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   Vol.65/No.43            November 12, 2001 
 
 
Meeting celebrates life of Priscilla Schenk
Three decades of political activity as a cadre of the SWP and participant in vanguard struggles of working people
(feature article)
 
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  
NEW YORK--"Priscilla Schenk began absorbing communist politics as soon as she joined the Young Socialist Alliance. She applied this understanding of working-class politics very effectively over her three decades of political activity as a cadre of the Socialist Workers Party and as a participant in the vanguard struggles of workers and farmers," said Socialist Workers Party leader Norton Sandler.

Sandler was speaking at a public meeting of 140 people, held here October 28 at Columbia University to celebrate the life and political work of Priscilla Schenk, who died October 16 after a long battle with a debilitating illness.

Schenk was part of the communist movement's turn to the industrial working class beginning in the late 1970s, first as a garment worker in the New York area and later as a worker in a United Auto Workers-organized factory in Des Moines, Iowa. She ran as the SWP's candidate for public office three times--in Denver in 1976; in Newark, New Jersey, in 1984; and in Des Moines in 1991. Over the course of a number of years she took on various national responsibilities: as a member of the Militant staff, in the party's national office, and in Pathfinder's printshop.

Attractive displays set up around the meeting room highlighted some of the major political developments, from the 1960s to the present, that Schenk was influenced by and actively participated in together with other cadres of the Socialist Workers Party. These included the mass movement against the war in Vietnam; the struggle for Chicano rights; fights against government frame-ups and attacks on workers' rights by the political police; the campaign against Washington's war on Iraq; farmers' struggles against foreclosures; and the pattern of working-class resistance today.

Those attending the October 28 meeting, which was hosted by the SWP branches in New York and New Jersey and the New York Young Socialists, came from throughout the New York and New Jersey area. They also arrived from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allentown, Pennsylvania; Boston; Washington, D.C.; Cleveland; Detroit; Miami; Atlanta; Chicago; Montreal; and other cities. The event was chaired by Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party national secretary.

Kathleen Fitzgerald, a garment worker in Pittsburgh who collaborated with Schenk when they were both members of the Newark branch of the SWP in the 1990s and who worked closely with her in the last few months of her life, described some of the events taking place in the world when Priscilla was a young woman that led her to become a political person and live her life as a disciplined revolutionary in the working-class movement.

Schenk, born in 1949, grew up on a family farm near Evansville in southern Indiana. One of 13 children, she went to Catholic grade school and then attended an all-girls boarding school run by Benedictine nuns in nearby Ferdinand. Like many others of her generation, she was affected by the big social and political changes in the world, which were creating an upheaval within the Catholic Church. At that time it was not uncommon for the older daughters in Catholic families to be encouraged to become nuns, but Priscilla rejected that idea. She left the boarding school and returned to finish high school in her home town.

Graduating from high school in 1968, Schenk was profoundly affected by big events in the United States and the world, from the rebellions in Black communities around the nation after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King to the movement for women's liberation and the growing movement against Washington's war on Vietnam. Schenk enrolled at St. Joseph's College and then the University of Indiana in Bloomington. She joined the Young Socialist Alliance and became actively involved in building the Student Mobilization Committee against the War in Vietnam (SMC) at the Bloomington campus.

The YSA had been involved in an important struggle at Bloomington. Several years earlier, in May 1963, three students who were YSA members at the University of Indiana had been indicted under the state's Communism Act, a 1951 "anti-subversive" law. The young socialists were accused of meeting "for the purpose of advocating or teaching that the government of the United States, or of the State of Indiana, should be overthrown by force, violence, or any unlawful means."

It took a nearly four-year defense campaign that won broad support to finally force the state prosecutor to drop the charges against the Bloomington 3, as the case became known, in December 1966.  
 
Grounded in Marxist politics
As part of their revolutionary political work, Schenk and her fellow YSA members at Bloomington recruited a group of five students who were members of a radical collective. The group, active in the fight against the Vietnam war, had previously looked to the Stalinist leadership of China under Mao Tse-tung for political guidance. One of the events that exposed Mao's class-collaborationist course was his welcome of U.S. president Richard Nixon to China as Washington was savagely bombing Vietnam.

In his remarks, Barnes pointed out that what enabled the YSA members to recruit these students was not that they were the best builders of the Student Mobilization Committee and the antiwar movement. Rather, it was the ability of YSA members to effectively discuss and argue a communist explanation of world and U.S. politics. They explained the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism on a world scale, from Moscow to Beijing, and pointed to the proletarian leadership that was needed, drawing on the lessons of the communist movement over several decades, from the October 1917 Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution to the Cuban Revolution today.

