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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan.18, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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When Al Stergar died on Jan. 2, 1996, after a heart attack following a battle with cancer, the daily newspaper here didn't run an obituary. It ran a news article.
The mayor sent a personal letter of condolence to Betsy Stergar, Al's wife. Nearly 200 people attended a memorial service on Jan. 6, although it was really a private affair for family and friends.
The crowd included the former Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, the state director of the American Indian Movement, and a large delegation of Latino workers from the Wisconsin Injured Workers Network.
The official part of the recognition would have amused Al, who remained a combatant to the end, especially in his role as co-editor of the Latino Community News.
Just about a month ago, he was threatened with a libel suit by officials at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee for printing articles accusing the school's administration of racism.
Then he was taken to task by the city's chief of police for another article describing police harassment of a local Latino activist.
A few months before that, while covering a Labor Board hearing in a union struggle, he was physically attacked by a company goon.
You always knew which side Al was on.
UNION AT 12
Albert Stergar was born in Milwaukee on Sept. 18, 1922, to immigrant parents from Slovenia, later part of Yugoslavia. His dad worked at the Briggs & Stratton factory, his mother cleaned up at the local Gimbel's department store. An aunt was an organizer for the United Electrical Workers.
By the time Al turned 12, Milwaukee was deep in the throes of the wave of union organizing that led to the birth of the CIO. He joined right in, organizing groups of youths to throw rocks at the scab-operated trolleys.
At Boys Technical High School, Al discovered photography and printing. At this time he was also introduced to socialist ideas and to the woman who would become his partner in his life's work--Betsy Kelsner. They were married in 1941. Over 50 years later, walking down the street together, they would still hold hands.
As a working-class militant from an Eastern European background, Al was similar to many other labor and socialist activists in the city. He organized unions, played a leading role in the strike wave that followed World War II, and became editor of the union newspaper at Wisconsin Motors.
But it was Al's commitment to the struggle against racism and in support of self-determination for oppressed peoples that won him the love and respect of so many oppressed workers.
As a union steward in the late 1940s with UAW Local 75, Al helped force the American Motors Co. to open up skilled- trade jobs to African American workers. He once said this was his proudest accomplishment.
He later organized the workers at Dewey Metal into the Sheet Metal Workers Union, opening up the formerly whites- only union to Black workers.
In the 1950s, Al helped organize one of the city's first civil-rights picket lines, demanding an A&P supermarket hire Black workers. He was also a member of the committee seeking justice for Daniel Bell, a young Black man beaten to death by Milwaukee police.
Those were difficult times for activists, whether socialist or not. Al was red-baited out of jobs, rocks were thrown through the windows of his and Betsy's home, and swastikas were painted on their doors. If anyone thought that would scare them, they didn't know Al and Betsy.
Al marched for open housing in the 1960s with civil-rights leader Lloyd Barbee and the legendary Father Groppi. When the city's Black community boycotted the segregated school system, he served as a principal at one of the Freedom Schools, which his own daughter attended. He also took part in the huge struggle to win indictments against the cops who murdered Ernest Lacey, another Black youth.
Al participated in the 1975 Novitiate takeover in Gresham, Wis., with the Menominee Warrior Society and the American Indian Movement. That same year he stood with AIM members at the city's War Memorial when they were arrested and beaten by police while protesting an anti-AIM lecture by an FBI informant sponsored by the John Birch Society. Al supported the struggle for treaty rights in the often violent fish- spearing campaigns of the 1980s.
His militant anti-racism earned him close relationships with the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and the Brown Berets, as well as with AIM.
There wasn't an issue that Al wasn't involved in. A leader in the local anti-war movement, he was in Chicago in 1968, building street barricades outside the Democratic Party Convention.
He fought for the rights of welfare recipients. He marched on Gay Pride Day.
Al was a fighter, including, when it was necessary, in a physical sense. When he was 51, Al was arrested for beating the hell out of the local Nazi leader--20 years younger than he.
Al Stergar was an activist's activist, but he was also the ruling class's worst nightmare: an activist with an ideology--revolutionary Marxism. At the age of 13, in the turbulent days of the Great Depression, he joined the youth group of the Socialist Party. He was later active with the Socialist Workers Party.
In 1967 Al Stergar became a founding member of the Milwaukee branch of Workers World Party. At the time the Party only had branches in New York, Buffalo, N.Y., and Youngstown, Ohio.
Present and former members of all these organizations, as well as of the Communist Party and others, attended Al's memorial service.
As a WWP branch organizer, Al helped guide and develop a new generation of revolutionaries. For many of these young activists, Al was the first revolutionary worker and Marxist they knew. He taught them to think in terms of class, to always look for the historical context and material basis for political developments.
He passed along the technical skills he had developed in photography, printing, newspaper layout and journalism, paying particular attention to young activists from the communities of color. He provided a personal example of how to combine a passion for the struggle with the qualities of patience, sensitivity and humor.
Al was arrested many times over the course of his political career. The most serious charges came when the police tried to invade the local WWP headquarters after the branch helped mobilize nearly 1,000 people against a speaking engagement by arch-racist Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
When news of his arrest reached the Latino community, hundreds of dollars were collected there for the bail fund. With the help of the Party's national center, the frame-up of the Anti-Wallace Six was defeated.
In 1981, Al was fired from the Rose Company, where he had been a sheet-metal worker and a thorn in the company's side for over 20 years. The UAW local he had played a leading role in organizing was decertified shortly after. The company's lawyers bragged they had spent $100,000 to defeat Al.
Al was now out of a job. But he used the time to develop his photographic skills, taking pictures for the African American Milwaukee Courier and the alternative Shepherd Express. At the Shepherd he was introduced to desktop publishing, a skill he pursued with a vengeance.
After serving from 1983 to 1991 as editor-in-chief of the Spanish Journal, Al co-founded the Latino Community News with Ted Uribe, Juan Jose Olmos and Onofre Rivera. This bilingual, biweekly newspaper became an important sounding board for the city's growing Latino population.
Co-editing this paper became the focus of Al's political work, his way of making a contribution to the community he loved.
The last week of his life, although weakened from repeated chemotherapy treatments, he met the deadline and got the paper out.
At his family memorial, Al's daughter Lauren spoke of her father's hands.
He had great hands, she said. They could comfort a crying child, tickle his wife and make her laugh, paint a picket sign, create a newspaper, design a leaflet, fix a car, program a computer or make a fist to defend himself and his class.
Al Stergar is survived by Betsy; his daughters JoEllen Seifert and Lauren Sanchez; four grandchildren; many other relatives; and more friends than can be counted.
Al, we're really going to miss you.
A memorial program to celebrate the life of Al Stergar will be held at 2 p.m. on Jan. 20 at Milwaukee's United Community Center, 1028 So. 9th St.
Among those scheduled to speak at the memorial are Milwaukee's former socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler; Wisconsin Injured Workers Network Director Ted Uribe; American Indian Movement State Director Phil Bautista; Word Warriors Report co-host Michael McGee; Milwaukee County Labor Council Secretary-Treasurer Bruce Colburn; members of the family; and a representative of the national office of Workers World Party.
For over 60 years, Al Stergar was a key player in many of the progressive movements of the city. As a labor organizer, civil-rights activist, anti-war leader, journalist, photographer, printer and educator, he touched many lives. The Jan. 20 memorial will give his many friends and admirers an opportunity to share their memories and celebrate the struggles of his life.
For more information, contact Rose Lee or Phil Wilayto at (414) 364-1034 (phone and fax) or by e-mail at ajrc@execpc.com.
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