[Fwd: [BRC-NEWS] Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker]

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo <kklcac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Book Review

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Always Bring A Crowd:
The Story of Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker.
By Bea Lumpkin
International Publishers, NY, paper, $12.95
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Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker

By John Woodford <johnwood@xxxxxxxxx>

This is the story of an extraordinary "common man." Sounds
like a logical impossibility, doesn't it? But in Always
Bring a Crowd, the story of steelworker Frank Lumpkin, you
will meet such a man, a hero for our times. You will read a
life story that emerges from the blast furnace of American
history-the part of American history that is generally
shielded from our eyes. (And speaking of shielding, if the
AFL-CIO doesn't promote and mass-produce this book, it's not
serious about gaining strength in American politics.)

In these days of wealth and luxury for a few, we all see the
decline of our cities, farms, industrial base, schools,
health care system and pensions. Our mass media, our public
intellectuals, our politicians wring their hands and say,
Too bad, but there is no way to counter the "global" and
"high-tech" forces sending the majority of us on this
pell-mell descent in a handbasket bound for economic hell.
Or they say, Just be patient and await the "trickle down."
Or they ignore the growing numbers of poorly paid and
insecure salary and wage workers and say, That's just the
way things are.

Yet here stands the example of Frank Lumpkin. His life story
shows us how to get out of the handbasket and start building
up a better society. It will take union power. No other
social force has its potential influence. Lumpkin
demonstrated this in the campaign he's best known for in the
Chicago area-the 17-year fight that prevented a giant steel
firm and its holding companies from cheating 2,700 workers
in a corrupt plant shutdown scheme.

That's just his longest fight, however. The book recounts
the effective role he has played in every other kind of
social justice struggle our country has seen, including
police brutality, oppression of women, fair housing, fair
employment and tenants rights, among others.

"Bring a crowd." Yes. We all know that it is masses of
people in action who make the turning points in history.
Since might concentrated in a few hands usually does wrong,
everyday folk must organize in large numbers if they are to
defend themselves and advance against elite powers that
threaten their freedom, well-being and survival. But the
insight, charisma, patience, and motivation needed to "bring
a crowd" takes creativity and genius possessed by very few.
As union man Ed Sadlowski says of Lumpkin in the foreword,
"Maybe, if you're lucky enough, you'll cross paths with
someone like him within your own lifetime."

What path is Lumpkin on? As this book shows, people like
Frank Lumpkin don't just happen. Born in 1916, Lumpkin comes
from a family whose upward mobility began on plantations and
sharecropping land in Georgia and then in the orange groves
of Florida at a time when Afro-Americans did most of the
picking. Big, powerful and smart-and fortified by a family
that prized work, study and standing up against racism-Frank
worked in fields, chauffeured, boxed as "K.O." Lumpkin and
moved to Buffalo and became a steelworker in the early
1940s.

Lumpkin is one of 10 brothers and sisters. And Always Bring
A Crowd is a family saga as well as a story that represents
the best qualities of the Afro-American people and Americans
in general. All of the Lumpkins appear throughout the book,
and author Bea Lumpkin, Frank's wife, paints their portraits
and captures their characters in speech as deftly as any
novelist.

Led by the examples of their parents, who never quit
struggling to improve the family's conditions, and of young
activist siblings like sister Jonnie, most of the Lumpkins
got involved in union and other progressive work, seveeral
around and in the Communist Party of the United States. The
lynching in uniform of Taft Rollins, a Black soldier, was an
catalyst that set them on the path of seeing a different
socioeconomic system as key in fighting racism in the many
forms they encountered it.

The book's structure, the way the author tells the story, is
unique. The ordinary chronology of biography is there. But
also, assembled like a collage, are the voices of workers
and neighbors and friends joining those of the family. Only
one of the 10 Lumpkin siblings broke into white-collar work,
and even that sister, Bessie Mae, stayed true to her class
roots and worked for labor unions and the CPUSA.

