Bea Lumpkin: Still Fighting

In the 1970s, there was the “Great White Flight,” when wealthy white people left the inner cities for suburbia. They took their money with them, leaving the cities to decline. Now the opposite of the white flight is occurring: poor people of color are being pushed out in favor of wealthy whites.

With gas prices at five dollars a gallon; you can’t help but ask how much better off are we than previous generations?

In the 1970s, there was the “Great White Flight,” when wealthy white people left the inner cities for suburbia. They took their money with them, leaving the cities to decline. Now the opposite of the white flight is occurring: poor people of color are being pushed out in favor wealthy whites.

With gas prices at five dollars a gallon; you can’t help but ask how much better off are we than previous generations?

It has been said that, for the first time in history, this generation believes it will be worse off than those before. With high interest rates for college loans, a crumbling education system, a poor economy this is not much of a surprise. But how did our forbears make things work?

If FEMA failed us all after the levees were breached, then how did people during of the Great Depression survive in an age where social security, public aid, and union rights were non-existent? Bea Lumpkin’s story helps us understand. Lumpkin was a union organizer and a women’s and civil rights activist. We should recognize and celebrate her as
a figure in communist and working-class history as she approaches her 90th birthday.

Lumpkin was born in 1918, in the east Bronx, a child of political refugees escaping from the Russian czar’s repression. Growing up in predominantly Eastern European community of garment workers, she joined the Young dynamic Summer 2008 31
Communist League in 1933, 75 years ago. Bea witnessed the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression that followed. Bea left Hunter College for one year to work as an organizer for the CIO laundry workers industrial union-CIO. In those
days, education was free, a right that the labor movement fought for and won, but later lost.

It was people like her who built the labor movement, and in doing so helped to secure Social Security and the idea that the government was responsible to provide a social safety net. As war clouds gathered over Europe, Bea spoke to other frustrated youth about the Nazi takeover of Germany, the atrocities of the camps, and the
possibility of it happening in the United States as well.

She returned to school to finish her degree, but later returned to organizing laundry workers in New York City. Bea, in a humble manner expresses, “The people were hungry to be organized, and they didn’t care if it was a nineteen year old pip squeak forcing them to fill out membership cards, it had to be done.” She worked with mostly women to enforce union labor friendly policies.

In 1964 Bea was fired from her electronics job simply for being female. Wanting to fight for women’s rights on the job, she helped to found the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), which has
remained a strong voice for women in the labor movement. Much of the women’s movement was run and organized by upper class women, around their issues. However, Bea put the demands of working women front and center in that movement by demanding equal pay and respect for female workers. While living in Chicago she joined forces with the Black Labor Leaders of Chicago to fight for workers’ rights in general, and women workers’ rights specifically.

Bea says, “Women have gained a lot since the 1974 conference moving forward in all four goals that the CLUW adopted: Organize the unorganized, promote
affirmative action Increase women’s participation in political and legislative activities promote participation within unions.”

In 1979, her CLUW chapter petitioned Congress, demanding funding for affordable childcare, and a watered down version of the bill was later admitted even during the Reganomics era. Without the push from grassroots organizations like CLUW, too many unions would have sat out those years and waited for better times. In the 1980’s she helped steel
workers reclaim pensions by forming The Save Our Jobs Committee, which also helped strengthen the labor movement during those hard years.

And, she’s still involved in the movement today. “Young people want answers today to a lot tougher questions than when I was in the YCL,” she says. “The environment is at stake; in fact the entire
human race is. The whole word could be destroyed by nuclear weapons. Young people are really inspired by noble causes such as overthrowing the war machine. Obama need to be put in office with a Congress that will support him. We need a foreign policy that is peaceful to help the Iraqi people rebuild.”

Hardly ever before in history have youth been this involved in the political process, with Facebook bumper stickers being uploaded, saying things like: “Do you smell what the Barack is cooking?” and
the new track on MTV “Black President”
by Nas.

We’re hopeful that Bea is right. And we think she is.