RACHELE FRUIT joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1970 in Philadelphia, where she was active in the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. She participated in civil rights protests, including one in Trenton, New Jersey, after the 1964 murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner during Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Still a high school student, she attended the first national march on Washington, D.C., against the war in Vietnam in 1965.
In the course of these struggles, Fruit became convinced that war and injustice were the product of the capitalist profit system, of class society. She learned about the Russian and Cuban revolutions and the need for a revolutionary proletarian party with the perspective of ending capitalist rule and leading workers to power in the U.S.
In the Socialist Workers Party, she met and worked with veteran communist workers who had been part of labor battles in the 1930s through the ’50s and the political battles against the Stalin-led counterrevolution in the Soviet Union that led to the founding of the SWP.
As the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida last fall, Rachele Fruit spoke out against the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel and in defense of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people at a rally at the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach Oct. 10.
“The Socialist Workers Party is part of the continuity in the fight against Jew-hatred that goes back to V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Socialists should never support any crime against humanity in the name of revolution,” she said. “Those who call themselves ‘socialists’ and who champion Hamas and other terrorist proxies of Iran will easily find themselves allied with future fascist forces.”
Fruit is a hotel worker and a member of UNITE HERE Local 355. Before that, she has been an active member of the American Postal Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the International Association of Machinists and the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
She has been involved in building solidarity with flight attendants fighting for a contract, for better wages and working conditions and for livable schedules that make it possible for workers to have families and be active in politics and their unions.
Fruit first ran for office for the SWP in 1973 for common council in Detroit, where the party campaign was active in the fight against the police terror squad Stress, Stop the Robberies — Enjoy Safe Streets.
In 2018 Fruit joined a solidarity brigade to Cuba, to become better able to describe the revolution made by Cuban workers and farmers to working people in the U.S. She builds protests opposing Washington’s economic war against Cuba’s socialist revolution and urges working people here to organize to emulate its example.
She ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and for governor of Florida in 2022, campaigning for solidarity with labor struggles, against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and in defense of Cuba’s socialist revolution.
On June 22, 2023, Fruit testified on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party in favor of independence of Puerto Rico at the U.N. Special Committee hearing on Decolonization. In November, she was one of several international participants at a conference of the Sugarcane Workers Union in the Dominican Republic.
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MARGARET TROWE joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1975 when she was 27. She had been drawn into the fight for Black rights as a high school student in the 1960s, when she joined efforts to desegregate the Oakland, California, schools. She also took part in protests against Washington’s war in Vietnam.
Trowe supports the fight for women’s emancipation and fought for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.
She met the Socialist Workers Party during the struggles she was part of. The party leaders and cadres she came to know and work with came out of the labor struggles of the 1930s and had continuity leading back to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the subsequent fight against Stalinism.
Margaret Trowe is a unionist who has worked in the shipbuilding, garment, chemical and food production industries. Currently a member of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 125, Trowe is on a leave from her job as a production worker at the Ghirardelli chocolate factory in San Leandro, California, to campaign for vice president.
While working in meatpacking in Marshalltown, Iowa, from 1997-99, Trowe helped lead union fights against attacks on immigrant workers by the bosses and the government.
She ran for vice president on the SWP ticket with presidential candidate James Harris in 2000.
Trowe contributes articles to the Militant newspaper from the field and was a staff member from 2014-2017.
She joined others building support for the fight of Blackjewel coal miners who blocked railroad tracks in Harlan, Kentucky, in 2019 after their employer shut down the mine they worked in and stole their pay.
Trowe supports the Cuban Revolution and opposes Washington’s economic war against Cuba. She has taken part in solidarity activities there, including trade union and farmers conferences and work brigades.
Responding to the Oct. 7 Tehran-backed Hamas pogrom against Israel, Trowe has protested Jew-hatred and antisemitic attacks and spoken against pro-Hamas resolutions at city council meetings in Berkeley, Oakland, El Cerrito and San Leandro, California.