Those who know of the American Communist movement only
through the "Russian spies" and "dupes of aliens" and
"fellow travelers" stereotypes of the J. Edgar Hoover, Joe
McCarthy/Nixon/Reagan line, or from the more liberal strains
of anti-communism, will get an entirely different and more
complex view of that history in this book.

Basically, the destructive forces that distinguish this
century-racism, world war, corporate tyranny-tempered into
steel Lumpkin's qualities of courage, optimism and
philosophical development through great reading and bold
action. He has fought consistently for racial justice, jobs,
the right to vote, the right to adequate education and
working conditions, for an end to world war, colonialism,
and weapons of mass destruction. And these objectives led
him into the Communist, labor and peace movement.

Bea Lumpkin captures the excitement of the challenges that
brought the best out in Frank and his fellow workers,
spouses and neighbors as they fought in word and deed to
make the corporations obey the law and the union contract.
The company kept shifting corporate skins like a snake, but
Frank and the young labor attorney Tom Geoghegan (GAY-gen)
finally cornered it. The workers won $4 million, thanks to
bankruptcy laws designed to help corporations skip out
workers and their communities, but that was only about a
sixth of what they were owed. (Also see Geoghegan's Which
Side Are You On?)

"I'm a very patient man," Lumpkin said at the end of it all.
Of course it wasn't the end.  Lumpkin was active in Chicago
politics, ran for unsuccessfully for the state legislature
and continues to fight for job-creation and living-wage
programs to this day.

Along the way, Frank and Bea visited Chile, Cuba,
Mozambique, Senegal, Western Europe and other countries. His
observations about these countries, their economies, the
labor movement and progressive politics are travelogues from
a worker's point of view.

The worker's point of view is a far broader and wiser
perspective than the caricatures like Archie Bunker, Ralph
Kramden and the wolf-whistling, racist and profane
construction workers of our commercials and movies. As
Lumpkin sees it, that point of view emanates from the
science of Marxism. He wanted answers to the social
conditions he saw in life, and when it comes to society, the
top science is Marxism-not as a source of doctrine and
dogma, but as a way to study "like mathematics," in which
"if you put down the right figures, you get the right
answer." That may sound simplistic, but thanks to the many
dialogues between Frank and other workers that Bea recorded,
readers will see that plain talk can convey the same probing
of ideas and ethics that one finds in the classical Greek
philosophers.

Here is Lumpkin is a sample dialogue between Frank and his
brother-in-law, Al Ellis.

Al: "You think you could get a six-hour day under
capitalism?"

Frank: "Yes, I think so. It will be a struggle, but we will
get it. We need a committee. A lot of guys have ideas but
don't know how to put it in words. Unity. That's the main
lesson I hope the Wisconsin Steel workers learned from Save
Our Jobs. When workers unite, they can win. I told
Geoghegan, I'm as interested in the struggle as in winning
the money. I'm interested in workers learning their
strength, not just someone being a 'smart aleck.' The money
ain't the whole thing. The fight isn't just for money. It's
for justice for working people. It's not simple to separate
the two.

"There is a solution to the problems and together we can
find it.... I have proof because we have done it."

Imagine what achievements could be won on a national scale
if the confused, disheartened and insecure working people of
this country had a leader, a movement, an organization with
this political effectiveness.

One thing is for sure: the big industrial, investment and
banking firms in this country have imagined just that. So it
will be hard to get Lumpkin's story out, regardless of how
wonderfully told this riveting story is.

The powers that be would rather that not many of us know
what it takes to be able to "bring a crowd." It takes a
Frank Lumpkin. A worker learned and intelligent who can
speak the language of the neighborhoods, factories, shops
and farmlands, and who can unite men and women and uit the
Red and Yellow and the Brown, Black and White, as we all
sang in the children's hymn of old.

Copyright (c) 2000 John Woodford. All Rights Reserved.


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