[ Pat Fry was a long-time activist, journalist, and leader in the
working class, peace, solidarity, anti-imperialist, and left-wing and
socialist movements in the United States, dies after long struggle
with cancer.]
[[link removed]]

PAT FRY: A TRIBUTE IN MEMORIAM  
[[link removed]]


 

Geoffrey Jacques
July 6, 2023
xxxxxx
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Pat Fry was a long-time activist, journalist, and leader in the
working class, peace, solidarity, anti-imperialist, and left-wing and
socialist movements in the United States, dies after long struggle
with cancer. _

Pat Fry, (family photo)

 

Pat Fry was a long-time activist, journalist, and leader in the
working class, peace, solidarity, anti-imperialist, and left-wing
movements in the United States. As a trade unionist, she had been a
rank-and-file member and local official of the United Auto Workers
(UAW) and worked for many years as a staffer of the Committee of
Interns and Residents (CIR), a New York City-based health care union.
She was a founding member, co-chair from 2009-2016, and National
Coordinating Committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for
Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). At the announcement of her death,
tributes from the United States and abroad came as testaments to the
appreciation her work in the struggle for democracy and socialism at
home and in the international anti-imperialist and solidarity
movements generated.

 

Fry died at age 76 on June 28 in Traverse City, Michigan, after a long
struggle with cancer.

 

My own friendship with Fry goes back to the early 1970s in Detroit,
where we were active in the local Marxist study group movement of the
period. She was my successor as Detroit reporter for the _Daily
World_, the newspaper of the Communist Party, USA, and we maintained a
close lifelong friendship. Pat possessed a wealth of good humor and
graciousness, as well as an incisive mind that was always open to new
ideas and experiences. She was an ardent and always interesting
conversationalist. Her resistance to dogmatic thinking and routinized
philosophizing was not just an endearing quality; it also spurred her
ability to work and make friends with a broad range of people of
widely differing backgrounds and perspectives.

 

Patricia Louise Fry (born June 14, 1947) was the first of five
children born in Detroit Michigan, to Catholic, working-class parents
John Henry Fry, a salesman who died in 1960 at the age of 36, and Anna
Mae (Jones) Fry, a stay-at-home mom and a clerical worker who, at age
98, survives her oldest child. Pat “came to the left from a moral
Catholic background,” remembers Jim Jacobs, an old friend. She
attended Benedictine High School in Detroit, during the period of
Vatican II, and the influence of Catholic social teaching of the time
stayed with her. During her senior year, in 1965, the civil rights
movement came home. A white woman from her neighborhood, Viola Liuzzo,
had gone to Alabama to be part of the struggle and was shot to death
in her car in Alabama by members of the Ku Klux Klan while returning
from driving a group of activists to the Montgomery airport. “I was
in awe of Liuzzo’s heroism,” Fry would later write. “Her racist
murder shook me.” For the rest of her life, Pat would place herself
as a participant in the struggle against racism, exploitation, and
oppression and for democracy and freedom.[1]

 

 “The civil rights struggle became my struggle,” she wrote. While
a student at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), she joined the battle
for open admissions and helped form a campus-wide human rights
committee that called on Michigan’s Human Rights Commission to
investigate systemic racism on campus. She also fought Jim Crow in the
North, picketing establishments that refused to serve Black customers,
and collected data on landlords who broke the law by refusing to rent
to Black people. She graduated EMU, “barely,” in 1970, with a
bachelor’s degree in education, while the country was in the midst
of the biggest campaign of mass demonstrations, as well as one of the
biggest strike waves, in its history. She moved back to Detroit and
soon got a job at Wayne County Community College as a clerical worker,
a post she would hold for the next fifteen years, becoming active in
her UAW local, including serving as an elected union officer. It was
as a UAW rank-and-file member that she attended the first convention
of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, held in Chicago in March
1974.[2]

 

Fry plunged into the anti-Vietnam War movement and related activities,
including supporting the 1971 Winter Soldier investigation. That was a
public inquiry organized the movement during which recent Vietnam
veterans spoke out publicly for the first time about atrocities
they’d committed during the U.S. war against that country. The
following year found her in Cuba as part of the Venceremos Brigade, a
group of mostly young people from the United States who went to Cuba
to protest the trade blockade and work on the sugar cane harvest, as
an act of solidarity with Cuba’s effort to construct a socialist
society.

