[Jeff was a glorious model of a human being. Not a man without
flaws, but a man with great passion, intelligence, determination,
caring, humility, generosity, and an unwavering drive toward justice.]
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LONG LIVE JEFF PERRY  
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Gene Bruskin
September 26, 2022
Stansbury Forum
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_ Jeff was a glorious model of a human being. Not a man without
flaws, but a man with great passion, intelligence, determination,
caring, humility, generosity, and an unwavering drive toward justice.
_

Jeff and I at our 50th reunion, June, 2018,

 

For 58 years Jeff was one of my closest friends. The intertwining of
our lives from our first meeting is most remarkable.

My memory, part imagination, was wandering around the Princeton campus
on the first day of my freshman year in 1964, feeling lost and totally
out of place and walking right into Jeff. 

That instant “collision”, turned into an instant connection –
two working class guys at Princeton on basketball scholarships feeling
alone. We traveled a long way since then, together, in parallel,
mutually inspired, in solidarity, in touch, buddies, changing and
challenging, in each other’s corner, on the phone, on the streets of
Manhattan, always within reach. You couldn’t help but like Jeff,
love Jeff. He had that type of charm and genuineness.

Now he is gone—but his life and work touched so many I couldn’t
even begin to do that justice. 

But I do know how he touched mine. 

We struggled with our basketball careers and our studies at Princeton,
eventually both transformed by the winds of change in the 60s as the
counterculture and the anti-war movement seeped into us both and began
to radicalize us.

We both majored in Psychology; I think it seemed like an easier major
than the sciences.

We hitchhiked to Vassar and other women’s colleges, desperate, but
unsuccessful, at meeting someone, to bring to all male Princeton for a
weekend date, like all the prep school guys seemed to be doing

We worked at Camp Tonset on Cape Cod the summer of 1966 as counselors,
and with Jeff’s encouragement, I made an unsuccessful (at first)
attempt to pick up a beautiful woman on the beach who would eventually
become my first wife.

We joined SDS our senior year, I think Jeff signed up first, and
marched against the war in our first demo, in Newark. 

While I taught in the South Bronx in 1968 to avoid the draft, I
remember Jeff leaving the country and somehow, in Che style, hitching
around South America for several months.

By the fall of 1969 Jeff was selling the Liberated Guardian on the
streets of New York and visiting me regularly at my apartment on
190th St. in Manhattan. Jeff landed in Hoboken working with the
Puerto Rican socialist party. We kept moving left, together.

In this tumultuous “Ocean Hill Brownsville” era in NYC, Jeff
helped me figure out how to navigate the heated-up city politics
surrounding the union strikes, antisemitism, race and class. Then, as
I struggled in my second year of teaching, he gave me some clear
advice that once again changed my life:

“Gene’” he said, after spending a day in my classroom at a
neglected elementary school filled with poor and wonderful children of
color, “You are part of the oppressive system by teaching here. This
school is not here for learning – just for keeping these kids off
the streets. You are losing the battle to be useful and helpful. (I
had actually slapped a kid on the head for misbehaving, only to find
that one of his parents had shot the other that morning). “You need
to quit.”

Boom. It hit me in the gut – he was right. I quit shortly after
that.

Jeff then had an answer to my next question: Now what? The draft was
looming. “Come with me to Cuba on the March 1970 Venceremos Brigade
to cut sugar cane in solidarity during ‘The Year of the Ten Million
Tons.” While you are there send them postcards every day – they
have to put them in your file and won’t want you after that.”

Going to Cuba changed the political trajectory of my life. We were
exposed to revolutionaries from Africa, Vietnam, Uruguay and beyond,
including meeting with Fidel. Our commitment to socialism and
internationalism were permanently solidified.

Meanwhile, if I remember correctly, Jeff avoided the draft by
disrupting his induction ceremony, jumping up and yelling about the
war and handing out literature in support of the NLF.

Somehow in the 70s Jeff managed to get into the Harvard Ed school but
left because of the elitism and liberal hypocrisy.

