[Having given his first political speech when not yet a teenager,
Leon at 97 worked to pass on the wisdom gained from decades of
organizing and deep thought to a new generation. ]
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LEON WOFSY: THE ORGANIZER (1921-2019)  
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Conn Hallinan and Max Elbaum
September 5, 2019
People's World
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_ Having given his first political speech when not yet a teenager,
Leon at 97 worked to pass on the wisdom gained from decades of
organizing and deep thought to a new generation. _

Leon Wofsy, with a 1930 newspaper clipping from the Daily Worker
featuring his father Isadore Wofsy and other demonstrators who were
beaten by police on May Day that year., credit: Berkeley Historical
Society // People's World

 

When Leon Wofsy
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at age 97 on Aug. 25, 2019, progressive movements throughout the
United States lost a champion. Leon accomplished many things in his
long life. He was an innovative scientist, and a fine writer and
teacher, but above all things, he was a patient and peerless
organizer.

He honed those skills during the Great Depression and the political
repression that followed in the wake of World War II. Child of a
radical working-class family, he gave his first political speech at
age 11 in 1932 at a rally for William Z. Foster, the presidential
candidate of the Communist Party. He threw himself into organizing
just two years later, cohering a high school group that affiliated
with the radical American Student Union. As a college student at City
College of New York from 1938 to 1942, he became president of the
Marxist Cultural Society and then leader of the Young Communist
League.

Drafted into the U.S. Army and focused on the “Double V” (victory
over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home) effort during
World War II, Leon had his nose broken by an MP when protesting the
treatment of Black soldiers. Heading the Communist Party-linked Labor
Youth League from its founding in 1949 to 1956, Leon was called to
testify before the Subversive Activities Control Board during the
height of the McCarthy period.

Leon Wofsy, chairman of the Labor Youth League, as photographed in the
Daily Worker in August 1952.
People's World Archive
 

After leaving the Communist Party in 1956, Leon began his journey as a
scientist, earning a Ph.D. in 1961 and conducting pioneering medical
research on the use of antibodies to deliver effective therapies
directly and specifically to the site of disease. Denied faculty
positions at several universities because of his political views, Leon
was finally hired as a faculty member at the University of California
at Berkeley in 1964.

FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT

And he immediately brought the organizing skills he had developed over
the previous 30 years to another round of the good fight.

In the fall of that year, the university was embroiled in a battle
over free speech and the right of students to organize politically on
the campus. It was a critical moment in the history of the country.
Students had gone into the South during Freedom Summer to help
register black voters and challenge Jim Crow laws. When Bay Area
students came home in the fall, they joined the growing northern civil
rights movement that was confronting racial discrimination in San
Francisco and Oakland.

The ability to use campuses to organize boycotts, picket lines, and
sit-ins was essential to the civil rights movement, and the university
was determined to choke off that venue. That it failed was in part
because of Leon Wofsy.

There were many reasons the university was forced to retreat from its
efforts to muzzle political activism, but a key moment for the Free
Speech Movement (FSM) was when the Faculty Senate supported the
student’s demands. That might not have happened were it not for
Leon.

At the time, the FSM’s nickname for the Faculty Senate was “the
hutch,” a body composed of rabbits that would bolt for their burrows
at the first hint of trouble. But Leon could organize anything, even
rabbits. He didn’t do it alone, of course, and many other faculty
members contributed, but Leon knew how to get people who spook easily
to hold their ground.

He built up a core of people and began to push the Senate—gently,
because rabbits are timid—to act. This was not something he did out
front. He was a formidable debater (as Ronald Reagan would discover),
but his style was small meetings, phone calls, breakfast gatherings,
persuasion. He got people to move at their own pace—and then to go a
bit further.

Good organizing means dampening one’s ego, particularly in academia,
where high self-regard is sort of part of the job description. But
Leon always knew that the people being organized, not the organizer,
were the point. It was frustrating and at times plain painful, but the
Senate majority stood up to the university in 1964, even if its
fortitude later diminished.

SERIOUS POLITICS ARE MASS POLITICS

On every issue—whether it was the war in Southeast Asia, the Third
World Strike, the women’s movement, Latin American intervention, or
the anti-apartheid movement—Leon pushed that rock back up the hill.
But unlike Sisyphus, the rock never rolled all the way back down,
because he knew how to change people’s minds. And he shrugged off
the losses and retreats because he was in it for the long haul. As
long as you made some progress that was enough because it laid the
groundwork for the next fight.

He was individually brave, but he knew that serious politics was not a
matter of singular courage. What was important is that you stood with
thousands and tens of thousands. That is what he was after. The
old-fashioned way of putting that was that Leon thought serious
politics were mass politics. And he firmly believed in the sentiments
of Shelley’s poem
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the aftermath of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre: “Rise, like lions…Ye
are many—they are few!”

If he had to, however, Leon could play Horatius at the bridge
[[link removed]]. When then-Governor Ronald
Reagan tried to turn a so-called “meeting” with the UC faculty
into a photo opportunity to denounce “radicals” at UC, Wofsy
pushed himself into the middle of the cameras and challenged the
governor directly. Since Reagan couldn’t talk without a script, it
did not go well for the governor.

When he retired, Leon organized retirees into discussion groups on
domestic and foreign politics. He wrote a blog to persuade people
about issues like Israel and the Palestinians, racism, and the
importance of historical events like the Spanish Civil War.

 

Leon Wofsy at a 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam War. |
UC-Berkeley
HE NEVER STOPPED

In short, he never stopped organizing, thinking, re-thinking, and
re-configuring. His co-authored essay
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2015 on the necessity to rethink U.S. foreign policy accurately
predicted many of the current international crises and challenged
Americans to examine basic assumptions about the world. In 2017, he
offered his unique first-hand reflections on the history of socialist
struggle in the 20th century in a series of interviews with the
Berkeley Historical Society that are available for viewing here
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Just a month before he died, Leon gave a presentation on Spain and the
fight against fascism in the 1930s and ’40s to a class of activists
mostly in their 20s and 30s studying ways to combat today’s racist
right. He then posted the text of his remarks, “Looking Again at
Spain
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on his blog. It was his final post. Having given his first political
speech when not yet a teenager, Leon at 97 worked to pass on the
wisdom gained from decades of organizing and deep thought to a new
generation.

Leon Wofsy will be missed as a parent and a grandparent, as a
scientist and a friend. But he will also be missed as an organizer,
someone who deeply believed that it is possible—indeed,
imperative—to persuade and move human beings to build a kinder, more
equal, and more peaceful world. And for almost a century he did a
really good job doing just that.

Leon Wofsy, ¡Presente!

 

_[Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus. A retired
journalism professor, he previously was an editor of People's World
when it was a West Coast publication._

_Max Elbaum is author of Revolution in the Air, recently reissued by
Verso Books, and an editor of OrganizingUpgrade.com
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Thanks to the authors for sending this to xxxxxx.

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