The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 67/No. 24           July 14, 2003  
 
 
Arthur Lobman,
cadre of the SWP
for 44 years, dies
(feature article)
 
BY PATRICK O’NEILL  
Arthur Lobman, a cadre of the Socialist Workers Party for nearly 45 years, died at New York Veterans Administration Hospital June 29. He was 78 years old. Members and supporters of the New York SWP and Young Socialists will host a memorial meeting on Sunday, July 6, to honor his contributions to the communist movement.

Lobman was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1924. As a young man he was repelled by the brutal character of Jim Crow segregation and anti-Black racism. In the 1930s he was attracted to the international defense campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine Blacks framed up in Alabama on charges of raping two white women.

Drafted in 1943 during World War II, Lobman’s experiences as part of the U.S. occupation force in postwar Japan brought him face to face with the horrors of that imperialist war, which he had initially backed. In 1945 he was among the U.S. troops who entered the city of Osaka. Earlier that year the city had been destroyed by U.S. firebombing raids in which some 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed across the country. At a Militant Labor Forum a few months ago, Lobman described seeing families sleeping in subway tunnels after their wood homes had been incinerated.

Lobman also recalled the buzz in the armed forces stirred up by the Double V campaign organized in the United States during the war. A victory in Washington’s “war for democracy” against Japan and Germany, many Black organizations said, would ring hollow without a simultaneous victory in the war against racism in U.S. society—including in the Jim Crow-organized armed forces. Tens of thousands of Black GIs identified with the protests back home, as did many white soldiers, Lobman included.

While studying history at Harvard and Columbia Universities in the late 1940s and 50s, Lobman joined actions in support of unions and the emerging mass civil rights movement. In 1948 he actively backed the presidential campaign of former U.S. vice president Henry Wallace on the ticket of the Progressive Party, a short-lived capitalist party supported that year by many liberals and middle-class radicals, as well as the Communist Party.

By the late 1950s, Lobman—then in his mid-thirties—had become convinced of the need for a socialist revolution in the United States, and had come to recognize that achieving that goal was only possible if the working class built a party and social movement independent of the capitalist parties and politicians of all stripes. Acting on that conviction, he joined the SWP in early 1959.

That year he married Ethel Bloch, a cadre of the party in New York who remained his companion until her death in 1999. Like millions of people around the world, Lobman was inspired by the victory of the Cuban revolution in January 1959. He and Ethel traveled to Cuba in the summer of 1960 so they could participate more effectively in efforts to defend Cuba and build a movement to make a revolution in the United States.

Lobman was an active party cadre in New York, carrying out a range of political activity. He sold the Militant, the monthly Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books off weekly literature tables on street corners, at political events, and at plant gates. He was a crack petitioner in efforts to get SWP candidates on the ballot, usually handling several signature boards at a time and ending up among those with the highest daily rates. He took an active part in educational classes and the weekly Militant Labor Forum series.

Until his retirement in 1986, Lobman worked as an “answer man” for Grolier’s Encyclopedia, researching questions from readers, and then as a proofreader. The skills he gained served him and the Militant well in recent years; until just a few weeks ago, Lobman volunteered several days a week—often on call—as a proofreader for this newspaper. He also supplied a number of newsstands with copies of the Militant each week.

The meeting to celebrate Lobman’s life will be held July 6 (see ad on left). Messages to the meeting can be mailed to the New York SWP, c/o Pathfinder Books, P.O. Box 30, New York, NY 10018. E-mail ny_swp@verizon.net  
 
 
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