Toby Schwartz: Communist for Life

The life of Toby “Teddy” Schwartz (1928-2015) reads like a handbook for communists. He was a beloved family member, friend, and comrade. Toby helped to build the Progressive Labor Party and modeled how to win people to its ideas and to organize campaigns of class struggle.
Fighter from the Get-Go
Toby was raised in an immigrant family committed to fighting for workers and social justice. His mother was a seamstress and International Ladies Garment Workers Union organizer, his uncle a Bolshevik. From a young age, Toby committed himself to fighting against capitalism and racism. In 1939, he joined the Young Communist League (YCL), becoming a state youth leader in 1942. Four years later, at 18, he joined with Paul Robeson in the American Youth for Democracy. In his teens, Toby joined the Communist Party (CP-USA). Toby understood that to build an egalitarian world without racism, oppression, or class warfare, one needed to act courageously.
In 1949, as a student at City College of New York (CCNY), Toby helped to lead an anti-racist struggle to fire two racist, anti-Semitic professors. As part of a group of CCNY students led by the YCL, Toby helped to lead a campus-wide strike against racism that eventually involved thousands of students, many of whom had just returned from fighting fascism and racism in Europe during World War II. The resulting weeklong strike shut down the entire campus, a first for a major U.S. college.
Helped Found PLP
During the late 1950s, he and other members of the CP-USA became critical of the party’s politics. After unsuccessfully trying to lead a struggle within the organization to fight for the international working class, Toby joined with a group of 30 who quit the CP in December 1961. Six months later, Toby was among the group of comrades who founded what was to become the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
While working toward his PhD in Buffalo in 1964, Toby was active in a PLP chapter that included steel and auto workers. The fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched a witch-hunt to “rout the radicals.” Toby and others were subpoenaed to appear before HUAC. Many lost their jobs. But they were not silenced; they organized to openly challenge the very right of HUAC to exist. During the hearings, Toby disrupted the proceedings. He grabbed a microphone that was being used to bug the defense table. Soon he was in a grappling match with federal marshals.  Three dragged him from the hall. An Associated Press photographer captured the scene and the picture hit front pages across the country. PLP led a counterattack that saw 1,500 students, workers and professors picket the hearings and launch a campaign that drove HUAC from the city and to its eventual demise.
Staunch Anti-Racist Organizer
As a professor, Toby continued to lead struggles to fight for a better world. In 1973, he helped found what later became the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR). In the late 1970s and 1980s, InCAR led a national movement against expansion efforts by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. InCAR’s message of “no free speech for racists — racism hurts all workers” was delivered to hundreds of thousands.
Toby helped to lead this important work throughout New England, meeting the violent tactics of the racists with organized and courageous action. When the KKK attempted to hold a cross burning in the remote rural town of Scotland, Connecticut, Toby led a mass multiracial march of hundreds of workers and students from three states. The demonstrators stopped many Klan sympathizers from attending the cross burning. Not surprisingly, Toby and his family’s livelihood were threatened. Nevertheless, Toby and his wife Helen continued to dedicate their lives to fight for an egalitarian society without racism: communism.
In the 1980s, Toby recruited in the town of Willimantic and helped mount a series of anti-racist campaigns. This was a training ground for developing Party leaders, including a successful struggle to defend a young Puerto Rican man who was targeted for defending himself after a racist gang attack. When local politicians tried to turn a housing project into a gated fascist prison camp, PLP defied racist cops and led demonstrations to defeat it. And when a leading government head publicly slandered Puerto Ricans, PLP’s campaign exposed his racism and forced him out of office!
Toby’s fighting nature helped him recover from a stroke in 1980. He remained active on the University of Connecticut (UConn) campus with InCAR and PLP, leading many a campus-wide anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. These struggles included preventing the UConn administration from closing the two schools on the main campus that had the largest number of women and nonwhite students, a fight to end the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative and other racist and pseudo-scientific research, and campus-wide opposition to U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
An Inspiration for Workers
Toby worked to solve problems collectively, rather than relying on charismatic individuals. He would often say, “We don’t believe in the cult of personality. That’s a losing strategy.” At one campus InCAR meeting, a Black woman student and InCAR member stated, “Toby, you have taught me how it’s important to not sit and watch these racist and sexist attacks happen. You taught all of us how to fight back. You also taught us that it’s not enough to just fight racism, but that you have to fight capitalism. That’s why I’m joining PLP.”
Throughout his decades of struggle, Toby was happily married to the love of his life, Helen, until her death in 1999. Together they created a family, raising three children and five grandchildren. Their house was always a place for friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members to gather and share a meal, a glass of wine, and a good discussion of politics and life. They created a household in which lively debate, friendship and compassion were the rule. Everyone was welcome at their table. Their ties created a web of friends across the country and worldwide.
Even in his declining years, Toby made deep connections at his assisted living home. Despite the ravages of dementia and heart disease, Toby lived life to the fullest, attending the opera and taking the train to visit old friends. He was always curious about the world. He and Helen built a library of thousands of books, often processing three or four simultaneously. He wanted to understand how the world worked as well as how people thought and interacted. Toby was a distinguished biophysicist, focused on the specifics of cell membrane transport, and noted for pointing out fundamental principles of thermodynamics.
The kind of fighter he was, and his love for life, became even more evident when Toby entered a hospice, but then fought to recover and return to the home. Then a second entrance to the hospice saw him once again recover to return home! He eventually died there in his sleep.
At his core, Toby believed in the capacity of all people to grow, learn and act, optimistic that our actions can and will create a communist world. Always on the side of the working class, Toby was a militant anti-racist fighter and proud communist, in the true spirit of the word. He never shirked from participating in and leading class struggle.
Toby will live on in all our struggles and in the lessons his life taught us.