Remembering Minnie Bruce Pratt

This article was originally posted on July 20, 2023. For more remembrances of Minnie Bruce Pratt go to workers.org/2023/07/72439.

Minnie Bruce Pratt was already a renowned lesbian poet, author and anti-racist activist even before she joined Workers World Party over 20 years ago. She became a managing editor of Workers World/Mundo Obrero newspaper following the death of her longtime partner and spouse, Leslie Feinberg, in 2014.

Minnie Bruce and I became political kindred spirits, working together as managing editors and on the education committee. We were both born in segregated Alabama — she in Selma and me in Tuscaloosa, she being white and me being African American. Although our experiences growing up were different as night and day, our hatred of white supremacy and our joining the Party as a vehicle to fight it brought us even closer. 

In 2016, when I was the WWP presidential candidate, Minnie Bruce organized a dynamic meeting of young people in the town where she was living, Syracuse, New York, for me to speak on our program of revolutionary struggle. The next day as we drove to Rochester for another meeting, we talked about taking a trip together to Seneca Falls, New York, where the feminist movement arose in the 1800s and also to the Adirondacks to visit the gravesite of abolitionist John Brown. 

Since Minnie Bruce died on July 2, [2023], I feel painful regret that we never took that trip together to deepen our camaraderie. I am grateful that Martha Grevatt and I were able to visit her in hospice care on June 23.

I will miss everything Southern about her — her voice, her warmth, her personal and political sensitivity and most of all, her lifetime commitment to the abolishment of the most horrific scourge known to humankind — capitalism. Minnie Bruce Pratt, your legacy will live on now and for future generations of revolutionaries until a better world is truly in birth. 

Go to minniebrucepratt.net.