Beatrice Lumpkin wasn’t just liberal, or left-leaning, or a secret communist sympathizer. She was an open, enthusiastic, dues-paying member of the Communist Party for nearly 90 years, whose passion for workers’ rights put her on the front lines of post-World War II labor struggles in Chicago, from working with Black Panther Fred Hampton to the fight to compensate employees abruptly fired at the closing of the Wisconsin Steel plant in 1980, to the recent unionization of Starbucks employees.
“Bea was born and grew up and lived her life in the Communist Party,” said Roberta Wood, former secretary-treasurer of the Communist Party USA.
Lumpkin, 107, died in Hyde Park, Sunday, June 14.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, who declared Aug. 3 as “Beatrice Lumpkin Day” in Chicago, called her “a towering figure in the labor movement, an unwavering advocate for fully funded education, and a continued source of inspiration for us all.”
“Spanning almost an entire century of public engagement, Lumpkin was deeply involved in movements for workers’ rights, civil rights, and educational justice. She advocated for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, supported efforts to advance racial justice, and fought for policies that protected vulnerable communities,” Johnson continued, in a statement.
“As a teacher and organizer, Bea brought the lessons of solidarity into the classroom. As a math teacher in Chicago Public Schools and at Malcolm X College, she inspired generations of students while remaining deeply engaged building worker power. Through her leadership in the Chicago Teachers Union Retiree Committee and Climate Justice Committee, she built bridges between generations, reminding us that strong schools and strong communities are built through collective action and a steadfast commitment to justice.”
She was born in New York in 1918. Her parents, Dora and Morris Shapiro, Belarus radicals who emigrated to America after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, ran a laundry. Lumpkin would say she was born “knowing which side I was on.” By age 9 she was marching with striking textile workers.
In her mid-teens, she joined the Young Communist League, and since then, she “never had a moment when there was nothing to do,” she wrote in her 2013 autobiography, “Joy in the Struggle: My Life and Love.” “There were always picket lines for workers on strike, demonstrations to demand food for a hungry family, knocking on doors to sell The Daily Worker, or bring people out to vote.”
She went to Hunter College, but found “union work was too important and too exciting” to waste time in school. She later returned and graduated.
She moved to Buffalo in 1942 to work for Sylvania Radio. There she met a force in the Buffalo Communist movement, Hattie Lumpkin and, more significantly, her son Frank. They married on Oct. 22, 1949.
“My father was in the Merchant Marines,” said their son, John Lumpkin, the former director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. “My grandmother was very active in the people’s movement. When he came home from the war, they met at his mother’s house and fell in love.”
“She and Frank were an extraordinary couple,” said Tom Geoghegan, a longtime Chicago labor lawyer who represented the Wisconsin Steel workers. “Frank had a wonderful heart, and she had a great heart too. They each had their own form of courage and complemented each other. They had a real romance.”
The couple settled in Gary, Indiana, and Frank Lumpkin went to work at Wisconsin Steel in 1950.
In 1965, she became a Chicago Public Schools teacher, then an associate professor at Malcolm X College, originally Crane Junior College, around the time it changed its name, where she focused on stressing the multicultural roots of knowledge. In the 1980s, she contributed to the Portland Model Baseline essays, a comprehensive attempt to highlight Black contributions to every aspect of education.
“The African contributions to mathematics comprise a vast field of study because it was in Africa that the foundations of our modern mathematics were developed,” Lumpkin wrote in one PMB essay. “Since Africa is widely believed to be the birthplace of the human race, it follows that Africa was the birthplace of mathematics and science.”
With Black contributions to society being vigorously scrubbed from history today, Lumpkin reflects the opposite extreme of the spectrum — too far, for some critics, who found her Afrocentrism “keen to deny the Greeks any intellectual achievements of their own.”
In 1974, she was involved in forming the Coalition of Labor Union Women, serving on its executive board for 20 years.
On March 28, 1980, Wisconsin Steel closed its doors, firing 3,500 workers. Their last paycheck bounced. Its longtime owner, International Harvester, had sold the mill to Environdyne in 1977, to shed itself of pension obligations. Their union proved feckless and Frank Lumpkin stepped forward and formed the Save Our Jobs Committee.
“As he put it, it was a question of fight or die,” said Beatrice Lumpkin, who aided him in his efforts, later publishing a book about the struggle, “Always Bring a Crowd: The Story of Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker.” After a 17-year struggle, the fired Wisconsin Steel workers received nearly $15 million in compensation.
Survivors include sons John Lumpkin, Paul Lumpkin and Carl Mohrherr, and daughter Jeanleah Mohrherr, as well as three grandchildren and a great-grandson.
“She was the person who was always showing up, wherever people were demonstrating,” said John Lumpkin. “Recently, when folks at Starbucks were out on strike, she was there with them. She was at the No Kings demonstrations. She was a rock of the movement.”
“A lot of people talk about the sacrifices they made for the movement,” said Roberta Wood. “For Bea, it was never a sacrifice. It was all the joy of the struggle. She was raised to think your job is to make the world better.”
“She was a heroic woman, an indefatigable organizer and a person who never gave up,” said Geoghegan. “What was extraordinary about Bea is she started young and kept marching until the end. She believed in class struggle, and communists were the best people to articulate that. She had a sense of humor about herself as she got older. She was a cheerful person with an extraordinary sense of justice.”