Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)

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Tim Hall, Ethos and History

I grew up in a semi-rural working-class area east of Cleveland, on the shores of Lake Erie, one of three children in a family with strong abolitionist, feminist, literary and musical traditions. I was an outdoors boy, a fisherman, hunter and boat-builder, played football and ran track, and attended Cornell on a scholarship, where I edited the literary magazine, won several literary prizes, had a play produced and narrowly avoided flunking out. Beginning in 1964 I went south in the civil rights movement, where my immersion in the struggle of black sharecroppers changed me into a life-long activist.

I participated in most of the mass movements of the 60s – civil rights, farmworker, anti-draft and anti-war, labor and increasingly in the revolutionary movement. In the process I hitch-hiked over the whole country. I became especially deeply involved with the black freedom struggle in Fayette County, Tennessee, where I still visit. I marched in the 1963 civil rights March on Washington, the 1965 Delano farmworkers pilgrimage to Sacramento, the April 1967 anti-war march in New York (in the Harlem Contingent), the March on the Pentagon, the 1967 Stop the Draft Week battles with the police, the Selma march to Montgomery, a 60-mile civil rights march through west Tennessee in 1966, and was active in numerous strikes in the Cleveland area. In 1967 I helped found and lead the Cleveland Draft Resistance Union, which held frequent mass actions and fought right-wingers, racists and the police.

Through our participation in these struggles, a few of my close comrades and I moved toward socialism and the program of a working-class revolution as the solution to class and national oppression. In 1968 I began working in factories and have worked at Union Carbide, Republic Steel, Ford Motor Company and Detroit Receiving Hospital. I drove a Checker Cab for 11 years in inner-city Detroit and have worked at my present job, a large communications plant in Detroit, since 1988.

In 1969 a few comrades and I, rejecting all the left organizations and regimes as having revised the soul out of Marxism, formed a Marxist trend which continues today as the Communist Voice Organization. My activism continued, through this group, in workers’ struggles, in opposition to the anti-abortion fanatics and against U.S. intervention in Latin America. At the end of the 70s I immersed myself in studying, playing and singing the blues, work and prison songs and revolutionary music and in collecting and studying proletarian literature from the US and abroad. I also resumed writing poetry and songs, after a hiatus of over ten years. In 1985, I led a successful cab drivers’ strike and founded Struggle magazine, which has recently entered its 26th year of publication.

In 1995 I participated in the Detroit newspaper strike picket lines which blockaded the plant. In 2003 I marched against the war in Iraq in New York City. Throughout this period I marched in many anti-war and pro-immigrant protests in Detroit and Chicago. I have been an active fighter for the workers and against both management and the sellout labor leadership at my current job for many years, leading a movement of injured workers in 1989-90 and a successful fight from 2008 to the present to compel my local union leadership to call mass actions against management job cuts. In August 2010 I was a delegate to the national convention of my union, the American Postal Workers Union, in Detroit, where I fought successfully against a pro-concessions resolution and in favor of one establishing defense of postal workers’ jobs as a focus of the national campaign against five-day delivery.

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