Let me tell you a little about myself, though you can also find several autobiographical writings in the Articles section of this website.
I was born in Chicago in 1945 and spent my early childhood on the Southside. From the age of 13, I grew up in Imperial Beach, California, which sits on the shore of the Pacific Ocean and shares a border with Tijuana. After studying at Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista between 1963 and 64, I moved on to San Diego State College where I graduated in in 1968,
This is me at about the age of 2o in one of those photo booth pictures we all took then.
I spent a semester at the University of Chicago Library School in 1968, but then decided that it was not for me. I returned to California and from 1969-1971 was a graduate student in Literature at the University of California at San Diego studying with Frederick Jameson and auditing classes with Herbert Marcuse. Much later I returned to school and earned an M.A. and then a Ph.D. in American History at the University of Cincinnati in 1998 with a dissertation on the “slackers,” American war resisters and draft dodgers who went to Mexico during World War I and who became involved in the Mexican Revolution.
Over the years I lived in various cities: Imperial Beach, National City, La Jolla, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Berkeley, Mexico City, Managua, and New York—and worked at many jobs: fry cook, taxi cab driver, librarian, social worker, steelworker, truck driver, Spanish teacher, interpreter, and college professor of History, Sociology, and Labor Studies.
This photo was taken in 1974 when I was living in Chicago and working as a case worker for the Cook County Department of Public Aid. I worked in the general assistance office and was a member of the Illinois Union of Social Service Employees (IUSSE), an independent union that later affiliated with the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
I have been since the 1960s an activist in various social movements, from the anti-war movement, to support for theUnited Farm Workers, and and later the organization of Latin American immigrants. One of my most important experiences took place in the 1970s. In 1974 I became a truck driver in Chicago and became involved in organizing truck drivers and dock workers into a reform movement in the Teamsters union both in Chicago and other cities. I was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union in 1976.
In 1984, Sherry Baron, the president of the House Staff Association, the union of interns and residents at Cook County Hospital hired me to be the union’s organizer. as it contemplated a strike over patient care issues. Ronald Reagan had cut back Medicaid reimbursement so that private hospitals started dumping patients at the public hospital, overwhelming the staff. Here is Sherry, speaking at the Cook County Board meeting on behalf of the HSA. The union won all of its demands without a strike. We married a couple of years later.
In 1990 my book Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union was published. Here I am at a book signing at a bookstore in Cincinnati where I then lived. My son Traven, two years old at the time, sits on my lap.
SSince joining the International Socialists (I.S.) in 1969, I have been an active socialist all of my adult life, as an I.S. member, then a Solidarity member (1986), then a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (2016), and as a member of the editorial board of the independent socialist journal New Politics.
In 2001 in Cincinnati, the organizers of the March for Justice chose me to chair a mass rally at Fountain Square to protest police racism in violence that had led to the death of 15 Black men, some killed in custody.
On the podium with a group of Black activists, singing “We shall not be moved.”
In 2010 I ran for the U.S. Senate as the candidate of the Ohio Socialist Party with the support of several socialist organizations in the state and groups of local labor and immigration rights activists. I traveled and spoke throughout the state at colleges and universities, at NAACP chapters, to immigrant groups, and others.
During my campaign I joined the socialist contingent of a demonstration in Washington, D.C.
A couple of times I had an opportunity to teach young socialists from around the world at the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam (IIRRE).. Here I am. group in 2012.
I was invited in 2014 to speak about the American left at a conference organized by Swiss socialists.
In 2014 Sherry and I moved to Brooklyn, New York. We worked on the Bernie Sanders for president campaign in 2015 and joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). I remained a member of Solidarity: A Socialist, Feminist, Anti-Racist Organization. Here I am in Boston in 2016 speaking at a DSA event dealing with unions, the social movements and politics.
And here I am chairing a DSA rally in New York City to protest the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march in August 2017.
I have traveled and spoken in Latin American countries about U.S. politics or the American left’s perspective on world politics. Here I am speaking on a panel at the Congress of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) in Mexico City in 2016.
And here I am speaking at a PSOL event at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Campus Gragoatá, Brazil in 2018,
Sherry and I have continued to be active in the progressive social movements, such as support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion and for the Palestinian people as they resist Israel’s genocidal war..
Sherry and I in the early spring of2024.
