https://themilitant.com/2019/01/05/nan-bailey-true-to-her-revolutionary-convictions-every-day-of-her-life/
Nan Bailey: ‘True to her revolutionary convictions every day of her life’
By Bernie Senter
Vol. 83/No. 2
January 14, 2019
Top, Nan Bailey, SWP’s 1974 candidate for Washington, D.C., mayor,
debates Marion Barry, left, who later became city’s first Black mayor.
Left, September 1988 rally to drop frame-up rape charges against Mark
Curtis, seated at left. Jack Barnes at podium. Bailey, second from
right, joined defense of Curtis that won worldwide support.
Militant photos: top, Eric Simpson
Top, Nan Bailey, SWP’s 1974 candidate for Washington, D.C., mayor,
debates Marion Barry, left, who later became city’s first Black mayor.
Left, September 1988 rally to drop frame-up rape charges against Mark
Curtis, seated at left. Jack Barnes at podium. Bailey, second from
right, joined defense of Curtis that won worldwide support.
LOS ANGELES—”Selfless, disciplined, and loving to a fault, Nan Bailey
remained true to her revolutionary convictions every day of her adult
life,” wrote Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers
Party, in his message to a celebration of her five decades of building
and leading the communist movement. The Dec. 30 event was held at the
Japanese American Cultural and Community Center here, in a glass-walled
room looking out on a beautiful garden.
Bailey died Dec. 12 at age 66. “Nan knew the party is indispensable to
the working-class march to taking political power out of the hands of
the brutal U.S. ruling class,” Norton Sandler told the audience,
speaking on behalf of the SWP National Committee, the party’s leading
body. Bailey served on the National Committee for 18 years. Over her
years in the party, she shouldered responsibilities leading its work in
strengthening trade unions, in defense of Black rights, in propaganda
activity among working people and SWP election campaigns, and on many
other fronts.
Among the 100 in attendance were comrades who worked with Bailey for
many years, as well as dozens of co-workers, friends, and family members
spanning generations, including those of her partner Hector Gomez.
Participants provided food, flowers and beverages, and browsed a display
reviewing the political activity Bailey had joined in and helped lead.
Some pulled out phones and cameras to photograph the four panels. They
looked through booklets of the 20 messages from across the U.S. and
other countries.
“I knew she was involved in all these things,” said Morgan Jones,
Bailey’s niece from Baltimore, as she pored over the display. “But Nan
would never talk about herself.”
“It is impressive all the things she did,” said Bailey’s neighbor Inez
Trujillo, who came with her husband Hector and child.
An ‘army brat’
“Nan Bailey was an ‘army brat,’” said Barnes at the opening of his
message. With her father a career military man, her family lived abroad
for much of her early years.
“She was tough,” Barnes said. “As a small child she was formed as much
by Japanese communities she lived in overseas and later, a little bit
older, by French communities, as she was by Americans.” That rearing was
among the reasons, he said, that Bailey “could not imagine her party not
doing political work in the ranks of the armed forces.” (See Barnes’s
message, which Sandler read at the meeting, on facing page.)
Bailey, SWP candidate for California governor at time, joins 2002 L.A.
protest demanding amnesty and no deportations.
Militant/ Elizabeth Lariscy
Bailey, SWP candidate for California governor at time, joins 2002 L.A.
protest demanding amnesty and no deportations.
Bailey joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1970 at Brown University
in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Socialist Workers Party soon
afterward. Taking advantage of Brown’s “independent study” program and
“pass or fail” grading system, she spent most of her four college years
building the SWP in Washington, D.C., occasionally returning to Providence.
SWP leader James Harris from Washington, D.C., told the crowd he first
met Bailey in 1971 when she was there building the April 24 march
against the U.S. rulers’ war in Vietnam, an action that turned out to be
well more than half-a-million-strong. “These were exciting times with
big events, with a lot of loud and bombastic people,” Harris said. “You
could get pushed around and ignored. But not Nan. She was determined to
take her place in the movement of the times.”
Bailey debated Marion Barry on TV in 1974 when she was the Socialist
Workers Party candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., Harris said –—
one of several times she ran for public office on the SWP ticket. Before
federal officials gutted equal-time rules for candidates outside the
bosses’ parties in the 1980s, Harris said, “our campaigns got extensive
media coverage. People would greet Nan on the street, often telling her
what they liked or didn’t like about what she said.”
Bailey was a coordinator for the D.C. Women’s National Abortion Action
Coalition. WONAAC organized teach-ins, marches and protests in defense
of a woman’s right to choose.
