A radical life / Vera Buch Weisbord.

This work contains black and white photographs that depict Vera Buch Weisbord at different ages, as well as of some of her family members.

Includes index.

This item contains a black and white drawn map of the scene of a police shooting of striking unions members in Gastonia, North Carolina.

The skies are empty -- Triumph and disaster -- A very special club -- I begin to live at last -- Passaic: achievement and betrayal -- Just good soldiers -- A place for me -- On strike in Loray -- The rolling wave of strikes -- "God save the state and its hon'rable co'r [sic]" -- A tissue of vague allegations -- A peculiar trial -- Against the stream -- Epilogue: the long wait.

"Vera Weisbord was and is now (at eighty-one) [at the time of publication, 1977] an American radical, but in the most positive, courageous, and creative sense of the word. Her life has been lived to the roots of her talents and interests; it has been extreme in commitment to ideals and self; it has been (with a peculiarly American cast) a thoroughgoing and original life, and she gives it to us now, modest in self-conception but powerful in fact and in literary expression. Vera Weisbord is a writer. And a teacher. And an artists. And a factory worker. And a political radical. As a child, she survived poverty in the tenements of New York. During a stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium, she first became interested in the class struggle and soon after joined the left wing of the Socialist Party and began a long period of work as a labor activist. Her first assignment as an organizer was in the massive woolen mill strike of Passaic, New Jersey, where she met the strike's chief organizer, Albert Weisbord, a Harvard law graduate who, like Vera, was a committed revolutionist. During the stormy events of the strike, she formed a lifelong commitment to him. Following an assignment in the Pennsylvania coal fields, in 1928 Vera underwent a painful, unwanted abortion because Albert was convince that a child would impeded their usefulness to the Communist Party, from whither they were later to separate. In 1929 she was sent as organizer to the textile mill strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, where she was the victim of a police assault on a picket line and was jailed as well. During the following years, she took various jobs as a factory hand in order to be closer to the workers and understand their plight. In her book Vera Weisbord recalls in stunning detail the events of a turbulent period of labor growth in the United States. But more, there is in her story the touching humanness of a woman often torn between her politics, her need for home and family, and her private struggle for personhood in a male-dominated social movement. An autobiography that will interest women, labor historians, and the general reader." --From the dust jacket.