Clara Fraser member of political party Freedom Socialist Party
Organizing the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women
In the 1950s and 1960s, Fraser stayed active in the labor arena, worked to end segregation, advocated for women, and opposed the Vietnam War. She worked with her then-husband, Richard S. Fraser, in developing Revolutionary Integration to explain the interdependence of the struggles for socialism and African American freedom and argue the key importance of Black leadership for the U.S. working class.Within the SWP, Fraser opposed the party's support for the Nation of Islam. The Seattle local conducted a long campaign to try to win the national party to its perspective, but a clampdown on internal party democracy brought this effort to a dead end. Fraser co-authored the branch's critique of the SWP's political and organizational degeneration in a series of documents that have been re-published under the title Crisis and Leadership (Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2000).
The Seattle branch left the SWP in 1966 and launched the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), founded on a program emphasizing the leadership role of the underprivileged in achieving progress for all of humanity. In 1967, Fraser formed Radical Women (RW), along with Gloria Martin and young women of the New Left. RW's ambition was to teach women leadership, theoretical skills, class consciousness.
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