Pat Barile, 1920-2020. | Courtesy of Barile Family
Pat Barile learned the meaning of the word devotion from the rank-and-file workers at the Sonotone Corporation plant in White Plains, N.Y. in the mid-1940s and 1950s.
Repeatedly, they elected him president of United Electrical Workers Local 428 for ten years even after Cold Warriors had branded him a Communist and instigated a witch hunt and continual efforts to decertify the UE.
Pat Barile, lower right, with some of his co-workers at the CPUSA National Office, April 1977. Top row, from left: Joelle Fishman, Ken Newcomb, Beth Edelman, Betty Smith, Ed Teixeira, Margaret Cann, and Lee Dlugin. Bottom row, from left: Henry Winston, Jake Green, and Arnold Becchetti. | People’s World Archives
Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture that for nearly a quarter century chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements beginning in the early 1960s, started in 1961, a year that was a kind of transitional one for the civil rights movement. The sit-ins that had begun in early 1960, and the continuing demonstrations and emerging fervor, had made national headlines, but the movement hadn’t yet achieved the national stature that it would a couple of years later. Nevertheless, the civil rights movement was still a significant, if not yet overwhelming, news media story. The 1961 Freedom Rides, in which Black and white movement volunteers tested a recent Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on interstate bus travel by sitting together on trips through the South, brought headlines, photographs and television news footage of racist mobs, burning buses and bloodied civil rights activists.
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‘We Accuse’: The Communist Party USA’s answer to 1948 conspiracy charges February 5, 2021 9:34 AM CDT By Eugene Dennis
Left to right: Some of the top leaders of the Communist Party USA swept up in the 1948 Red Scare dragnet descend the steps of the Federal Courthouse in New York: William Z. Foster, Benjamin J. Davis, Eugene Dennis, Henry Winston, John Williamson, and Jack Stachel. | People s World Archives
On Feb. 3, 2021, CNN published by Eliott C. McLaughlin that placed the Communist Party USA alongside Trump’s Jan. 6 Capitol mob and a neo-Nazi organization as the only groups to have “attempted to stage a coup against the United States of America.” CNN and McLaughlin have their history wrong, very wrong.
Michael Myerson is an author and lifelong activist for civil rights, peace, and labor rights. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
For nearly thirty-five years, Gil Green was my mentor, surrogate father, personal hero, favorite teacher, and perhaps the single biggest political influence of my life. He is the person I have most tried to emulate in terms of personal integrity and mental rigor.
When Che Guevara was murdered in Bolivia in 1968, Fidel Castro proposed to the Cuban Young Pioneers that they try to “live like Che.” I always thought of Gil as just the sort of U.S. revolutionary that young people should model themselves after that they should live like Gil.