Red Lives: Our Years in the U.S. Communist Party (1950–2000), Vol. 1: Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements

Paul Friedman was born on February 20, 1947, in New York City. His family moved from the Bronx to Flushing, Queens, in 1955. Paul attended Bronx High School of Science and New York University, where he received his bachelor of science degree. He met his future wife, Jean, at the university, and they married in November, 1970. He served as a national coordinator of the Student Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam and youth director of the New York State district of the Communist Party while on hiatus from college. From 1970 to 1973, Paul worked as a research technician in the pediatric cardiology department at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons at the Presbyterian Medical Center. He joined the staff of Local 1199 in 1973 as an organizer and eventually worked as assistant director of organizing for 1199’s National Union of Hospitals and Health Care Employees. Prior to his retirement in 2019 Paul served in various leadership positions at 1199 Service Employees International Union; Local 100 Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union; Committee of Interns and Residents; and New York State Nurses Association. Paul participated in or led campaigns throughout the United States that brought over twenty thousand new members into these unions.

Cindy Hawes was born in Pasadena, California, on May 31, 1949. She grew up in the Altadena-Pasadena area before going off to study at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cindy spent her junior year abroad in Madrid, Spain, and it was during that year that she traveled with other US students to the Soviet Union. That trip, as well as other travels, sparked an interest in socialism. After graduating, she continued her studies in Mexico, and when she returned to the United States she started a career in journalism and joined the Young Workers Liberation League and eventually the Communist Party USA. Cindy moved to New York in 1977 to be a staff member at the Daily World and in 1981 became the paper’s correspondent in Mexico City and in 1988 in Los Angeles. Four years later, she returned to Mexico City, where she worked with both the national and international press there until her retirement. She currently devotes her time to translation and her own writing.

Geoffrey Jacques is a poet, writer, and editor who has taught at colleges and universities in New York City and Southern California. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1953. His books include the poetry collections The Orchestra of Wind Chimes (2023) and Just for a Thrill (2004), both from Wayne State University Press, and the literary-critical study A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). His poem ”Trump” appeared in 2019 in the journal Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. His essay “A New Civil Rights Movement, a New Journal,” an introduction to the online archive of the complete run of Freedomways magazine, appears on the open-access Reveal Digital–Independent Voices portal at JSTOR. Jacques was the Detroit Daily World correspondent from 1978 to 1983, and a New York City–based Daily World staffer from 1983 to 1985. He served as a business representative and organizer for Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, and from 1990 to 1996 he was assistant editor, then associate editor, of 1199 News, the monthly magazine of 1199 SEIU, the New York City-based health and hospital workers union. He has taught classes in English, African American Studies, American Studies, and Humanities at the City University of New York, the University of California, Santa Barbara, California Institute of the Arts, and elsewhere. Since 2014, he has been a moderator for Portside. He and his wife live in Ventura, California, and Detroit, Michigan.

Timothy Johnson worked as a reporter for People's World (1985), and People's Daily World (1985–1990). He joined the Communist Party in Chicago in 1983 and lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. He also served on the Party's African American Equality Commission from 1987 to 1991.

