Judy Coleman, 1918-2007

Julia (Judy) Coleman, a longtime supporter of the Communist Party (CP) and later a friend of the Spartacist League, died at home on February 19. Throughout her life she was motivated by a deep hatred of capitalist exploitation and racist oppression, and as a Partisan Defense Committee sustainer, she was concerned above all with the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. We extend our condolences to her friends and to her family, Paul, Diana, Kathy, Kris, Pavlos and Corenthia.

Born in Brooklyn, New York on 20 April 1918, Judy married Esmond Coleman in 1936. They were together for 56 years until Es’s death in 1992. During her first year at New York University, she became active in the Young Communist League student fraction and joined the CP in 1939. In later years she was especially proud of her political work as a CP activist in the black ghetto in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during World War II and in San Francisco’s Fillmore district in the 1950s.

During the McCarthy era Judy and Es hid, housed and took care of various CPers who faced prosecution from the government witchhunters. After close friends and comrades were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted, Judy became one of the first social workers in California to enter private practice. She left the CP in the late 1950s, after the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin’s terror and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary which crushed the workers political revolution there. But she continued to call herself a socialist. She would often comment that she hadn’t voted for the Democrats since she left the CP. She came to respect the politics of the Spartacist League, and remarked that the U.S.’s bloody role in Vietnam had made her see that the Trotskyists of the 1940s, unlike the Stalinists who supported the “democratic” imperialists in the Second World War, had been right to oppose U.S. imperialism. A PDC sustainer from 1999, she was a fixture at Bay Area PDC picnics and Holiday Appeals.

Judy had a deep interest in the working people she met and an uncanny ability to earn their confidence. Everywhere she went, people told her their life story and sought her advice. She traveled all over the world, visiting 41 countries, with Es and by herself.

She had a sharp eye for hypocrisy and cant. At the end of her life, when she was asked if she would like to see any political people from the old days, she responded with typical acid wit, “I’d like to talk to Earl Browder and set him straight about that ‘Communism is 20th Century Americanism’ slogan,” naming one of the more grotesque slogans of the Stalinist Popular Front period.

We will all miss her insightful stories, compassion, humor and good company.