Dave Axelrod, presente!
Lifelong fighter for a workers’ world
By
Sue Davis
Published Feb 21, 2011 5:27 PM
Dave Axelrod died at age 72
on Jan. 22.
WW photo: G. Dunkel
|
Dave Axelrod devoted his entire life to the fight for socialism.
Everywhere he went, he wore progressive buttons, gave out leaflets and Workers
World newspapers, and talked to whomever he could find about the pressing
issues of the day. He expressed his enthusiasm for political action through
Workers World Party, which he joined in the early 1960s, and at work, in
unions, with his neighbors and in the communities where he lived.
Axelrod believed wholeheartedly in the working class and its power to overturn
capitalism. He unwaveringly supported self-determination for the world’s
oppressed peoples. How excited he would be about the unfolding Egyptian
revolution!
Born to left-wing political parents in 1938, Axelrod organized one of his first
political activities at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he
earned a degree in electrical engineering. Inspired by the student-led,
lunch-counter sit-ins in North Carolina to end Jim Crow segregation, he
organized demonstrations at Walgreens in 1960 and 1961 to stop de facto
segregation and demand that Black workers be hired.
After he moved to New York City a few years later to help grow WWP, Axelrod
worked tirelessly to help build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-war
movement through its youth group, Youth Against War and Fascism. In 1965, he
contributed a Black leader’s eyewitness account of the Los Angeles Watts
rebellion to YAWF’s magazine, The Partisan.
Anti-imperialist leader
As a YAWF spokesperson, Axelrod participated in Alternate U meetings attended
by anarchist and left-leaning youth beginning in 1966. There he met draft-age
men looking for ways to resist the Vietnam War. However, when he raised the
need to include draft resistance as part of anti-war organizing at a Student
Mobilization Committee meeting in May 1967, members of other parties shot down
his proposal, although the Black students supported it.
Axelrod’s vision was verified later that year during Stop the Draft Week,
when hundreds of youth marched daily from the draft board in lower Manhattan to
Times Square. Draft-card burning soon became routine at U.S. anti-war
demonstrations.
Driven by Axelrod’s leadership, YAWF founded the Coalition for an
Anti-Imperialist Movement early in 1968. Co-AIM called its first action in
April, after Mayor John Lindsay, who had just instituted a racist
stop-and-frisk law designed to stop Black protest, was invited to speak at a
peace rally in Central Park. Co-AIM’s feeder march protested
Lindsay’s declaration of war against the Black community and his
nonexistent anti-Vietnam war credentials.
As several hundred Co-AIM protesters started to march out of Washington Square
Park, undercover cops ambushed and assaulted them. About 150 protesters were
arrested, though dozens made their way to the peace rally.
Not to be intimidated, Co-AIM organized a follow-up, “The Streets Belong
to the People” demonstration, which successfully marched from the park
through the East Village. It was the first major U.S. anti-imperialist,
anti-war march. It attracted militant activists to YAWF and WWP.
YAWF became famous for its mobile street tactics. Axelrod made “a unique
contribution by engineering mobile sound systems,” remembers YAWF member
Hillel Cohen. “Because the movement couldn’t afford professional
bullhorns, Dave rigged together batteries that you get at hardware stores with
surplus amplification and microphones to create a device that could be
assembled quickly and that you could run with to avoid the police on a mobile
demonstration.”
Axelrod worked on sound through the ensuing decades, marking countless
international anti-imperialist struggles. “Even though he was struggling
with cancer on May Day 2010, Dave was still at the controls of the sound
system,” notes Cohen.
Community activist
When gentrification of Manhattan’s Lower East Side began in the
mid-1970s, Axelrod, like many of his Puerto Rican neighbors, moved to Hoboken,
N.J., a working-class town that was more than 50 percent Latino/a. However,
gentrification began there in the early 1980s, and arsonist fires were set to
drive out Latino/a families.
Moreover, landlords sought to renovate apartments and raise rents, so they
tried to change the rent control law, won through struggle in 1973, to include
vacancy decontrol. Axelrod and neighbor Dan Tumpson swung into action. They
found that the city charter included the right to mount a referendum that could
be used to try to stop vacancy decontrol.
“We needed to get 25 percent of the registered voters, which would have
been 4,500, but we got 2,800 signatures, which was amazing in just five
days,” recounts Tumpson. When they presented the petition, the city
council meeting turned into a community revolt.
After a speaker was thrown out, Axelrod took the microphone. “Dave was
asked to take his hat off, but he refused, so they just shut down the
meeting,” reports Tumpson. Though the activists didn’t defeat
vacancy decontrol, defending rent control continued for years; it is up again
this year. “We stopped them with petitions every time,” notes
Tumpson. “Dave was always great on strategy.”
Activist on the job
Not wanting a job as a corporate war industry engineer, Axelrod took unskilled
jobs, which freed him to do political organizing. Nevertheless, he made a
statement by choosing to work in the 1960s and 1970s as a stock clerk at the
Margaret Sanger Clinic, which provided vital women’s health care. By the
1990s, he worked on the library’s technical services staff at the New
York City Technical College, now called the NYC College of Technology.
A member of District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees, Axelrod met students and faculty at work. He posted flyers
about International Action Center activities and left WW newspapers in
prominent places. He proofread and wrote articles for the student newspaper,
including a series on the struggle to free death-row prisoner Mumia
Abu-Jamal.
Axelrod was so liked that the college declared an all-day open house in the
library so that people could wish him well when he retired in 2004. Black
Students Union and Haitian Club members were well represented among other
students, staff and faculty.
Petra Johnson, a Trinidad native who worked with Axelrod at NYCCT, valued his
friendship. “Dave was such an amazing guy. He was so warm and loving. He
would reach out and have conversations with everybody. He genuinely cared about
people. He often made copies of articles from Workers World to share with me,
and I became aware of various issues because of him. “
Karuna Madal valued Axelrod, her neighbor, as a close friend. “David was
a very caring person. We used to sit and have good discussions about politics
even though we were on two different sides of the coin. We agreed to disagree.
Dave was also knowledgeable about natural remedies, and I’m into
homeopathy, so we talked about that too. I was glad to go with him on doctor
appointments after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008.”
Marsha Goldberg, a WWP member who often walked home with Axelrod after Friday
meetings, valued him as a teacher and mentor as well as a comrade. “Dave
had such a strong understanding of the class struggle and of the importance of
the national question. I always learned so much every time we talked. He was
such a tough, dedicated fighter for the working class and for
self-determination for oppressed people.”
Axelrod was so well known and liked in all parts of his life that scores of
people showed up at a Hoboken funeral home to pay their respects after his
death on Jan. 22. The local newspaper’s obituary noted that he was
“a well-known local activist. He will be remembered for enthusiastically
voicing his opinions at City Council meetings, especially for maintaining rent
control. ... David was a lifelong fighter for human rights throughout the
world.”
A Workers World Party memorial for Dave Axelrod is being organized. More
detailed information will be announced in WW.
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