Carol Pittman was born in New York to communist parents who were also lifelong journalists, her father an African American who left Georgia during the great migration, her mother a German Jew who left Germany in 1938. Both wrote for and edited People’s World, Daily World, and People’s Daily World. She grew up in San Francisco, where she was active as a teen in both the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. She joined the Bay Area youth club of the Communist Party USA at seventeen and was briefly a member of the Black Panther Party. She studied ethnography at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, Germany, where she also played guitar in a Chilean conjunto band. She is multilingual, speaking English, German, Spanish, and Russian. Upon returning to the United States and New York City, Carol joined the Young Workers Liberation League and was active in the Chile Solidarity Movement. She interpreted for Gladys Marin, then head of the Chilean Communist Youth, Laura Allende (sister of murdered president Salvador Allende), and Fanny Edelman, head of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. She was an editor at International Publishers. While Youth Council coordinator of the National Coalition for Economic Justice, she helped organize the National Youth March for Jobs in the mid-1970s, then the largest national youth mobilization for jobs. During this time, she led her building’s tenants association. Carol became education director for the New York Party, joined the state committee, and was a leader of the fight for change. She left the Party in 1991. Her work as community-outreach coordinator for a local hospital’s pediatric resource center led to becoming an organizer for Local 1199, Registered Nurse Division. Her activity expanded to director of NY Jobs with Justice, in collaboration with the Workers’ Rights Board. She was a moderator of Portside from 2003 to 2014. A position as community-affairs coordinator for the New York State Nurses Association led to subsequently becoming associate director for political and community organizing, coordinating NYSNA’s labor-community response to hospital closings. Carol is retired, a grandmother and a Brooklyn Community Gardener (BUG) at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Donna Ristorucci was born in 1947 in Jamaica, New York. She knew she was a socialist at the age of eleven. The oldest of three children, she asked her father on a ride home from her grandparents, “Why can’t everyone just have everything they need?” He replied, “That’s socialism.” Her parents were leftists, but McCarthyism put the kibosh on any activism. In high school, Ristorucci worked in peace and civil-rights activities, especially the 1964 boycott for school integration. She joined the W.E.B. Du Bois Club in 1965 and the Communist Party in 1966, following its first open convention since McCarthyism. At City College she became immersed in anti-Vietnam War and open-admissions struggles on campus. She left school to work full-time for the Du Bois Clubs. She helped organize the US delegation to the 1968 World Youth Festival in Bulgaria. A founder of the Young Workers Liberation League, Ristorucci was New York education director. She participated in the Party’s national council and New York State leadership (until moving to Jersey City in 1979). In 1971, Ristorucci became the Daily World’s youth editor, serving on the editorial board. She eventually edited World Magazine, the paper’s weekly supplement. During her years at the paper, she gave birth to three sons. She left the paper and the CPUSA in 1987. After working at a labor-law office, Ristorucci was hired by Teamsters Local 237, a public-employee union, as associate editor of its newspaper. Returning to school at night, she earned a BA in labor studies in 1991. In 1995 she became founding editor of 237’s retiree newspaper and assistant director of the Retiree Division. She retired in 2012—still a Communist, still anti-imperialist, still going to demonstrations (although not quite as many).

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1953, Daniel Rosenberg came to the communist movement in 1970. His parents were Communist Party members and community leaders in civil-rights, peace, labor, and other movements. Fearing that the McCarthyite red scare of the 1950s would impose a Nazi-type regime in the United States, the Party urged his parents to go “underground”—with him in tow—to escape persecution. They moved through various cities until returning to Brooklyn. Rosenberg soon stumbled into public school. Each day lasted a century. He read Lenin and Marx in the summer of 1969, entering eleventh grade with both conviction and verbiage. From the last row in class, he held forth, in contrast with his general silence during the previous decade. He soon joined the Young Workers Liberation League, the Party’s new youth organization. He would hold League leadership positions and later local posts in the Communist Party. He served on the Party’s history and international commissions (the latter owing to his representing the League in the anti-imperialist World Federation of Democratic Youth). He has a doctorate in history from the City University of New York. He taught at Adelphi University for thirty-five years. He has written several pieces about Party history.

Jackie Saindon worked for most of her life as an adult educator, teaching adults to read, as well as teaching English to second-language learners. She has also been a community activist, serving on the school board, the library board, and various other community organizations. For many years, until her retirement in 2018, she was a part-time assistant professor in the Language and Literacy Department of the University of Georgia. She was born into a Communist Party family and grew up as a “red-diaper baby.” Her father was sent to New York in 1952 to join other Party members sent to work in industrial settings. During that period, she read Marxist literature that had been hidden in her family’s basement. She was an active member of the W.E.B. Du Bois Club and later of the industrial section of the Party, working with grassroots members of the International Garment Workers Union and District 65 United Auto Workers, organizing office workers to join the union already established by warehouse workers. She currently lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is co-coordinator of an adult literacy program and works with community groups and the school district to revitalize their adult and family literacy programs.