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PORTSIDE CULTURE

JIM WILLIAMS’S QUEST FOR JUSTICE  
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Paul Buhle
December 12, 2024
CounterPunch
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_ Activist and writer Jim Williams, in his new autobiography, covers
his life from Students for a Democratic Society activist, to Communist
labor editor, to social worker. _

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_Life on the Left
James Williams and the Quest for Justice_
James Williams
Changemaker
ISBN: 9781304359308

Jim Williams, one of a handful early Students for a Democratic Society
members still active politically, was also a founder of the Southern
Student Organizing Committee and a veteran union organizer. He has
finally provided us with a memoir, _Life on the Left: James Williams
and the Quest for Justice_
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(Changemaker).

Prof. Michael Honey, a distinguished historian of the Southern labor
and civil rights movement—also a political veteran of the same
region—prompted Williams by asking the questions. This is an oral
history, in effect, covering the many years and staggering varieties
of experience in Williams’s life.

His humble background, with its unusual twists and turns, will
fascinate the reader. Williams’s blue-collar family moved through
various parts of the South, sometimes so hard-put that he landed with
relatives. At 11, he contracted Polio, the dreaded children’s
disease of the 1950s. In a fascinating turnaround, he rose at age 17
from “Special Education” (all those who did not seem fit in
physically, for any reason) to the college-bound track. He had scored
so high on tests that nothing could hold him back.

He had already begun to grapple with the appearance of the civil
rights movement around him. At first, puzzled that “Negro”
drinking fountains could exist, he was stunned to learn about the
lynching of African American teen Emmet Till.  College called and
Jim answered, but he had meanwhile begun immersing himself in The
Movement. In a sense, he had already arrived at his destiny.

Williams did the college activist things of 1962 at Kentucky, inviting
aged socialist leader Norman Thomas to speak on campus—over the
objections of more prominent fellow student Mitch McConnell—and
worked in the local War Resisters League. Soon, he took part in a
civil rights march on Frankfurt, Kentucky, inspired by the famed march
and demonstration in Washington. Occupying the legislative gallery
back in Frankfurt, he and a handful of fellow students resolved to
stay, going on a hunger strike with nothing but water for a week.
Ignored by the politicians and the press, a failure in the usual
sense, the effort actually prepared Williams for future hopes and
setbacks.

He soon joined the labor movement in a big way. He heard of a wildcat
strike in eastern Kentucky, where the famed (but by this time, badly
aged) John L. Lewis had cut a deal with the struggling coal companies
to stop paying their share of payments to the health fund—the
remnant of the great labor victories in the receding past. The degree
of extreme poverty in miners’ communities staggered Williams, who
was himself used to seeing the poor and _being_ poor. Great anecdote:
the FBI stopped by to tell Williams’ mother that her son was
overthrowing the government. She answered flatly, in his account,
“Don’t worry, he never finishes anything he starts.” (p.18)

By his final year in college, he had become active in SDS and SSOC and
by 1964, traveled to New York to become active in the new SDS
Political Action Project. (Its offshoot, the Radical Education
Project, founded in 1966, sponsored one new publication: _Radical
America_, founded by this reviewer in 1967, and still around until the
end of the century.) From there, Williams moved into a group formerly
associated with the Communist Party to build a coalition of labor, the
civil rights and peace movements. Together, as he recalls, this would,
they hoped, realign the Democratic Party in a leftish direction.

Not many young activists around budding (but still small) SDS would
seek to combine labor and civil rights in this way. Fewer still would
link up with active Communist Party members to do it. As Williams
explains,  only the CP had the commitment and the contacts to hook
up simultaneously with civil rights, labor and the peace contingent.
This conclusion goes against the widespread belief that the CP had
been hopelessly isolated by the 1956 split (following the revelations
of Stalin’s crimes and the uprising of Hungarians against Soviet
domination), run still further into the ground by the bullying and
incompetent Gus Hall at the service of Russian commands.

This belief had a real basis in fact. But a sufficient segment of the
older, once-far larger CP had hung in, often quietly or even secretly
within their communities, linked to lawyers who would defend political
prisoners, likewise work doggedly within civil rights, peace
coalitions and the peace movement. Young activists in CPish circles
often came from Jewish Communist families in particular, and unlike
many New Leftists, were likely to stick with The Cause no matter
what.  Williams, too, took up membership, putting aside private
reservations.

It turned out, to no insider’s surprise and least of all his, that
Communist leaders continued to make life difficult for earnest and
engaged members. For a few years, Jim edited the tabloid _Labor
Today. _Formally the outlet of the unions that managed to survive the
Red Scare, joined by current labor activists, it served as an outpost
of CP influence.  He could manage the contradictions only so long.
He then returned to union building, in a variety of venues, different
unions and regions. Along the way, he suffered intermittently from his
own heavy drinking, and lost a marriage.

On the way to a different life, he had one more curious experience:
representative of a Moscow-based publisher of children’s books, from
a little office in Chicago. At last, he had become a Midwesterner of
sorts, and soon he transitioned to social worker, with an MSW degree
and a second marriage, this time to the daughter of a distinguished
Jewish Left family.

Williams reflects notably, after all this life experience, that
training as a clinical social worker in the middle 1990s, he
“learned how enormously empowering and healing it is to be involved
even if the outcome is not so good.” (59) In the end, he won a
prestigious award at the Jane Addams College of Social Work, and went
on to teach in the social work college in Tacoma. A Senior Citizen
Socialist, he offers this advice: struggle is hard.

An addendum of sorts, with labor and other organizing experience,
labor education, memberships and assorted documents related to his
life, is rich with possibilities for some future scholar of labor and
the Left.

_PAUL BUHLE is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy,
of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders._

* 1960s social movements
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* Students for a Democratic Society
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* civil rights movement
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* Communist Party USA
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* Organized labor movement
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