 

She began her study of Marxism in the early 1970s as part of a
bourgeoning movement of activists in Detroit from the campuses and the
auto plants that assembled in groups to study and debate the ideas and
ideals of socialism. There were a dozen or more such study groups in
the city, and while the new Marxist study group movement was a
national phenomenon, the class character of the Detroit participants
helped distinguish the movement in that city. Pat joined one such
group, the Detroit Organizing Committee. Most of the members of these
groups did more than just study. Fry was active in the fight against
STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), the peculiarly named
police unit that soon gained a reputation in Detroit’s neighborhoods
as a terror squad whose victims were mostly Black, unarmed,
law-abiding, citizens. During the spring and summer of 1973, the
campaign against STRESS engulfed the city, as the unit’s body count
rose to over 19 in the three years before it was disbanded. The
campaign against STRESS was a major contributor to the 1973 election
of Coleman A. Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor, who had himself
been a leader of the left-wing of the working-class movement during
the Cold War’s early days. When Young disbanded STRESS, it brought
jubilation to the city.

 

The election of the left-leaning Young administration inaugurated one
of those moments in social life when everything seemed possible. It
was a period of lively debate on the entire range of social issues in
the restaurants, bars, workplaces, classrooms, and living rooms of the
city. Pat and I met at around this time, and while I can’t remember
the circumstances of our meeting, we were already friends by the
mid-1970s. Fry was in the thick of all of it, and activists that knew
her then remember not only her activism, but also fondly recall the
parties that she and her then-husband, Dave Riddle, a long-haul truck
driver, rank-and-file Teamster, college teacher, and historian, would
host in their Highland Park home. At those parties one could meet a
cross section of the city’s left wing, debating and frolicking
together. The ennobling qualities of Pat’s character were on full
display at such gatherings.[3]

 

Among the qualities of Pat’s that enriched our friendship was her
resistance to stifled ways of thinking. Her joyful sensibility allowed
her to avoid taking self-appointed authority too seriously. This
meant, among other things, however much she steeped herself in the
arcane and sometimes puzzling minutia of Marxist and socialist theory,
Fry was never dour or dogmatic about her beliefs. Her great humor and
openness drew her to prefer a politics that worked in the interests of
working people to the pure theory of the dollar pamphlet or the
300-page treatise. Some of this she learned in her childhood. “My
parents were not of the left,” she wrote. “They were Democrats and
proud of it. Republicans were for the rich folks, they always told me.
This was my first grounding in class politics.” To be truly
liberating, theory had to first be useful to the people it sought to
emancipate. One of the less inviting characteristics of the youthful
Marxist study group movement of the 1970s was that too much
theoretical speculation could make some people inhospitable. Fry’s
openness was a breath of fresh air in such an atmosphere.

 

The 1970s also saw the rise of the New Communist Movement (NCM),
during which a host of Communist-style parties and groups, many of
Maoist orientation, came on the scene. Most groups of this tendency
folded within a decade or so, while some lasted longer. The Marxist
study group movement in Detroit was influenced by the NCM, and while
some study group members joined national NCM parties, most stayed
aloof. These younger radicals also sought out older Detroit left-wing
activists, who were a significant presence in the city. Saul Wellman,
a Spanish Civil War veteran who had been a Communist leader and Smith
Act defendant in Michigan in the 1950s, befriended Fry and other young
radicals. His political independence and counsel were highly valued in
Detroit study group circles. Fry always spoke in warm and appreciative
terms of the friendship that she and Wellman shared.

 

Pat found herself part of a circle of young radicals around Harry
Haywood, a legendary former leading Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member
whose book, _Negro Liberation_ (1948), was the classic expression of
the Party’s early approach to Black Liberation, an approach that by
the late 1940s had been a cornerstone of the CPUSA’s program for 20
years. In the early 1970s, Haywood, whose ties to the CP ended as a
result of the late 1950s crisis in the Party, was living in Detroit
and was one of several older independent radicals that the younger
radicals sought out.[4] He was writing his autobiography, _Black
Bolshevik_ (1978) by then, and Pat became part of a group that worked
on its production. She conducted interviews with Haywood, transcribed
them, and typed the manuscript. The book has since become a classic of
left wing and African American political literature. _Black Bolshevik_
is a sourcebook for the history of the Communist Party, USA, and even
as it served the Marxist study group movement in Detroit as a source
of critique from the left of the CPUSA’s post-1950s policies, the
study group movement itself was triggering frustration for Fry, as its
sectarian tendencies led to growing factional fractiousness. As a
result, by 1981 two of the major Marxist study group alliances, the
Detroit Marxist-Leninist Organization (DMLO) and the Organizing
Committee for an Ideological Center (OCIC), had both dissolved. Pat
described herself as being “emotionally wrecked” by the
experiences in these groups.  But despite the fractiousness and the
emotional turmoil these activities produced, Pat never lost her
resistance to dogmatism and her sense of the necessity for a broad,
inclusive left movement, rather than one made up of sects. Hence,
whatever political differences people may have had with each other in
the study group movement (and, later, within the CPUSA or the broad
left), it seemed that all saw in Pat a friend and confidant.