Defense of Black rights
In 1974 federal courts implemented orders to desegregate Boston schools
by busing students who were Black to schools in neighborhoods that were
predominantly Caucasian. “The ruling was met by big racist
mobilizations, aimed at rolling back gains won by Blacks in the 1950s
and 1960s and inciting violence against busing plans in other cities,”
Harris said. “Opponents of busing demonstrated in the thousands, and
thugs stoned buses, often with approval of city authorities.”
This was nothing like today’s false claims of rising “white nationalist”
actions, Harris said. “We were mobilizing against real, organized, and
large racist violence in the streets.”
“Nan spoke on campuses around the country,” Harris said, “and helped
organize the party and YSA as we joined and helped lead the campaign
that broke the back of the racist violence. There were mass
countermobilizations in Boston and other cities, as well as defense
teams on the school buses themselves, with union involvement.”
Norton Sandler addresses celebration of Bailey’s life.
MILITANT/ERIC SIMPSON
Norton Sandler addresses celebration of Bailey’s life.
Bailey helped lead the SWP’s participation in the National Black
Independent Political Party, founded in 1980 at a conference of 1,500.
NBIPP grew out of the proletarian battles that ended Jim Crow
segregation, Harris said. It adopted a far-reaching charter to advance
the interests of the Black community and beyond, setting an example for
all working people of class independence from the capitalist state and
parties.
NBIPP organized for a few years before many of its leaders cut and ran
under pressure back to the Democratic Party. “Nan always remained
objective and calm during those debates, often heated ones,” Harris said.
Building a proletarian party
Mary Martin, a leader of the SWP’s union work today, talked about
Bailey’s activity in the late 1990s organizing the party’s Trade Union
Committee. While working at an aerospace plant in Seattle organized by
the International Association of Machinists, “Nan helped form a women’s
committee in the local,” Martin said. “The SWP saw this as a way to
strengthen the union, to advance the fight for women’s equality,
including in the workplace, and to build the party.”
Above and below, comrades, friends, co-workers, and relatives of Bailey
spanning generations attended celebration, looked at displays and
enjoyed buffet.
Militant photos by Eric Simpson
Above and below, comrades, friends, co-workers, and relatives of Bailey
spanning generations attended celebration, looked at displays and
enjoyed buffet.
In a victory for both women and men on the job, the committee drew up
demands against the company’s draconian attendance policy, which
especially victimized women with children and other family
responsibilities. “They pushed the company back and won,” she said. The
committee also organized a program on domestic violence, attended by
hundreds of coworkers.
In 1999 Bailey led a four-month party campaign to get 1,500 copies of
the newly published Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics
at the Millennium by Jack Barnes into working people’s hands. The book
offers invaluable background to the world capitalist crisis that
sharpened in the early 21st century, and a working-class course to fight
its consequences for tens of millions.
“The successful party campaign reached working people in cities, small
towns and rural areas,” Martin said. SWP members won readers of the book
among factory and farmworkers in North Carolina, Mississippi and
Virginia; Midwest packinghouse workers; miners in the Appalachian and
Western coalfields; dairy farmers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; and
workers in garment shops and other workplaces from New York to
California, Florida to Washington.
Bailey was a staff writer for the Militant in 1980-81. She then took six
months off other responsibilities to participate in a leadership school
organized by the SWP. Party leaders studied the political writings and
activity of the founders of the communist workers movement, Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels.
Over the years, Bailey traveled on international assignment for the SWP.
She took part in solidarity trips to Grenada during the 1979-83
revolution in that Caribbean island, and to South Africa during the
closing stages of the struggle that toppled apartheid. She collaborated
with comrades in sister parties during visits to Canada, the United
Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
“The impact of these international assignments is captured in messages
to the meeting from Communist League leaderships in those countries,”
Sandler said. (See excerpts from these and other messages on page 6.)
Injury to one, injury to all
“In 1988, Bailey was working at the Swift meatpacking plant in Des
Moines, Iowa,” Sandler said. “One of our party members, Mark Curtis,
also a worker at Swift, was arrested, brutally beaten by the cops, and
framed up for raping a 15-year-old Black woman.”
The party went into action, Sandler said. It mounted a yearslong defense
campaign that won national and international support. “Political forces
opposed to Curtis in Des Moines misestimated Nan,” he said. “They
foolishly thought she’d back away from Mark’s defense because she was a
Black woman. Nan proudly spoke in Mark’s defense, exposing the frame-up
and helping win fighters like Edna Griffin, a decadeslong civil rights
leader in Iowa, to the defense campaign.”
Bailey also organized the secretariat of the SWP’s central leadership
for several years, Sandler said. “Nan was serious about the party’s
programmatic conquests and its leadership continuity.”
He read a message from Debbie Lazar, who said she got to know Bailey in
1995, when Bailey was a secretary for SWP leaders Jack Barnes and
Mary-Alice Waters. “Over the next several years Nan, more than anyone
else, taught me how to be a secretary for the central leadership,” Lazar
wrote. “She showed how a competent secretary can help in expanding their
reach, worldwide.
