Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000) is the first collection of historical analyses and reminiscences by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Communist youth movement in the US from the 1950s through the 1990s. The nearly fifty first-person testimonies bring to life a missing chapter in the history of US radicalism and demonstrate the influence of the post-World War II generation of Communists on social justice movements.
Most histories of US Communism end in 1956 when Red Lives just begins, when McCarthyism was on its final legs, the Civil Rights Movement was sweeping the American South and the whole country, the student movement was taking its first breaths, and a new generation of young people were seeking out socialists, communists, and the Communist Party in order to craft a radical, anti-Establishment politics. At a time when the launching of Sputnik, the Cuban Revolution, other revolutions sweeping Africa, and the example of the Vietnamese people fighting for their freedom and independence were inspiring the world, one-third of the world was also socialist, led by the Soviet Union and China. The time was propitious for a new generation in the US to also be seeking out, and joining, the CPUSA. This first volume of Red Lives, Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements, brings the stories of that generation to the forefront of American history at time when narratives of resistance are more needed than ever before.
About the Editors
Jay Schaffner, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, was born in 1952 and grew up in Skokie, a Chicago suburb. As a teenager he participated in civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War actions, becoming a leader of the area’s high school antiwar and young voters’ movements and later the Chicago Peace Council. He was in Students for a Democratic Society and the socialist, multiracial W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs and then, at sixteen, joined the Communist Party, running as a Communist for University of Illinois trustee when he was twenty-two. In 1970, Schaffner helped found the Young Workers Liberation League, and in 1974 he became a national officer. After moving to New York in 1975, he was elected to the CPUSA national committee, first in 1979 and then at every convention until 1991, when he left the Party. In 1990 he became a secretary for Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, later supervising its recording department. He negotiated electronic media agreements and was twice voted to the executive board. A founding moderator of Portside, he continues collaborating with the progressive news website. In retirement, he co-chairs a tenant committee in his housing cooperative. He belongs to the New York State Committee of the Working Families Party. Married, he has two children and four grandchildren.
Paul Friedman was born in 1947 in New York City. His family moved from the Bronx to Flushing, Queens, in 1955. Paul attended Bronx High School of Science and New York University, where he received his BS degree. He served as a national coordinator of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and youth director of the New York State district of the Communist Party while on hiatus from college. From 1970 to 1973, Paul worked as a research technician in the pediatric cardiology department at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons at the Presbyterian Medical Center. He joined the staff of Local 1199 in 1973 as an organizer and eventually worked as assistant director of organizing for 1199’s National Union of Hospitals and Health Care Employees. Prior to his retirement in 2019, Paul served in various leadership positions at 1199 Service Employees International Union; Local 100 Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union; Committee of Interns and Residents; and New York State Nurses Association. Paul participated in or led campaigns throughout the United States that brought over 20,000 new members into these unions.
Cindy Hawes was born in Pasadena, California. She grew up in the Altadena–Pasadena area before going off to study at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cindy spent her junior year abroad in Madrid, Spain, and it was during that year that she traveled with other US students to the Soviet Union. That trip, as well as other travels, sparked an interest in socialism. After graduating, she continued her studies in Mexico, and when she returned to the United States, she started a career in journalism and joined the Young Workers Liberation League and eventually the Communist Party USA. Cindy moved to New York in 1977 to be a staff member at the Daily World and in 1981 became their correspondent in Mexico City, and in 1988 in Los Angeles. She left the paper in 1989, and subsequently the Party, and for the next three years taught first grade in East Los Angeles. In 1992, she returned to Mexico City, where she worked with both the national and international press there until her retirement. She currently devotes her time to translation and her own writing.
Geoffrey Jacques is a poet, writer, and editor who has been an activist and worker in the peace, labor, and left-wing political movements since the 1970s. Born in Detroit in 1953, he was the Daily World correspondent in that city from 1978 to 1983, and a New York City-based Daily World staffer from 1983 to 1985. He has worked as a business representative and organizer for Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, and from 1990 to 1996, he was assistant editor, then associate editor, of 1199 News, the monthly magazine of 1199 SEIU, the New York City-based health and hospital workers union. He was the founding managing editor of the journal New Labor Forum and has published articles in many other journals and periodicals. Jacques earned his PhD in English from the City University of New York (CUNY), and has taught classes in English and US literature, African American studies, American studies, writing, and humanities at York College, CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Pacifica Graduate Institute, California Institute of the Arts, and elsewhere. His books include the poetry collections The Orchestra of Wind Chimes (2023) and Just for a Thrill (2004), both from Wayne State University Press, and the literary-critical study A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (Massachusetts, 2009). His poem, ”Trump,” appeared in 2019 in the journal Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. His essay “A New Civil Rights Movement, a New Journal,” an introduction to the online archive of the complete run of Freedomways magazine, appears in the open-access Reveal Digital–Independent Voices archive at JSTOR. Since 2014, he has been a moderator for Portside. He and his wife, Sherri L. Barnes, live in Ventura, California and Detroit, Michigan.