 

By 1983, Fry had joined the CPUSA, influenced by older radicals like
Chris Alston, a Black community leader who had been part of the UAW
organizing committee in the drive to unionize the massive Ford Rouge
Plant in the early 1940s, a member of the Young Communist League in
the 1930s, and of the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, before
leaving the Party sometime in the early 1960s, while remaining
friendly to the Party and its policies; and Al Fishman, a Communist
who was a major Detroit peace activist, and an early computer
programmer, who had served for a time as deputy chief of the Detroit
Police Department during the Young administration. Pat also credited
me with being instrumental in her joining the CPUSA. I’d invited her
to a 1983 meeting in Detroit where CPUSA activist and former Smith Act
political prisoner Carl Winter gave a talk on the significance of the
Young administration, then under attack from right wing forces in the
city and region. After hearing Winter’s presentation, Fry wrote,
“I filled out a membership card joining the Communist Party that
day.”[5]

 

Within two years she joined the staff of the _Daily World_ as Detroit
correspondent. One of her earliest stories was based on interviews
with worker-participants in the great Flint GM Sit Down strike of
1936-1937, in celebration of the UAW’s 50th anniversary. Over the
next several years, she chronicled a city and class in crisis, as the
capitalist offensive against the post-WW II social contract, often
called the Treaty of Detroit, after a famous 1950 UAW-GM collective
bargaining agreement, came, in Southeast Michigan, under particularly
vicious assault. Plant closures, federal abandonment of aid to the
cities, the onset of economic crisis and depression, and the
increasing difficulty of union and urban officials, no matter whether
their background was as radicals or as liberals, to mount an effective
response no matter how earnestly they tried, were all part of Fry’s
beat. These were also the waning days of the Cold War, although nobody
thought of it in those terms then, and the ratcheting up of the peace
movement, the fight against apartheid in South Africa, solidarity with
the Palestinian people struggling for basic rights (and which had a
particular resonance in Southeast Michigan, with its large Arab
population), and the effort to keep the United States from intervening
against revolutionary and democratic movements in Central America,
were also part of Fry’s reporting.

 

The end of the Cold War, with its crisis of Communist-led socialism,
also brought crisis to the CPUSA, which manifested in the resignation
of about one-third of its membership at the Party’s 25th national
convention in Cleveland at the end of 1991. The Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an organization formed in
the wake of that convention by hundreds of former CPUSA members and by
left wingers from other sectors and traditions, including several
1960s “New Left” veterans, as well as activists and leaders in
newer movements, emerged at this time. Charlene Mitchell, the
Communist Party leader who ran for president of the United States
under the Party’s banner in 1968, the first African American woman
nominated by any party for the presidency, led the organization until
a stroke in 2007 sidelined her. Fry was also a founding member of
CCDS. She and Mitchell were close friends and comrades, sharing with
others the work of CCDS, on which Fry would devote her political
energies.[6]

 

Pat moved to New York from Detroit to work full-time for CCDS, putting
her considerable administrative experience to work with Mitchell in
the organization’s national office. She also served on the
organization’s leadership body as well as seven years as CCDS
co-chair.  Fry continued to work for CCDS until joining the staff of
the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), an affiliate of the
Service Employees International Union, as Director of Special
Projects, retiring in 2012 after 13 years of service. Fry would
continue working with CCDS, writing for its publications, traveling
and speaking on the organization’s behalf, advancing the cause of
democracy and socialism. Such travels included, most recently, a 2019
trip to Venezuela, just as Donald Trump was applying pressure on the
people of that country to force them to abandon the government
they’d chosen. And she, along with countless others, would continue
to fight for democracy and socialism. Not that she had any illusions
about the difficulties of the struggle, or about its protracted
nature.

