Jim Williams’s Quest for Justice

Jim Williams, one of a handful early Students for a Democratic Society members still active politically, was also a founder of the Southern Student Organizing Committee and a veteran union organizer. He has finally provided us with a memoir, Life on the Left: James Williams and the Quest for Justice (Changemaker).

Prof. Michael Honey, a distinguished historian of the Southern labor and civil rights movement—also a political veteran of the same region—prompted Williams by asking the questions. This is an oral history, in effect, covering the many years and staggering varieties of experience in Williams’s life.

His humble background, with its unusual twists and turns, will fascinate the reader. Williams’s blue-collar family moved through various parts of the South, sometimes so hard-put that he landed with relatives. At 11, he contracted Polio, the dreaded children’s disease of the 1950s. In a fascinating turnaround, he rose at age 17 from “Special Education” (all those who did not seem fit in physically, for any reason) to the college-bound track. He had scored so high on tests that nothing could hold him back.

He had already begun to grapple with the appearance of the civil rights movement around him. At first, puzzled that “Negro” drinking fountains could exist, he was stunned to learn about the lynching of African American teen Emmet Till.  College called and Jim answered, but he had meanwhile begun immersing himself in The Movement. In a sense, he had already arrived at his destiny.

Williams did the college activist things of 1962 at Kentucky, inviting aged socialist leader Norman Thomas to speak on campus—over the objections of more prominent fellow student Mitch McConnell—and worked in the local War Resisters League. Soon, he took part in a civil rights march on Frankfurt, Kentucky, inspired by the famed march and demonstration in Washington. Occupying the legislative gallery back in Frankfurt, he and a handful of fellow students resolved to stay, going on a hunger strike with nothing but water for a week. Ignored by the politicians and the press, a failure in the usual sense, the effort actually prepared Williams for future hopes and setbacks.

He soon joined the labor movement in a big way. He heard of a wildcat strike in eastern Kentucky, where the famed (but by this time, badly aged) John L. Lewis had cut a deal with the struggling coal companies to stop paying their share of payments to the health fund—the remnant of the great labor victories in the receding past. The degree of extreme poverty in miners’ communities staggered Williams, who was himself used to seeing the poor and being poor. Great anecdote: the FBI stopped by to tell Williams’ mother that her son was overthrowing the government. She answered flatly, in his account, “Don’t worry, he never finishes anything he starts.” (p.18)

By his final year in college, he had become active in SDS and SSOC and by 1964, traveled to New York to become active in the new SDS Political Action Project. (Its offshoot, the Radical Education Project, founded in 1966, sponsored one new publication: Radical America, founded by this reviewer in 1967, and still around until the end of the century.) From there, Williams moved into a group formerly associated with the Communist Party to build a coalition of labor, the civil rights and peace movements. Together, as he recalls, this would, they hoped, realign the Democratic Party in a leftish direction.

Not many young activists around budding (but still small) SDS would seek to combine labor and civil rights in this way. Fewer still would link up with active Communist Party members to do it. As Williams explains,  only the CP had the commitment and the contacts to hook up simultaneously with civil rights, labor and the peace contingent. This conclusion goes against the widespread belief that the CP had been hopelessly isolated by the 1956 split (following the revelations of Stalin’s crimes and the uprising of Hungarians against Soviet domination), run still further into the ground by the bullying and incompetent Gus Hall at the service of Russian commands.

This belief had a real basis in fact. But a sufficient segment of the older, once-far larger CP had hung in, often quietly or even secretly within their communities, linked to lawyers who would defend political prisoners, likewise work doggedly within civil rights, peace coalitions and the peace movement. Young activists in CPish circles often came from Jewish Communist families in particular, and unlike many New Leftists, were likely to stick with The Cause no matter what.  Williams, too, took up membership, putting aside private reservations.

It turned out, to no insider’s surprise and least of all his, that Communist leaders continued to make life difficult for earnest and engaged members. For a few years, Jim edited the tabloid Labor Today. Formally the outlet of the unions that managed to survive the Red Scare, joined by current labor activists, it served as an outpost of CP influence.  He could manage the contradictions only so long. He then returned to union building, in a variety of venues, different unions and regions. Along the way, he suffered intermittently from his own heavy drinking, and lost a marriage.

On the way to a different life, he had one more curious experience: representative of a Moscow-based publisher of children’s books, from a little office in Chicago. At last, he had become a Midwesterner of sorts, and soon he transitioned to social worker, with an MSW degree and a second marriage, this time to the daughter of a distinguished Jewish Left family.

Williams reflects notably, after all this life experience, that training as a clinical social worker in the middle 1990s, he “learned how enormously empowering and healing it is to be involved even if the outcome is not so good.” (59) In the end, he won a prestigious award at the Jane Addams College of Social Work, and went on to teach in the social work college in Tacoma. A Senior Citizen Socialist, he offers this advice: struggle is hard.

An addendum of sorts, with labor and other organizing experience, labor education, memberships and assorted documents related to his life, is rich with possibilities for some future scholar of labor and the Left.

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