Schenk and other YSAers were well-grounded in Marxism from systematically reading, studying, and applying communist politics together with SWP members. One of the five who were recruited to the YSA at that time sent a message to the meeting commenting that "Priscilla knew her stuff."

"There are three steps involved in becoming a communist," Barnes stated. The first is knowing what you're rebelling against, but that is not sufficient. The second is figuring out what you're for. While this is more important than simply what you're against, it's as far as many who call themselves socialists get, he noted. The third is realizing the need to advance along the line of march of the working class, which involves figuring out how to link up with those who came before and will come afterward. That effort cannot be accomplished as an individual--you need to be part of a communist organization.

Communism "is not just a good idea," Barnes stated. "What happens to the human race depends upon whether such a movement can be consciously organized."

In 1973 Schenk and a friend moved to Lebanon, Fitzgerald recounted. In Beirut she volunteered at an office set up to defend Palestinian rights, and witnessed firsthand the determined fight by Palestinians living in Lebanon to win the right to return to their homeland. That year the Israeli regime launched a war against Egypt, Syria, and other nations in the region. She also traveled through France and Greece, at a time when huge demonstrations by working people toppled the Greek military dictatorship.

After returning to the United States the following year, Schenk rejoined the YSA and transferred to Denver, where she joined the Socialist Workers Party. "It was here that she became a disciplined soldier of the party," Sandler stated in his presentation.

"Denver was one of the centers of the Chicano struggle," Sandler noted. "There were struggles for bilingual education, against the deportation of Mexican activists, and the emergence of a Chicano political party, the Raza Unida Party. Labor struggles led by the United Farm Workers union were also at their peak."

In March 1973, more than 200 Denver cops mounted an attack on the Escuela Tlatelolco, a school run by the Crusade for Justice, a Chicano rights group. In the course of this attack, a school dormitory was blown up and a Crusade activist killed. More than 100 other Chicano activists were arrested on various frame-up charges. The following year, in May 1974, bombs placed in cars by right-wingers took the lives of six activists in Boulder, Colorado.

Sandler explained that "the SWP branch was involved in the protests against police harassment of the Chicano movement," including a march of 3,000 people in March 1974. "Party members threw themselves into these events. Like the rest of the party nationally, comrades in Denver were also involved in defending Black youth in Boston under attack by rightists trying to prevent the implementation of desegregation of the schools, as well as defending a woman's right to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment," he noted.  
 
Fight against FBI spying, disruption
In 1976 Schenk ran as the Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Congress in the Denver area. On July 7 of that year, the SWP offices were burglarized and party files, membership lists, and financial records were removed. In response to this and other instances of harassment, SWP candidate Schenk issued a statement underlining the fact that the "FBI had admitted to similar cloak and dagger-type break-ins. Did they engineer this black-bag job as well?"

At first the FBI claimed it had no knowledge of the break-in, but within weeks the spy agency was forced to admit that the burglary was carried out by Timothy Redfearn, an FBI informer who had joined the YSA. The cops picked up Redfearn on a charge of stealing furniture from the house of a neighbor, at which time they found the material he had stolen from the SWP.

John Studer, a leader of the SWP in Philadelphia who worked with Schenk over the years, told the meeting that in 1973 the SWP and YSA filed a lawsuit against the FBI, CIA, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and other federal police agencies for decades of spying and disruption against the two socialist organizations. To win broad support and raise funds for the case the Political Rights Defense Fund (PRDF) was organized.

"This case was unique," said Studer, who served as executive director of PRDF during this fight. Instead of the government putting socialists on trial, "We were the plaintiffs. We put them on trial." Through this case, tens of thousands of previously secret FBI documents detailing the government finks' spying, burglaries, black-bag jobs, and other attempts to disrupt the SWP and YSA were made public. In 1986 federal judge Thomas Griesa ruled in favor of the SWP and YSA and awarded them $264,000 in damages. Two years later the government finally withdrew its appeal of the ruling, bringing the 15-year fight to a successful conclusion.

"At the trial in 1981," Studer noted, "Priscilla testified about the SWP's experience in Denver with government harassment" and detailed the role of FBI snoop Redfearn.

