Ed Shaw

Edward "Ed" Shaw (1923 – 1995) was an American Communist and life-long member of the Socialist Workers Party. Born in Zion, Illinois, on July 13, 1923, Shaw grew up in a family of working farmers. In his youth, he rebelled against the fundamentalist religious assumptions that surrounded him in Zion. After high school, at the outbreak of World War II, he entered the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Shaw moved to New York City in 1942. There, while still in his late teens, he entered the military-run Maritime Service training school at Sheepshead Bay, where he got his papers as a fireman/watertender in the merchant marine.

On his way to start a job on a boat on the Great Lakes in 1943, Shaw found himself helping a Black worker escape a racist lynch mob during a race riot in Detroit - an act that ended up marking the rest of his life. From that moment on, he identified with, and later became an active participant in, the struggle for Black rights.

During World War II, Shaw sailed mostly on what were called "liberty ships." While in Murmansk, in the Arctic region of the Soviet Union in 1943, on a ship carrying arms and supplies, Shaw got his interest piqued in socialism.

A few months later, on a ship in a Philadelphia harbor loading cargo for the USSR, Shaw met a seaman who had gotten to know a member of the Socialist Workers Party on another trip. This seaman told Shaw that 18 leaders of the SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters had been imprisoned on charges of "conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government," because of their opposition to the World War. Their convictions had been the first under the notorious Smith "Gag" Act.

The seaman in Philadelphia gave Shaw three books he had gotten from the SWP member: "Dialectics of Nature" and "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" by Friedrich Engels, and "Fascism and Big Business" by Daniel Guerin. Shaw promptly sat down and read them from beginning to end, taking a particular liking to "Dialectics of Nature". When he returned to New York, he visited the Socialist Workers Party's office in Manhattan, where he met SWP members and bought "the Militant" and more socialist books and pamphlets. Shaw joined the Socialist Workers Party in October 1944.

In 1949, while unemployed, Shaw was drafted into the U.S. Army. Losing his appeal for deferment based on his time in the merchant marine, he was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey. Shaw served one year in the army, on the eve of the Korean War. When the U.S. organized forces invaded Korea in 1950, Shaw took an active part in the SWP campaign against the war.

At the beginning of the 1950s Shaw went to work in Los Angeles for a couple years and was active in the party branch there. In the fall of 1953, Shaw, along with a handful of other SWP members, moved to Detroit to help reinforce the party branch there, after the split with the group lead by Bert Cochran. At the end of the 1950s Shaw was chosen by the SWP branch in Detroit as its organizer. He was elected to the SWP National Committee at the party's convention in 1959. He served on the leadership body until 1981. He was the SWP's organization secretary during the late 1960s, serving alongside the party's national secretary, Farrell Dobbs.

On New Year's Day in 1959, a revolution in Cuba, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, overthrew the U.S. backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Soon after the revolution's triumph, Shaw took the initiative to travel to Cuba to experance what was going on first hand. Upon Shaw's return, the SWP sponsored a nationwide speaking tour for him in late 1959 and 1960. In the early 1960s, he was a leader and Midwest director of the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee".

In 1964, Shaw was nominated as the Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. vice-president and ran on the ticket with Clifton DeBerry. The SWP slate got on the ballot in 11 states. Shaw assumed additional leadership responsibilities over the next decade. He became SWP organization secretary in 1965, an assignment he held through 1968.

During much of the 1970s, Shaw shouldered numerous responsibilities as a leader of the world communist movement. He traveled throughout Latin America, collaborating with cothinkers of the SWP and other revolutionaries. His trips included visits to Argentina and Bolivia during the prerevolutionary upsurges of the early 1970s in these countries, as well as to Peru, Chile, and elsewhere. Shaw represented the SWP leadership as a fraternal delegate in the United Secretariat of the Fourth International between 1972 and 1977 and spent considerable time in Spain.

In 1977 Shaw moved to Miami and became part of the SWP branch there. After retiring from day-to-day political activity in 1982, he continued to follow the party's press and its work nationally and internationally, and to carry out projects proposed by the party leadership.

Shaw worked as a machinist for 11 years at an aircraft engine shop, before retiring in 1992 at the age of 69.

Shaw was hospitalized in October 1995 with complications from chronic emphysema and serious heart problems. He died four weeks later.