In Memoriam of Ruth

Ruth was born in 1935 and grew up in the South Bronx, one of four daughters of a furrier and a garment worker. Ruth was close with her three sisters, Millie, Florence and Dottie growing up. As a kid and teenager she was known as a ferocious handball player, often playing and beating older boys and young men.
Her parents, like many of the families she knew, were involved in the old communist movement. Ruth became politically active in her late teens and was particularly influenced by her oldest sister Millie and brother-in-law Leon who were active in the movement.
After high school Ruth worked several jobs, including in a plant that made circuit boards where she eventually was asked to become an organizer for the union. Around that time she became a member of the Young Communist League and then the Communist Party. She met her husband-to-be Bert at a YCL party.
Ruth and Bert stayed in the CP through the McCarthy years, often having FBI agents come to the house and harass them on the street. By 1960 they felt that the Soviet Union had lost its way and was no longer leading the movement towards a communist future.
When they heard about a meeting to discuss a new direction in the communist movement they went and eventually became part of the group that established the Progressive Labor Movement and then the Progressive Labor Party. She became active in this new communist movement, including helping to organize the trip in 1963 that broke the government’s travel ban to Cuba.
While doing this, Ruth had two children, worked and went to school in the evenings to get a teaching degree from Hunter College. As a teacher Ruth worked in an elementary school in the housing projects near her and Bert’s apartment on 106th street.
In 1968, the teachers’ union launched a racist walkout against parental control of schools. Ruth and other teachers in and around the PLP joined with Black and Latin parents to cross the racist picket lines, breaking into the schools and setting up freedom schools with anti-racist teachers and volunteers. This including sending her own kids across the lines in the face of the worst kinds of gutter racism.
Throughout her long teaching career Ruth was always an anti-racist fighter for those students the system didn’t want to teach. Working in the heavily tracked schools in her neighborhood and in Harlem, as part of a group of PL teachers in upper Manhattan, she always chose the classes the school deemed the bottom of their grade and fought like hell to have the school care about those kids.
She was removed from schools several times for standing up to the administration, including organizing a boycott of a racist competency test the Board of Education was giving that was increasing the dropout rate of Black and Latin students.
After retiring Ruth continued her political activity, helping produce CHALLENGE newspaper, organizing Kids against Racism to introduce her grandchildren and others elementary school kids to the ideas of PLP, and trying to bring communist ideas into the struggle against Israeli fascism.
Most of all, Ruth was a fighter for the working class who never lost confidence that even with all the ups and downs of the communist movement, victory will come.