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	Workers Vanguard No. 963	27 August 2010

Keith Anwar

1952-2010

Keith Anwar, an ardent socialist and longtime supporter of the Spartacist League, died in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 5 of an especially aggressive liver cancer that had been diagnosed barely five weeks earlier. He was 58 years old. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Keith’s wife, Connie; his two children, Brian and Tessa; his brother Bruce and sister-in-law Blandine; and to his many friends, co-workers and extended family. The speed with which this disease took Keith’s life has left us all stunned and deeply saddened.

A memorial service held shortly after Keith’s death drew close to 200 people, including family, Spartacist League members and supporters, former co-workers at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and local writers. Those who knew him well have recalled his uncompromising honesty, compassion and strength of character. As his son, Brian, poignantly pointed out at the gathering, “There are few men, few people that give more than they take. And that was Dad. He was more focused and hard-working than any person I’ve ever met.”

Keith was a multifaceted, talented individual who dedicated his adult life to fighting against oppression and bigotry in its many manifestations. A trade-union militant and talented writer, he was a materialist, an atheist who believed that mankind made its own history. Keith understood the importance of building a revolutionary workers party, representing the interests of workers, black people and other minorities, as the necessary instrument to bring about a society where those who labor rule. Those who worked with Keith were aware of his fierce opposition to both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

Keith came of age at a time of great radicalization and outpouring of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. And like many young activists at that time, he joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Being the kind of guy who looked for answers and required some serious convincing, Keith took notice of Workers Vanguard while attending Brandeis University in the early 1970s and was won to the views of the Spartacist League. Keith moved to Chicago in the late ’70s and landed a job at U.S. Steel’s South Works, later becoming an apprentice millwright at Inland Steel, where he quickly became known as a fighter for labor by honoring a bricklayers strike.

In 1979, while employed at Inland and a member of United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 1010, Keith refused to cross a picket of striking workers from sister Local 8180. The company reacted swiftly by firing him. A campaign to get Keith reinstated in his job, which was heavily featured in WV at the time, generated enormous support among steel workers in the Chicago-Gary district who understood that Keith had acted in defense of a tradition that helped build the industrial unions in this country: Picket lines mean don’t cross!

The union took his case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and won in 1982, when Inland was ordered to reinstate Keith with full back pay and seniority. Though this ruling was later overturned and Keith never got his job back, his refusal to cross picket lines earned him a great deal of authority that lasted throughout his life. Keith’s ties to USWA Local 1010 were instrumental in gaining the endorsement of a number of union officials for a labor-centered, united-front demonstration initiated by the SL that mobilized 3,000 people and prevented the Nazis from attacking Chicago’s Gay Pride March in June 1982. The union’s vice president, Cliff “Cowboy” Mezo, joined the mobilization and spoke at the rally. In 2001, Keith got a warm welcome from his former local as he was helping organize an anti-Klan mobilization in Gary, Indiana.

In 1986, Keith became a mechanic for the CTA and a member of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 308, where he again came to be known as a union militant and outspoken opponent of racism and bigotry in all forms. In 1987, bus driver Cassandra Seay and her mother were brutally beaten by the Chicago cops in their own home and slapped with trumped-up charges, including assaulting a police officer. Keith was in the forefront of rallying support in Local 308 for the defense of Seay, a member of ATU Local 241. It was through this successful campaign that the Chicago Labor Black Struggle League was formed, and Keith was one of its founding members. In the late 1980s, Keith helped organize an integrated team of transit workers to help a black co-worker move into a neighborhood that was just becoming integrated and where, the previous year, the home of a black couple who had moved in had been firebombed. The team of transit workers moved the family in and made a point to ostentatiously hang out on the front porch before leaving.

Upon hearing of Keith’s death, ATU Local 308 passed a motion offering condolences and solidarity to his family, noting “his high integrity and the faithful service he rendered to humanity.” Keith was instrumental in getting his union local to sign on in defense of class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and to donate repeatedly to his legal funds in the fight for freedom. Keith also helped build the Partisan Defense Committee’s annual Holiday Appeal benefits, successfully soliciting contributions from his union.

Keith was politically active for over 40 years. Swimming against the stream and fighting for what you know to be right and just can be a tough job, especially in this extended period of union defeats, lack of class struggle, and political and social reaction. In the last few years of his life, he stepped back from political work and focused on his writing, approaching it with the same professionalism and seriousness that he showed in other areas. In 2004, Keith edited a second edition of Memories of Afghanistan, the memoirs of his father, Mohammad H. Anwar, a modernizing Afghan intellectual of the last century. Keith wrote an afterword discussing the role of the U.S. government in fostering Islamic fundamentalism and tribal backwardness in Afghanistan. He focused on Washington’s support to Osama bin Laden and other reactionary mujahedin (holy warriors) following the 1979 entry of the Soviet Army into Afghanistan, where it fought on the side of social progress, particularly for horribly oppressed Afghan women.

Keith went on to become an active member of the Oak Park Writers Group, a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists and a member of the Dramatists’ Guild. He authored several short plays, primarily political-social satires, which were given public readings by established actors. This past June, Keith won the 2010 Dionysos Cup at the Polarity Ensemble Theatre’s Festival of New Plays for his script Kabulitis, which weaves together a story about a woman’s decline into dementia and the brutal treatment of women in Afghanistan.

This touching drama of an elderly American woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease who is haunted by memories of Afghanistan was based on the experience of Keith’s mother, Phyllis, who had joined her Afghan husband, Mohammed, in an ill-fated attempt to foster secularism and modernity in mid 20th-century Afghanistan. Phyllis was a longtime friend of the Spartacist League and a member from 1979 to 1982. As part of a 1980 national speaking tour titled “Women of the East—Proletarian Revolution or Slavery: Down With Islamic Reaction! Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” she vividly retold her experience as the first woman of her time to refuse to wear the tent-like veil on the streets of Kabul. At the risk of her life, she secretly taught girls at a school which was disguised as a hospital to fool the mullahs.

Keith never sought the spotlight, so it was easy to miss the depth of his work on so many fronts. He was comfortable in his own skin, confident in his worldview and his approach to life. An obituary for Keith in the Chicago Tribune (13 July) quoted a member of the Oak Park Writers Group who remarked, “Keith was a lovely writer, but was just as proud of his work repairing trains.” As his son, Brian, put it at the memorial meeting, “Dad had those kind of hands. Hands that could fix a motor, or write an award-winning play.”

We will never forget that within Keith’s stoic sensibility and sometimes brooding style, there was an inner core of tremendous passion, will and creative ability that brought joy and sustenance to his family and friends, creative and intellectual contributions to the world and an unyielding fight on behalf of the working class. These qualities made up a man whose life made a difference in this world. He will be sorely missed.