At that time the Socialist Workers Party was also involved in struggles to defend immigrant workers, winning some to its ranks in the course of these battles. One was Héctor Marroquín, a Mexican-born youth who had fled to the United States in 1974 because of frame-up charges by Mexican authorities for his political activities. Marroquín got a job at a Coca-Cola plant in Houston, where he participated in a union-organizing drive. He soon met and joined the SWP.

The INS sought to deport Marroquín back to Mexico where his life was in jeopardy. The Héctor Marroquín Defense Committee waged an 11-year fight in his defense, and eventually he won the right to legal residence. Schenk was a leading participant and spokesperson for this committee, "which took this fight to workers from one end of the country to another," Studer stated.  
 
Struggles by meat packers in Iowa
In 1988 Schenk moved to Des Moines to join her party's political work there as an industrial worker and unionist. In the mid- and late- 1980s, a wave of struggles by meat packers had erupted in the Midwest, and the Socialist Workers Party joined these fights, establishing branches in Des Moines and other cities in the region.

On March 1, 1988, INS cops raided the Swift packinghouse in Des Moines, arresting 17 immigrant workers. Other workers organized protests in their defense. Among them was Mark Curtis, a meatpacker at Swift and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union and also of the SWP. On March 4, Curtis was arrested and framed up on charges of raping a 15-year-old Black girl. As the cops beat Curtis in the station, they called him a "Mexican-lover, just like you love those coloreds."

As part of her work in the labor movement, Schenk took on important responsibilities in the Mark Curtis Defense Committee that was established. The defense campaign, carried out among working people and other supporters of democratic rights throughout the country, was also international. In 1991 Schenk took part in a weeklong trip to Mexico, winning the endorsement of the electrical workers and garment workers unions as well as auto, airline, and other workers. After an eight-year fight Curtis won parole and was released from prison in 1996.

Schenk got a job making brake liners at an Emco plant, organized by the United Auto Workers. As an active unionist, she helped organize a speaking tour of farming areas in the state for New Zealand farm activist Denis Hiestand. She also took part in the fight of Iowa farmer Harold Dunkelberger against the government's seizure of his land, and wrote about this fight for the Militant.

When cops beat Larry Milton, a 35-year-old Black man in Des Moines, she joined many protests for justice organized around the slogan "No excuse."  
 
'Effective in winning farmers, workers'
Barnes and other speakers noted that 29 messages were sent to the meeting by individuals who had worked with Schenk over the years, including messages from both Marroquín and Curtis. Messages were also received from the leaderships of Communist Leagues in several countries.

From Carlisle, Iowa, Hazel Zimmerman, the former secretary of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee, wrote, "Because of her farm background, her varied experiences as an industrial worker, and her ability to communicate in both English and Spanish, Priscilla was very effective in winning farmers, co-workers, and a broad spectrum of other people who shared her goals of social and economic justice. She had a profound effect on the development of my personal development as an activist and supporter of the SWP."

Julia Terrell, the committee's treasurer, said that Schenk's life was "so well spent, a life of so much value." She added, "As I interacted with Priscilla I became aware of her love of justice and her dedicated advocacy for the working class--my people."

In January 1991, shortly after Washington began its bombing of Iraq, the personnel manager at Emco informed Schenk, the Socialist Workers candidate for school board at the time, that two "gentlemen" were waiting to talk to her in the front office. "They turned out to be not gentlemen but agents from the U.S. Secret Service and the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation," Studer said. They claimed to have received an anonymous phone call saying that Schenk and another worker in the plant had been overheard threatening to kill then-president George Bush and the governor of Iowa.

An experienced working-class militant, Schenk said this claim was nonsense and refused to talk to them. She asked if she was under arrest. When the agents replied no, Schenk said she had nothing to say to the two political police. She demanded an attorney, which the cops refused. She then insisted that her union steward be present. The agents finally gave in to this demand, and when the steward defended Schenk's right to refuse to answer questions, they had to let her go.

They then proceeded to call in Schenk's co-worker, Harold Searcy, for interrogation. A few days later, speaking at a Militant Labor Forum in Des Moines, Searcy said, "Over the past few weeks I read a lot in the papers about how people in this country had to beware of terrorists from the Middle East. It turned out the only people I have been harassed by showed up at Emco, and they were from the government." He joined the YSA that evening. Schenk wrote a Union Talk column in the Militant entitled "Unions should oppose cop interrogation at work."

