We appreciate his gumption in doing something, right off the bat, about the interest and sympathy the paper had evoked in him. When Don joined the party in the late 1940s, the post-World War II labor upsurge in the United States had already peaked. The cadres of our movement could not yet know that we had entered what would turn out to be a very long retreat of the labor movement. The struggle for Black rights was still more than a decade away from the self-sustaining momentum that brought down Jim Crow segregation. But Don never saw this as a bad time to have joined the communist movement.
Any time is the right time.
And he was among those who stayed the course. Those who did were decisive to the party's transformation in the next upturn in the class struggle, which began to gain momentum in the early 1960s. We are grateful to the Minnesota Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists for giving us the opportunity through this note to take part in your celebration of this lifetime of communist political work. The leadership of Don's party thanks you all for joining together this evening to salute his more than fifty years among us in the revolutionary workers movement. To salute Don's example of activity and dependability that never flagged.