Anybody have any really dedicated liberal activists in their family that they're proud of?

[Aristus]

My cousin is a civil rights lawyer in Baltimore. He's the co-author of a book on Native American land rights.

I'm very proud of him...

[CBR]

1. I would just take a liberal... even a lazy one.

:(

Kudos to your cousin!!

[old mark]

2. My dad is 92, and still refers to Nixon as "That poor man".

Family is equally divided among very liberal and very not.


mark

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. My parents, who are gone.

My dad was a union organizer for the OCAW (Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers) in the 1930s. He was the Secretary of the Local in 1940. He was also in the Pipefitters Union. He refused to be promoted past Shift Foreman in the Pipe Shop.

His term for guys who were promoted and sold out to management was "suckbutt"!!! :D

The dirty four-letter word around our house was "scab".

He said that if you showed up on a picket line in the 1930s at a refinery, you got your head busted open and your ass thrown in jail. He said that Sophie Mandell (whose husband was the first labor lawyer in Houston, Arthur) bailed everybody out, posted $100 bail.

He voted for Norman Thomas (Socialist Party Candidate) in '32. He said there was no real difference between the platforms of Hoover and Roosevelt, but after he was elected, FDR adopted nearly everything that Norman Thomas wanted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Thomas

Dad told me how the OCAW union raised several thousand dollars (the equivalent of $80,000 today) for the widows and orphans after Texas City blew up in 1947 (worst industrial accident in the United States).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Disaster

Mom and dad were both in the Harris County Democrats, the progressive group of Houston Democrats. It was founded by Frankie Carter Randolph and Billie Carr, after the local Dems endorsed Eisenhower in '52. They knew Barbara Jordan and Craig Washington's father, who was a socialist union organizer. Craig Washington was one of the holders of Barbara Jordan's Congressional seat (now held by Sheila Jackson Lee).

The first politician I heard mom gripe about was "That bastard Richard Nixon". She related how he smeared Helen Gahagan Douglas when running against her for Congress.

Mom's parents were Democrats too.

Somebody once asked me what my childhood home was like. I said, "We didn't have any pictures of Jesus on the wall, but we had THREE pictures of John F. Kennedy". :D

Republicans were a strange exotic species to be avoided. And boring as well.

Dad said that if somebody called him a Communist, he was probably doing something right. :D :D


And a good friend of mine learned organizing from Saul Alinsky, and knew Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez. :D