. HUMAN RIGHTS .
An article by Stacy Davis Gates in In These Times
When people ask me what it means to be a woman in power, I think about Bea Lumpkin, because power means you don’t wait for permission.
Not power as in proximity to the powerful, or having a seat at a table someone else built. I mean power as in knowing early which side you were on, then spending every day of your life standing on the business of that side.
Bea passed away June 14 at 107 years old. A lifelong communist and the Jewish daughter of Russian immigrants, she married a Black man during the height of the Red Scare in 1949 and raised a family under the restrictive conventions of Jim Crow fascism.
Bea Lumpkin with her husband Frank
The United States in the mid-20th century was a country where inter-racial marriage was still illegal in 30 states, and where the Supreme Court would not strike down those laws until 1967. A federal agent might show up at your door simply because of who you loved and what you believed.
It was the McCarthy era, and the openly Communist Lumpkins were already a target for their activism. But their politics were the least of it. They were an interracial couple in America in 1949. That alone was enough to make them a threat.
In a 2019 article for People’s World, Bea Lumpkin wrote: “In addition to fighting back against school closures and the firing of teachers, it is important to keep the struggle for an anti-racist, multicultural curriculum front and center.”
Bea and her husband, Frank — steel-worker, son of sharecroppers — were undeterred.
To understand what Bea brought to her marriage, and to everything else in her life, you have to understand what she had already lived by the time she married.
Her parents were Russian revolutionaries. Her father was arrested after returning fire on the Czar’s Cossacks when they attacked the synagogue where the Jewish Labor Bund was meeting. Her mother helped engineer his escape.
Bea was born knowing which side she was on, telling the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund in 2025, “I always knew, even when I was 6 years old, how much injustice there was.”
By age 9, she was making solidarity trips in support of striking textile workers. At 14, she lied about her age to get a factory job assembling radio tubes and joined the Metal Workers Industrial Union. At Hunter College, when the school threatened to raise the price of a half pint of milk from five to six cents, she organized a boycott and won. She was later suspended for organizing a conference against war and fascism on campus.
At 19, Bea was one of the organizers hired by the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize more than 30,000 laundry workers in New York City. She was a radio technician with the United Electrical Workers and a defense worker during World War II.
In 1948, she stood alongside Paul Robeson at a labor rally in New York. She marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Marquette Park. She stood alongside the Black Panthers on Chicago’s West Side. Legend in our movement holds that she once babysat a young Fred Hampton.
She bore witness to the state killing striking workers during the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago, where 10 were killed and 90 injured when police shot into the crowd. She knowingly took risks to win justice and to marry the love of her life.
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How can we carry forward the work of the great peace and justice activists who went before us?
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Bea was many things that our politics too often tries to reduce and sort into separate boxes. She was a mother, and she was an educator who started her classroom career at age 47. She was a mathematician who published groundbreaking scholarship on the multicultural roots of math and science because her students demanded to see themselves in what they were learning. She was a feminist who co-founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974. She was a fierce advocate for climate justice in her 100s.
Bea’s existence resisted reduction because it undersells the enormous impact of her life. She wasn’t an “-ism.” She was a force of nature. The labor movement Bea entered as a teenager in the 1930s was fighting for things we now take as bedrock: the right to organize, the minimum wage and the eight-hour workday. She was raised to believe that her existence was to make the world a more just place for everyone. For Bea, the struggle was never a sacrifice. It was a joy.
As a Black woman leading a labor union in this particular moment in America, when the rights Bea’s generation bled for are being dismantled in real time, when public education is under assault, when the multiracial coalitions she built her life around are being deliberately fractured,
I find myself asking what Bea would do.
She would be at the rally, on the picket line and knocking doors. She would be organizing young people and old people in the same room. She would be furious and unrelenting, yet jubilant and optimistic. She didn’t slow down by choice. Her body made that decision for her.
Bea taught us the discipline of showing up, and the refusal to leave a struggle to someone else.
She embodied the understanding that justice is not something you wait for, but something you build, generation by generation, in union halls and church basements, and on picket lines, no matter the weather. Well into her 100s she attended every monthly delegate meeting and protest and caucus meeting for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and oftentimes got there without any support or assistance. I can close my eyes and see that black fanny pack, red CTU cap, and fist held high in proud defiance.
She was our friend, and we are going to miss her.
Roberta Wilson, a longtime organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), gave 80 years of her life to educating students.
Our union also lost in these same days of grief one of our longtime members, Roberta Wilson.
Roberta came north from Thomson, Georgia, as part of the Second Great Migration that helped build Chicago. She gave 80 years of her life to her faith, to educating her students, to organizing her block club, coat drives, and food pantry, and to creating a scholarship fund that sent Black children from Chicago’s West Side to college.
Black history.
Where Bea showed us how to fight, Roberta showed us how to hold, and how to be the root system of a community that allowed everything above ground to grow.
They are the women on whom this movement is built.
Excerpt from her book, Joy in the Struggle: My Life and Love by Beatrice Lumpkin, International Publishers, 2018. Free for any DSA or Union member
‘So how do I feel about fighting for the same issues again and again? My reply is, “Yes, I am tired of the system that puts profits first. But I am not tired of fighting capitalism. Each fight brings us in touch with wonderful fellow-fighters. Each fight hastens the day when organized workers and their allies will be strong enough to get rid of capitalism and begin to build socialism. Yes, there is joy in the struggle.’ —
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The author, Stacy Davis Gates, is president of the Chicago Teachers Union and the Illinois Federation of Teachers.
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