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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 16 April 25, 2016
(special feature)
NY meeting celebrates Natalie Bombaro’s life as
SWP cadre
BY SARA LOBMAN
NEW YORK — “From her late teens, Natalie Bombaro spent her life building
the Socialist Workers Party and the international communist movement,”
Norton Sandler told participants at a meeting here April 3 to celebrate
her life and political work. “She was a cadre — a word we use with pride
in describing someone who works collectively, in a disciplined way,
toward the party’s goal of overthrowing the dictatorship of capital that
we live under today.”
Bombaro died March 20 from a stroke. The night before she had
participated in a New York meeting to hear a delegation from the
Federation of Cuban Women.
Among the 95 people at the celebration were Bombaro’s sister, Gerre
Carr, and many relatives of her longtime companion, John Studer.
“Meetings like the one today tell you a great deal about an individual
like Natalie,” said Sandler, organizer of the SWP in New York, “but also
about what her party was part of over five tumultuous decades.”
Other speakers were Janet Post, a leader of the party in Philadelphia,
and Don Mackle. Gale Shangold chaired the meeting. Mackle and Shangold
are supporters of the SWP and members of the Print Project, made up of
some 250 volunteers who produce the books on working-class politics used
by the party in its work. Bombaro was one of these volunteers since the
project’s inception 18 years ago.
Bombaro grew up in South Philadelphia and graduated from a Catholic
girls’ high school that tracked students to become secretaries. Young
men at Catholic schools in that area were directed to the nearby
shipyard. She became a secretary at the University of Pennsylvania,
where students and others introduced her to the civil rights movement,
the Cuban Revolution, the growing struggle against the Vietnam War and
the women’s liberation movement.
She joined the Young Socialist Alliance and later the SWP in 1969,
“convinced that to be effective she needed to be part of a party with a
continuity going back to the Russian Revolution and before, with a
leadership of current mass struggles and a clear programmatic course for
the working class’s march to power,” Sandler said.
Photos on displays prepared for the meeting gave a feel for the times.
One showed young Black Panther members in 1970, stripped to their
underwear and lined up in public against a wall by Philadelphia cops
under Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo. Bombaro was part of the SWP and
YSA speaking out against this attack on political rights.
In a poster put out to build the April 24, 1971, march in Washington,
D.C., against the war in Vietnam, Bombaro is marching arm-in-arm with a
whole group, including an active-duty GI.
Another photo showed the August 1970 Chicano Moratorium march in Los
Angeles of 25,000 against the war, the largest working-class protest
opposing the war up to that point. Bombaro, at the request of the party,
moved to Los Angeles in 1971.
Learned organization and discipline
“I learned organization and discipline from her example,” Jim Gotesky,
who was a new party member in Los Angeles at the time, said in a
message. “Natalie was full of fun, optimism, and good humor. I will
always remember her standing big-eyed, bouncing with energy, and
grinning ear to ear with a stack of the Militant newspaper under her arm
or walking on the beach handing out flyers for an anti-war march.”
In the mid-1970s she took an assignment in New York as part of the
secretarial staff under the direction of the central leadership of the
SWP. She had special responsibility in relation to the party’s
international work, including handling correspondence to and from
comrades in countries where there was dangerous political repression and
a misaddressed letter could cost lives.
She was part of the party leadership’s secretariat at the 1979 world
congress of the Fourth International, at the time the international
organization of the communist movement. It was an important meeting. To
be part of a new rise of resistance among working people, the Socialist
Workers Party had organized over the preceding year to get the majority
of its members into industrial workplaces organized by the trade unions.
Similar opportunities existed in other countries.
Also that year working people in Iran overthrew the hated U.S.-supported
shah. And in Nicaragua and Grenada, popular revolutions overthrew
dictators and established workers and farmers governments.
“The debates and fights over these questions were decisive in winning
the forces in Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere who are today
part of our world movement,” Sandler said. “Natalie knew in her bones
the strengths of our program and her loyalty and party patriotism never
wavered.”
In 1988 Mark Curtis, a union packinghouse worker and member of the SWP
in Des Moines, Iowa, was framed up on rape charges while part of a fight
against an immigration raid targeting some of his co-workers. Bombaro
and Studer moved to Des Moines. Studer organized the more than
seven-year defense effort and Bombaro was a stalwart of the work.
“Natalie was right in the thick of the battle with us,” Kate Kaku,
Curtis’ wife, wrote in a message signed by both. “She had such a way
with people, making them feel welcome and appreciated. This was very
important since we had to take the fight to the people and win over
supporters, especially in Iowa.”
Over the years, Bombaro also built the party in San Antonio, Phoenix,
Boston and Chicago.
After leaving active party membership in the early 1990s, Bombaro
remained a supporter for the rest of her life, taking on various
responsibilities.
When Studer and Bombaro moved to Philadelphia in 1999, Post said, the
party mostly carried out propaganda work in the northern part of the
city, which was majority African-American. “Natalie was confident that
workers in South Philly — with its mix of Irish, Italian, Eastern
European, Latino and Black workers — would be just as interested in the
Militant and Pathfinder books,” Post said. She was right.
In recent years in New York, Mackle told the meeting, Bombaro helped
strengthen the Supporters Monthly Appeal, which raises monthly
contributions to sustain the party’s work.
In concluding, Sandler noted that the best tribute to Bombaro was to
“build the SWP and a powerful movement that can fight for the
emancipation of the great majority of humanity.”
Before and after the program participants enjoyed a plentiful spread of
food. A fund appeal raised $5,216 to build the party.
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