After that Jeff started working at the giant bulk mail center in
Jersey City and became part of the historic wildcat national postal
strike in 1978. He launched a 33-year career in the National Postal
Mail handlers Union (NPMHU).

While his scholarly work was emerging, he stayed with Local 300 and by
1989 was part of a Black-led national rank and file insurgency to take
over the union. (Part of LIUNA, the Laborers Union). 

Not satisfied with helping to build a strong anti-racist rank and file
local as Secretary Treasurer, Jeff was on an continuous mission to
publicly expose the corrupt president and leader of LIUNA, Anthony
Fosco, a man very few people ever choose to challenge.

Once again, Jeff changed my life, convincing the new NPMHU national
leadership to hire me and my good friend Bill Fletcher to build a
contract campaign for the 1990 national postal negotiations. That
brought me to DC which led to many other jobs organizing with national
unions, and became my home until today.

Backing up to the late 70s and eighties, while working part time at
the “Bulk” as it was called, Jeff remarkably got his PHD at
Columbia. During this period, he built a close relationship with
Theodore Allen and invited me into Ted’s world, again a
life-changing event for me.

Ted was a working-class self-educated scholar, former WV miner and
union leader, who spent decades developing his research that led to
the monumental, pioneering two-volume work on The _Invention of the
White Race. _He broke new ground, starting in the 60’s, with a deep
understanding of white skin privilege from a class perspective and the
origin and centrality of white supremacy in understanding the history
of the US working class. Knowing and loving Ted, a sweet and
unpretentious man, changed my life and forever enriched my
understanding of the profound connection between race and class.

When Ted died in 2005, Jeff became the executor of his works and his
tireless efforts got Ted’s extensive writings out deep into the
world, and his papers placed at the University of Mass, Amherst
archives; appropriately, where WEB Dubois archives are preserved.
(Here’s a link to Jeff Perry’s Stansbury Forum piece Ted Allen’s
work: THEODORE W. ALLEN’S WORK ON CENTRALITY OF STRUGGLE AGAINST
WHITE SUPREMACY GROWING IN IMPORTANCE ON 98TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS
BIRTH
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While at Columbia Jeff discovered the under-appreciated voice of
Hubert Harrison, a brilliant early 20th century Caribbean-born writer
and leader, known in his day as the Father of Harlem Radicalism, who
electrified NYC during his short life. Harrison’s brilliant insights
into the connections between race and class went unnoticed by history
until Jeff decided to make it his life mission to find out about him
and tell the world. He worked on this project until he died after
completing A GROUNDBREAKING TWO VOLUME WORK ON HARRISON’S
REMARKABLE LIFE AND IDEAS IN 2021
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Not surprisingly, Jeff remained an internationalist and went with me
and others in 1988 on a labor delegation to the West Bank sponsored by
the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee. We returned and gave
testimony to the Commerce Department challenging the GSP (trade
preferences) given to Israel due to the extensive labor violations
against Palestinian workers and trade unions. The images of
Palestinians and their mistreatment by Israeli authorities were seared
into our minds forever.

To say that Jeff was a central player in my life is an understatement
of an understatement. One other crowning joint achievement happened in
1994 when Jeff and his wife Becky adopted their daughter Perri from
China and my wife Evie and I followed shortly, adopting our daughter
Nadja from Russia. Both girls were four years old. Being a father was
a huge addition to both of our lives and Jeff spent decades, until his
death, committed to his wonderful wife, Becky Hom while Evie and I
have loved and lived our lives together to this day.

Jeff was a glorious model of a human beings. Not a man without flaws,
but a man with great passion, intelligence, determination, caring,
humility, generosity, and an unwavering drive toward justice.  Those
wishing to honor Jeff need only to read his works on Harrison and
those of Jeff’s mentor Theodore Allen and follow the powerful
insights they contain to help guide our struggle.

There is a song (by ‘Just Keith and Evelyn’) “May the work
I’ve done speak for me.”  I would add about Jeff, “May the
life I have led speak for me”

Jeff Perry has passed. Long live Jeff Perry.

* In Memoriam
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