the way.”
In 1946 Anne and her husband Bill joined the Communist Party, a Stalinist party that claimed continuity with the 1917 Russian Revolution, but in fact subordinated the interests of workers to the needs of the Soviet rulers in Moscow.
During her time in the CP, Anne Morrow worked for a year on a General Electric assembly line. This was during what’s come to be known as the McCarthyite witch-hunt, when the CP, SWP and other working-class groups came under government attack.
After years of assignments to work in various liberal causes and facing harassment from the FBI, Anne and Bill Morrow decided to break ties with the CP.
In 1960 the Morrows were inspired by the courageous example of young people in Greensboro, North Carolina, sitting in to desegregate Woolworth’s lunch counters. They teamed up with a Black neighboring family in Fulton, Missouri, and with their children desegregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.
Anne and Bill were introduced to the Socialist Workers Party in the early 1970s by their children Dave and Sally, who were being won to the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth organization of the SWP.
Anne and Bill had kept their past affiliation with the CP a secret from their children. Over time, the parents were won over and Bill Morrow joined the SWP in Milwaukee shortly before his death in 1983. Anne Morrow became a supporter of the SWP and then joined at the age of 67 in San Francisco.
During the 1990s she threw herself into the work of the SWP which included building opposition to U.S. imperialism’s brutal war in Iraq, supporting the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and helping to organize speaking tours for young leaders of the Cuban Revolution. She was a regular participant in plant gate sales of the Militant, including at the Chevron refinery in Richmond.
Deborah Liatos, organizer of the SWP branch in Los Angeles, explained that Morrow was part of the party’s efforts to build support for miners on strike at the Co-Op mine near Huntington, Utah, when four of them came on tour to the Bay Area in 2004.
The miners, almost all originally from Mexico, were fired by Co-Op’s bosses for protesting unsafe working conditions and organizing to join the United Mine Workers of America. They spoke to hundreds of unionists in the Bay Area and raised thousands of dollars to help keep the strike going.
“A key lesson of this fight is that divisions the bosses try to create between the mostly native-born coal miners in Utah and Mexican-born coal miners quickly dissolved during the fight,” Liatos said.
“This fight also helped us see more clearly why the fight for amnesty for undocumented workers, and against raids and deportations, is key for today,” Liatos said. “Why it’s central to overcoming the divisions the bosses and their government try to create and strengthening the workers’ movement.”
“I found Anne to be disciplined, professional, competent in any responsibility she assumed,” said Barbara Bowman, who worked with Morrow in the San Francisco branch of the party and chaired the meeting, as she welcomed participants, including Morrow’s family members. “Anne was tough, she was no push over. She was hard on herself and expected the same proletarian functioning of her comrades.”
“I came to understand that Anne’s attention to detail was a tribute to the respect she had for the serious work of the party and its cadre,” she said.
Bowman read from some of the messages sent to the meeting by those who had worked with Morrow.
“Anne understood that an organized campaign office was a reflection on the party and its political seriousness, and Anne was very convinced about the necessity of building a revolutionary party,” wrote Dennis Richter, a leader of the party in Los Angeles and its recent candidate for mayor. “A socialist revolution will not occur in the U.S. without a party built of many more cadre like Anne, for whom the party is the ‘apple of their eye.’”
Although Morrow relinquished her membership in 2011 for health considerations, she remained a loyal party supporter, making regular financial contributions. She continued to follow the party’s activity closely and greeted with enthusiasm the publication of new Pathfinder books.
Before and after the meeting, participants pored over a photo display highlighting Morrow’s political activity and that of the SWP. And they contributed more than $1,500 to further the work of the party.
Betsey Stone contributed to this article.
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home