I am pushing 85 as I write this and take you back to a sleepy Sunday in 1943 when I am six years old and my father has brought me to the Five-Ten-Hall. While a small clutch of men, including my father, speak animatedly about things that buzz above me, my eyes are locked on one man in that group. I follow him wherever he steps, at a certain distance, too shy to approach. I am engrossed in the light that reflects purple and dark blue off his forehead and cheeks and by the contrast of his totally black skin and the whites of his eyes. No doubt such interest is not new to him. When our eyes meet, he smiles at me in a kindly way. The name of this blackest of men was Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. He was among the greatest of IWW organizers and one of the pioneer civil rights leaders of the early twentieth century: unsung and forgotten today.
Anatole Dolgoff
Left of the Left: Sam Dolgoff’s Life and Times
What follows here—after this introduction—are excerpts from Left of the Left, Anatole Dolgoff’s memoir of his father, Sam, who was a large figure on the margins of American life in the last century. Dolgoff embodied an ideal once celebrated on the American left. He was…
a worker-intellectual—someone who toils with his hands all his life and meanwhile develops his mind and deepens his knowledge and contributes mightily to progress and decency in the society around him.
Radiation Treatment
So, I am in the tight waiting room sharing space and chairs with half dozen black men in their fifties and sixties — the oldest of them twenty years younger than me. They are all of them thin and dressed in poverty uniform: shabby sweat pants or jeans slipping off slack thighs, loose sweaters and shirts that had once been molded to thicker chests and arms. Tired eyes, mustaches and hair combed, but still unkempt. Worn men, their unprivileged lives on display. They had all of them been driven up by van from black Brooklyn to glossy Mid-town Manhattan for their daily radiation doses.