Mark Shapiro, a communist for all seasons

Comrade Mark Shapiro, one of the original members of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), died on January 12 at 78. Mark was a communist whose life and influence spread throughout the working class and encompassed both mental and manual labor. Married to Ann, a PLP comrade, Mark was a General Motors auto worker, a railroad brakeman, a high school and college teacher, a father to Daniel and David, a grandfather to four grandchildren and a father to two foster daughters, a musician who belonged to several bands and played the clarinet — his high school yearbook portrayed him as the “Benny Goodman of Weaver High.” Being a “birder” he and his wife Ann led the Hartford, Connecticut Audobon Society, while serving as a political leader among hundreds of workers and youth.  Truly a communist “for all seasons.”
Perhaps Mark’s most significant contribution to the working class was his uncovering of one of the most vicious racist frame-ups of the 1960s, the George Whitmore case.  The U.S. Supreme Court cited it as “the most conspicuous example of police coercion in the country” in its 1966 decision which became known as the Miranda ruling, to possibly protect those arrested from being coerced into false confessions.
After his auto and railroad jobs, and having obtained a Masters degree in physics at Columbia University, Mark began teaching science in New Jersey and later moved to Connecticut where he taught physics at Wesleyan University among other colleges in the area and social studies at Trinity College and Prince Tech.
He had been born into a communist family in Albany N.Y. His parents had been blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunts. This background led him to join Progressive Labor Movement in 1963 and later the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Mark became a member of PLM’s first trade union club and of the staff of CHALLENGE. He put his great sense of humor to work, writing the paper’s first humor column, “Marksmanship.”  Years later his son said he liked to brag that the first big anti-Vietnam War protest in New York City was organized in his living room
Mark exposes the racist frame-up of George Whitmore
On August 28, 1963, two white professional women were murdered in Manhattan which the media  labeled the “Career Girl Murders.” At that very moment George Whitmore, a young Black man, was in Wildwood, N.J. sitting with a dozen friends watching Marin Luther King make his famous “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Whitmore had been previously acquitted of a frame-up by racist cops of a murder in Brownsville, Brooklyn. But the cops went after him again and arrested him for the murders of these two women. The cops wrote a 61-page “confession” and beat him into signing it. A Manhattan District Attorney joined in the frame-up and a judge sent the youth to Rikers Island for a “psychiatric” examination. The bosses’ press — 10 New York City newspapers at the time — lept on the case with ranting front-page “stories” smearing Whitmore as a “Black killer.”
At the very same time a civil liberties advocate, John Lawrence, who worked for a law firm, had decided to test a law by striding down Broadway in Manhattan carrying an unloaded rifle in full view, hoping to be arrested to create a test case in court. Sure enough the cops arrested him and a judge sent him to Rikers for an “examination.” He ended up in the same area as Whitmore. Lawrence had heard of Whitmore and they began talking.
Whitmore detailed to Lawrence about where he was in Wildwood, N.J. watching King’s speech on TV when the murders were committed. When Lawrence was released, he went to every newspaper in the city with his “scoop” and every paper refused to publish it, given that it exposed the racist trash they had been printing.
Lawrence then consulted the “newspaper” listing in the telephone yellow pages and saw “CHALLENGE.” He came to our office to see if we would print the story. Mark met him, listened to what he had to say and began writing a series for
CHALLENGE recounting his interviews with Lawrence exposing the racist frame-up. None of the city’s press pursued it but some out-of-town newspapers picked it up, never mentioning Mark’s reporting, of course. It became the story of the year, similar to the more recent racist “Central Park Five” frame-ups. Seven years later Telly Savalas made a TV movie dramatizing the case entitled “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” only the second Kojak production.
Mark and Ann raised their family in Bloomfield, Connecticut, where he lived the rest of his life. He was a fixture at every May Day march until last year. He brought scores of his high school students to the anti-KKK march in Scotland, Conn., and remained passionately devoted to his communist principles and activities.
 He and Ann were avid travelers, touring the world in places like China, Alaska, and Brazil, and taking camping vacations regularly to Maine and national parks nationwide where they developed an abiding interest in birding, leading them to the Audobon Society. In recent years he joined the fight to protect Bloomfield’s water from exploitative corporate interests and became active in supporting hospital strikers in his area, selling them CHALLENGE, containing stories he had written about their struggle. In his last years he suffered from Parkinson’s Disease but never lost his interest in the clarinet. He was heard playing it on the day before he died.
Comrade Mark Shapiro was one of many who devoted their lives to building the communist movement. While he is gone in body, the fruits of his labors will live on in the continuing efforts of revolutionary communists the world over to create a society that will liberate the working class from capitalist slavery. A toast to Comrade Mark, remembered forever!