As a member of the Newark branch in the early 1980s, Schenk joined the recently launched effort to build the party's trade union fraction in the garment industry. She took on the task of learning to sew and, being fluent in Spanish, was all the more effective in reaching out to Spanish-speaking workers. As a garment worker, she ran for U.S. Senate from New Jersey on the Socialist Workers ticket in 1984.  
 
Absorbed the importance of 'we'
As the party became rooted in the industrial working class and its unions, it began to study more systematically the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Barnes noted that he had discussions with Schenk about the Theses on Feuerbach written by the young Marx in 1845, which she had studied carefully. In this article Marx said the essence of humans "is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."

Schenk absorbed the importance of "we," Barnes noted. "We can do more than a collection of I's, and only by doing that can working people defeat the power, wealth, and domination of the capitalist ruling class."

Barnes explained that as a disciplined communist worker, Schenk focused on carrying through any challenging task to the end. Then "she easily relaxed when the task was over. She had the kind of fun you have after accomplishing something big. And Priscilla was great fun."

Amy Husk, the organizer of the Newark branch of the SWP today, described Schenk's recent political contributions in helping to strengthen the party unit there and help root it in a workers district in the city. Schenk was elected and served as the branch organizer from January to April of this year. "During some of this time she would be ill, and even hospitalized for a day or two, but being ill was never her framework; it was a fact of life she had to deal with in order to keep doing the political work that was so important to her," Husk said.

Jacob Perasso, the organizer of the Young Socialists National Executive Committee, spoke about the example that a worker-bolshevik like Schenk set for young people coming toward the communist movement. Building the Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party is all the more important today as Washington intensifies its war against Afghanistan and steps up its assault on working people at home, including the current INS detention without charges of some 1,000 immigrants in the United States branded as "terrorist suspects," Perasso said.

Barnes quoted from a message sent by Bobbi Negrón that highlighted the role Schenk played in helping to recruit her to the Young Socialists in 1998. "Priscilla was always the one who would call about forums and to discuss articles in the Militant," Negrón wrote. "She and Maurice would invite me over to dinner and talk," she added, referring to Maurice Williams, Schenk's companion. "I felt very welcome, not only to her home, but to the movement. I was just astonished by all these books."

Barnes described the prolonged battle Schenk waged against her illness, a blood-clotting disorder. "She fought to maximize the possibility of doing what she loved so much to do, and this gained the admiration of a group of doctors," Barnes said. She was eventually admitted to the University of Pittsburgh's Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute and put under the care of one of the leading physicians in the field. She decided to have an operation that had never yet been accomplished successfully, and that in the end did not succeed. The doctor came to admire Schenk, Barnes noted. "I've never known a famous surgeon to spend the entire night in the recovery room. What they did they did together: the world-class doctor and Priscilla the dedicated revolutionist," said Barnes.  
 
Responsibilities in party center
Over the years Schenk took on a number of national responsibilities in the party's center in New York. She was a copy editor for the Militant from 1978 to 1981. She served on the party's control commission in the mid-1990s.

In the mid-1980s Schenk worked as a secretary in the SWP national office and on national party finances. Sandler noted that the fact that party cadres like Schenk have absorbed communist politics is what qualifies them for such assignments that require trust, confidentiality, discipline, and attention to detail.

"In 1995 Priscilla transferred back to New York from Des Moines to take an assignment in the party's printshop," Sandler said. "She didn't think twice about quitting her job to take a national party assignment. She considered it an honor."

"Priscilla never saw an iota of difference between what she was doing in the party apparatus and the work she was carrying out in the Newark branch--selling Pathfinder books and the Militant, participating in Militant Labor Forums, winning workers and young people to the communist movement," Sandler continued. "She would have laughed at any suggestion to the contrary."

Schenk took great pride in the progress being made in the party's printshop with the introduction of time-saving and cost-efficient computer-to-plate equipment that allowed the shop to eliminate its entire pre-press department in the late 1990s and the project undertaken by supporters of Pathfinder Press around the world to convert to digital form the publisher's more than 350 books and pamphlets, Sandler pointed out. She would often ask supporters questions about the books they were working on at the time.

A collection for the Pathfinder Fund at the October 28 meeting brought in $2,500. Before and at the end of the meeting, a Pathfinder book table offering "supersaver" discounts was swamped with customers. Many participants left with large stacks of books and pamphlets sold at bargain basement prices of $1 or $2. Some 650 revolutionary titles were sold.  
 
 
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