 

As the presidential election was ramping up in 2016, Susan Webb, an
old common friend from late 1970s-early 1980s Detroit and a former
editor at the People’s World website, the successor publication to
the _Daily World_, asked several writers, including Pat and myself, to
share our reflections on the meaning of socialism in current times.
This symposium took place during the Democratic primary season, during
which Bernie Sanders placed the question of socialism and socialist
politics at the center of public life in the U.S. for the first time
in a century.[7]

 

“There is no blueprint for socialism,” Pat wrote for that
_People’s World_ symposium. “Socialism cannot emerge from
sentiment, ideology, or wish fulfillment. Socialism emerges because
the working class, as it struggles around the crisis of everyday
living, comes to recognize that it is a necessity.”[8]

 

In addition to her mother, Anna Mae Fry, Pat is survived by her
sister, Peggy Fry, two brothers, John Fry and Tom Fry, nieces Molly
Thomas and Alicia Bennett, and nephews Michael Thomas and Andrew Fry.
Her brother Kenneth Alan Fry died in 1974. Memorial contributions in
Pat’s honor may be directed to [link removed]
to help fight for universal health care, or to the National Council of
Black Lawyers, at www.ncbl.org [[link removed]] to help advance
the fight against racism (white supremacy) and the inequities it
produces.

 

[1] Quotations from Pat Fry, unless otherwise noted, are from a
memoir-essay in manuscript, “My Story of the Communist Party USA in
Detroit,” which will appear in _Reds: Lives of U.S. Communists,
1950-2000_, which is forthcoming from Punctum Press.

 

[2] Fry wrote a report on the convention for a Detroit alternative
newspaper. See “Women Form Labor Coalition.” _The Fifth Estate,_
April 13-26, 1974, pg. 17.

 

[3] For a example of Riddle’s work as a historian, see Babson,
Steve, Dave Riddle, and David Elsila. _The Color of Law: Ernie
Goodman, Detroit, and the Struggle for Labor and Civil Rights._
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Dave and Pat eventually
divorced. He died in 2012.

 

[4] See Haywood, Harry. _Black Bolshevik_. Chicago: Liberator Press,
1978. The circumstances under which he parted with the CPUSA are
narrated on pgs. 605-627.

 

[5] On Carl Winter (1906-1991), Saul Wellman (1913-2003) and the
Communist Party of Michigan during the 1950s, see Pintzuk, Edward C.
_Reds, Racial Justice, and Civil Liberties_ (Minneapolis: MEP
Publications, 1997), and Pettengill. _Communists and Community:
Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941-1956_ (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2020.

              On Chris Alston (1913-1995), see the
introduction to the Chris and Marty Alston Collection, Wayne State
University, Walter Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban
Affairs: [link removed]. On Al Fishman
(1927-2011), see Lessenberry, Jack. “Farewell to a hero: Al Fishman
never gave up the fight.” _Detroit Metro Times, _June 25, 2011:
[link removed].

 

[6] For an account of these developments, see Rosenberg, Daniel.
“From Crisis to Split: The Communist Party USA,

1989–1991.” _American Communist History_ (2019).
[link removed]

 

[7] CCDS-CPUSA relations were such by this time that Fry addressed the
Party’s 30th national convention in Chicago in 2014 with “warm
greetings” on behalf of the organization of which she was co-chair
at the time. See Fry, “Convention Greeting: Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy & Socialism.” Communist Party USA.
[link removed]…
[[link removed]]

 

[8] Fry, Pat. “What is socialism? Let’s get specific.”
_People’s World_. “People’s World Series on Socialism.” 24
February 2016.
[link removed]…
[[link removed]]

* Pat Fry
[[link removed]]
* Activism
[[link removed]]
* socialist movement
[[link removed]]
* Communist
[[link removed]]
* Communist Party
[[link removed]]
* CPUSA
[[link removed]]
* Committees of Correspondence
[[link removed]]
* Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
[[link removed]]
* CCDS
[[link removed]]
* Trade unionists
[[link removed]]
* UAW
[[link removed]]
* CIR/SEIU
[[link removed]]
* anti-imperialism
[[link removed]]
* Detroit
[[link removed]]
* Harry Haywood
[[link removed]]
* New Communist Movement
[[link removed]]
* Viola Liuzzo
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]