Timothy Johnson worked as a reporter for People’s World (1985), and People’s Daily World (1985-1990). He joined the Communist Party USA in Chicago in 1983 and lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. He also served on the Party’s African American Equality Commission from 1987 to 1991.
Carol Pittman was born to Communist parents — her father an African American who left Georgia during the great migration, her mother a German Jew who left Germany in 1938. Both were lifelong journalists and wrote for and edited People’s World, Daily World, and People’s Daily World. As a teen in San Francisco Carol joined the high-school activist group Students Organized Education and Action League and was active in both the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. She joined the Bay Area youth club of the Communist Party USA at seventeen. She was briefly a member of the Black Panther Party. She studied ethnography at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, Germany. She is multilingual, speaking English, German, Spanish, and Russian. Upon returning to the United States and New York City, Carol joined the Young Workers Liberation League and was active in the Chile Solidarity Movement. While Youth Council coordinator of the National Coalition for Economic Justice, she helped organize the National Youth March for Jobs in the mid-1970s, then the largest national youth mobilization for jobs. Carol became education director for the New York Party and a state committee member; and was a leader of the fight for change. She left the Party in 1991. Her work as community-outreach coordinator for a local hospital’s pediatric resource center led to becoming an organizer for Local 1199, Registered Nurse Division. After leaving 1199 she became director of NY Jobs with Justice and the Workers’ Rights Board. She was a moderator of Portside from 2003 to 2014. As community affairs coordinator and then associate director for political and community organizing of the New York State Nurses Association, she coordinated NYSNA’s labor-community work, building solidarity and organizing the response to hospital closings, until retirement. Carol is now retired, a grandmother, and volunteers at a local food pantry, a community writing workshop, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Donna Ristorucci (née Hackman) was born in 1947 in Jamaica, New York. She knew she was a socialist at the age of eleven. The oldest of three children, she asked her father on a ride home from her grandparents, “Why can’t everyone just have everything they need?” He replied, “That’s socialism.” Her parents were leftists, but McCarthyism put the kibosh on any activism. In high school, Ristorucci worked in peace and civil rights activities, especially the 1964 boycott for school integration. She joined the W.E.B. Du Bois Club in 1965 and the Communist Party USA in 1966, following its first open convention since McCarthyism. At City College she became immersed in anti-Vietnam War and open-admissions struggles on campus. She left school to work full-time for the Du Bois Clubs. She helped organize the US delegation to the 1968 World Youth Festival in Bulgaria. A founder of the Young Workers Liberation League, Ristorucci was New York education director. She participated in the Party’s national council and New York State leadership (until moving to Jersey City in 1979). In 1971, Ristorucci became the Daily World’s youth editor, serving on the editorial board. She eventually edited World Magazine, the paper’s weekly supplement. During her years at the paper, she gave birth to three sons. She left the paper and the CPUSA in 1987. After working at a labor-law office, Ristorucci was hired by Teamsters Local 237, a public employee union, as associate editor of its newspaper. Returning to school at night, she earned a BA in labor studies in 1991. In 1995 she became founding editor of 237’s retiree newspaper and assistant director of the Retiree Division. She retired in 2012 — still a Communist, still anti-imperialist, still going to demonstrations (although not quite as many).
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953, Daniel Rosenberg came to the Communist movement in 1970. His parents were Communist Party USA members and community leaders in civil rights, peace, labor, and other movements. Fearing that the McCarthyite red scare of the 1950s would impose a Nazi-type regime in the United States, the Party urged his parents to go “underground” — with him in tow — to escape persecution. They moved through various cities until returning to Brooklyn. Rosenberg soon stumbled into public school. Each day lasted a century. He read Lenin and Marx in the summer of 1969, entering eleventh grade with both conviction and verbiage. From the last row in class, he held forth, in contrast with his general silence during the previous decade. He soon joined the Young Workers Liberation League, the Party’s new youth organization. He would hold League leadership positions and later local posts in the CPUSA. He served on the Party’s history and international commissions (the latter owing to his representing the League in the anti-imperialist World Federation of Democratic Youth). He has a PhD in history from the City University of New York and taught at Adelphi University for thirty-five years. He has written several pieces about Party history.
Jackie Saindon worked for most of her life as an adult educator, teaching adults to read, as well as teaching English to second-language learners. She has also been a community activist, serving on the school board, the library board, and various other community organizations. For many years, until her retirement in 2018, she was a part-time assistant professor in the Language and Literacy Department of the University of Georgia. She was born into a Communist Party USA family and grew up as a “red-diaper baby.” Her father was sent to New York in 1952 to join other Party members sent to work in industrial settings. During that period, she read Marxist literature that had been hidden in her family’s basement. She was an active member of the W.E.B. Du Bois Club and later of the industrial section of the Party, working with grassroots members of the International Garment Workers Union and District 65 United Auto Workers, organizing office workers to join the union already established by warehouse workers. She currently lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is co- coordinator of an adult literacy program and works with community groups and the school district to revitalize their adult and family literacy programs.