“Nan set a tone of dignity, respect, and kindness in the office. She had
high work standards and challenged her co-workers to reach,” Lazar said.
Bailey taught her “to strive to judge political priorities and not get
lost in myriad details.”
“I’m proud of Nan’s contribution to building the communist movement and
of those who will follow in her footsteps,” Lazar closed. “Be like Nan!”
Building SWP in Los Angeles
Bailey worked in garment factories in Los Angeles after leaving Seattle
in late 1999. Messages from Rachel Wilson in Seattle and Arlene
Rubinstein in Washington, D.C., described how Bailey helped train them
and other workers in how to sew and get a sewing job. Her efforts to
learn Spanish were important in collaborating with co-workers to pass
along skills and carry out political activity.
Bailey was a coordinator of Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition,
organized to fight for a woman’s right to choose. Above, Nov. 20, 1971,
march in Washington, D.C.
Militant/Mark Satinoff
Bailey was a coordinator of Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition,
organized to fight for a woman’s right to choose. Above, Nov. 20, 1971,
march in Washington, D.C.
Bailey was forced to curtail her political work the past 15 years, as a
degenerative lung disease advanced. She continued taking assignments and
participating in SWP meetings as she could. “At meetings of the Los
Angeles branch,” Sandler said, “Nan would cut to the heart of questions
being debated. Once a decision was made, she understood it was not a
suggestion, or a good idea, but an instruction to be carried out with
discipline.”
“Nan could be stubborn; that’s an understatement,” said Sandler. “She
couldn’t be pushed around politically, or medically.” He described the
kind of health care she fought for and got, “extremely unusual in
capitalist society for a person like Nan, with little money or other
resources.”
“Nan was determined to be in control of her own decisions, right up to
the last hours of her life,” Sandler said. He described her many-year
battle to obtain a lung transplant. Small in stature, Bailey could only
tolerate an adult lung from a similar-sized person. She would be
bypassed on the list if she had a cold or other ailment, and it would
take her months, sometimes years, to requalify.
No longer able to work in industry, Bailey got jobs editing resumes and
postgraduate papers. Having paid attention her whole life to conditions
in U.S. prisons, she excelled at crafting resumes to help ex-inmates get
jobs, James Harris said. “Members of the party in L.A. would sometimes
meet one of these people in factories where we worked,” he said —
“workers who owed their jobs and livelihood, in part, to help from Nan.”
Celia Garza-Halstead, a nurse practitioner and close friend of Nan’s,
spoke at the event. To boisterous laughter, she described how Bailey
would calm her down when she was under deadline pressure for a school
thesis she was writing and Bailey was editing.
Garza-Halstead also described the aid Bailey provided to Nestor Santana,
a young Guatemalan-born worker, in securing a prosthesis after losing a
leg in a train accident. Today a skilled sample-making garment worker,
Santana attended the celebration and explained after the program how
Bailey had helped him learn to sew following the accident.
Those who knew Nan “can give hundreds of examples” of such kindness,
Barnes said in his message. And they were “always done with the absence
of any obligation on the part of the recipient, other than to be
yourself and to enjoy.”
Sandler concluded the meeting by urging participants to contribute to
the party that Bailey dedicated her life to. Over $4,000 was raised to
help advance the work of the Socialist Workers Party.
Related Articles
Messages: ‘Nan listened. She was interested’
Leaders of Communist Leagues in four countries — sister parties of the
Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. — sent messages to the celebration
of Nan Bailey’s political life. Below are excerpts from those messages,
as well as from several…
‘Selfless, disciplined, loving to a fault’
Below is the letter from Jack Barnes, National Secretary of the
Socialist Workers Party, read to the celebration by Norton Sandler.
December 30, 2018 To friends, family, and comrades gathered in Los
Angeles to celebrate the life of Nan Bailey:…
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Join Socialist Workers Party 2019 campaign!
•US troops out of Middle East, Afghanistan now!
•Judge affirms Chicago cops used torture in frame-up case
•SWP members gear up to take Militant, books door to door
•Los Angeles teachers, supporters rally before Jan. 10 strike deadline
•Trump plan to draw down troops in Syria, Afghanistan stirs debate
•Reader points in right direction
Feature Articles •Nan Bailey: ‘True to her revolutionary convictions
every day of her life’
Also In This Issue •‘Yellow vest’ actions continue to press needs of
French toilers
•‘Militant’ fight against prison censors draws attention
•The Kurds’ decadeslong fight to gain a homeland
•Messages: ‘Nan listened. She was interested’
•‘Selfless, disciplined, loving to a fault’
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nothing to them. ”
― Jules Verne