The following is an excerpt from an interview with Dennis Richter by Owen Elle, editor of the weekly McLeod County Chronicle published in Minnesota. The article ran on the front page May 24.
Glencoe native Dennis Richter is running as the vice presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party for the 2024 Presidential Election. His parents moved to Glencoe in 1948 where a year later he was born. Richter says his father started work at the Green Giant plant when it first opened in the city and his mother worked as a hairdresser downtown. He says he also had five uncles who were farmers in the region.
“I spent significant time working on my uncles’ farms, working in town, I helped build that grade school over there, St. Pius, they built when I was in eighth grade, and I worked all summer,” Richter said. … “What I learned growing up in a small town relating to people in the countryside it’s been very important in my life.”
Richter says growing up in Glencoe has helped shape his worldview. “It is a working-class town, its connection to agriculture is very important. When I was here in the late sixties, the civil rights movement was at its peak, there were no Black residents in Glencoe, but the impact of it I watched on television, what I heard was one of my first responses to politics,” Richter said.
He says the movement made him question how people could not be treated equal and that he was drawn to the “massive, Black-led proletarian movement that tore down Jim Crow” segregation. Richter spent time in St. Paul during his high school years bringing Black students out to Glencoe to begin making “connections.” …
Richter has worked as an industrial worker for over 50 years and has been active in railroad, meatpacking, steel, and garment industry unions. He currently works as an airline food service worker and is a member of the union there.
He is running as a vice presidential candidate for Rachele Fruit, a member of the Socialist Workers Party since 1970. … “Rachele was chosen by the Socialist Workers Party because of her history as a fighter in the working-class union movement,” Richter said. “When the Oct. 7 pogrom, which really is what it was, took place in Israel, when Hamas invaded Israel and carried out its slaughter of 1,200 Israelis, she responded immediately within days with a statement and with action in solidarity with the Israeli people, particularly with Jews who this was aimed at. It showed the caliber of leader that she is.”
Richter says he supports Israel’s existence and the Ukrainian people’s “fight for national independence.” Richter also says he and Fruit are making the message that working people need to build a labor party to break with Democrats, Republicans, and the Green Party. “We need to form a party that’s based on the unions but involves everybody who’s in the working class, the majority of this country,” Richter said. “Workers are tired of what they’ve been facing over decades, the fact that their children won’t do better than them and probably will do worse economically and in every other way, but Rachele has a saying: workers are in a mood to fight.”
Richter expressed his support for constitutional freedoms that he says are under attack in the country and called for safer working conditions as a part of his platform. “If safety was really first and if workers controlled production and made decisions about what was produced, how it was safely produced, nobody would ever die on the job,” Richter said. “Ultimately we think in this country there needs to be a third American revolution.”