Franklin Rosemont RIP April 12th, 2009 Kate Khatib
Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65 years old. Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society, Franklin helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964, and put his considerable talents as a propagandist and pamphleteer to work producing posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press.
He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study, Joe Hill: The I.W.W. and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr’s rediscovered cartoons and grew to giant volume providing our best guide to what the early twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history might do. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. Indispensable compendiums like The Big Red Songbook with Archie Green. http://info.interactivist.net/node/12524
He edited and wrote an introduction for What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of Andre Breton, and edited Rebel Worker, Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, The Rise & Fall of the DIL Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago's Wildest & Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot and Juice Is Stranger Than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim. With Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon he edited The Forecast is Hot!. His work has been deeply concerned with both the history of surrealism (writing a forward for Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth) and of the radical labor movement in America, for instance, writing a biography of Joe Hill & Dancin' in the Streets! Anarchists, Iwws, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Rosemont
more: http://libcom.org/news/franklin-rosemont-1943-2009-14042009 http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1832 http://www.surrealistmovement-usa.org/pages/black.html
Archie Green, 91, union activist, folklorist, and editor of “The Big Red Songbook dies.
Submitted by REB on Mon, 03/30/2009 - 2:02pm.
>From the March 28, 2009; New York Times story.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/books/29green.html?_r=2
In 2007, Mr. Green completed a project nearly 50 years in the making, The Big Red Songbook, which he helped to edit. It included the lyrics to more than 250 songs in the various editions of the Little Red Songbooks published from 1909 to 1973 by the Industrial Workers of the World, best known as the Wobblies. They were gathered by John Neuhaus, an I.W.W. machinist, who left his collection to Mr. Green when he died in 1958. Thanks to LaborStart for the heads-up. http://www.iww.org/en/node/4657
Abel Paz (born August 12, 1921. - Died April 13, 2009) is a Spanish anarchist, former combatant and historian. http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/369055/index.php
Abel Paz is the pen name of Diego Camacho. He was born in Almería in 1921, and moved with his family to Barcelona in 1929. In 1935 he started work in the textile industry and joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). In July 1936, with the start of the Spanish Civil War and Spanish revolution he joined the anarchist Durruti Column. As well as fighting on the Aragon front, he fought in the Barcelona May Events of 1937. After the fall of Catalonia in January 1939, he went into exile in France, where he was interned. During the 1940s he fought both in the French resistance to Hitler and the Spanish Anarchist resistance to Franco. He is the author of numerous works on anarchist history, the most important being his biography of Buenaventura Durruti "Durrutti,The People Armed" (Originally published by Free Life Editions,NY which has appeared in several editions, and numerous languages. Also read The Iron Column: Militant Anarchism in the Spanish
Civil War 200+ pages. Translated by Paul Sharkey. First published (in Catalan) as Crónica de la Columna de Ferro Barcelona http://akpress.org/2006/items/durrutiinthespanishrevolution
links in Spanish:
alasbarricadas thread http://www.alasbarricadas.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=41025
Interview with Abel Paz from 2005 http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/?q=node/1633
Videos on the Memoria Libertaria site http://www.memorialibertaria.org/spip.php?article1167
Los que quisieron matar a Franco http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm2cJnSyHrw&feature=related
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