James Zarichny

Jim Zarichny died in his Boulder home in the early morning hours of Jan. 31 at the age of 89. He was a lifelong activist in the labor, civil rights, peace and socialist movements. When he was a kid, his father was an auto worker who participated in the 1937 sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan. Instead of the workers walking out, the bosses had to leave. The workers converted the factories into fortresses which they lived in and held for a month until General Motors recognized the union. Jim's mother was in the Emergency Brigade of the Women's Auxiliary. At one point, tear gas was pumped into the occupied factories. The brigade took long poles to break the windows so the gas would escape. Jim was in eighth grade then and became the president of the Junior Union. In high school, he was treasurer of the CIO Youth Club. His dad's wages went up by 50 %. He got time and a half pay for overtime over 8 hours. The line speed was slowed significantly and he no longer came home exhausted. He was a different person. The strike was crucial. Jim said, "When the strike started, there were only three million union members in the United States. A decade later there were 17 million. The Flint victory touched off an incredible organizing campaign and growth of the labor movement." Jim was drafted into the Army in 1943 and served in Africa, India and Okinawa. When he came home, he attended Michigan State College in Lansing. In January, 1947, he was placed on disciplinary probation by the school as a result of distributing a leaflet of the American Youth for Democracy calling for a Fair Employment Practices Commission. The terms of the probation prohibited him from participating in any extra-curricular activity on campus but stated that "any political beliefs that you may hold play no part in this action." In 1948, Jim was a witness before the Michigan Senate Committee on Un-American Activities. He refused to reply to a question asking if he was a member of the Communist Party. He was indeed a member but if he had admitted that, he would have been compelled to give the names of other party members. On the last day of the legislative session, the Senate (acting as prosecutor, judge and jury) found Jim guilty of contempt and sentenced him to prison. Under the Michigan Constitution, however, this sentence could last only the life of the legislative session, and since the sentence was imposed on the last day of the session, Jim did not have to go to jail. In December 1948, Jim attended a civil rights meeting off-campus in a church at which a Communist Party leader spoke. He would be expelled from college for just doing that. The Civil Rights Congress took both cases on Jim's behalf to the courts. They reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear them. He worked at an auto plant for several years and would begin to re-evaluate his politics. He left the Communist Party in 1956. He felt a new left was needed. He moved to New York City where he enrolled at Columbia University. Jim was one of the founders of a study group that eventually became the FDR Four Freedoms Club, which met in his apartment. In 1960, when the Four Freedoms Club had 80 members, it affiliated to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This would almost double the national membership of SDS. He became a computer programmer in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute at Florida State University in Tallahassee where he helped organize a union of faculty and technical workers. He would end up commuting to Boulder to use the supercomputer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Jim joined the New American Movement, a democratic socialist group, shortly after it was founded in 1971. He became a leader of the Boulder chapter which supported union organizing and rent control in the city, and participated in the peace and environmental movements. In Tallahassee, Jim was involved with a leftist bookstore. He felt that it helped grow the left there and he urged the Boulder NAM chapter to create a similar institution. In 1979, the Left Hand Book and Record Collective was born. It is a collectively run and all volunteer socialist enterprise. Unfortunately, it will close this April. It has been a unique source of progressive literature in Boulder for decades. In the summer of 2006, Jim travelled to Chicago to attend the founding convention of a revived SDS and was treated as a respected elder statesman. In August 2010, he attended the Colorado SDS reunion in Boulder. He participated in 'Occupy Boulder' events and labor rallies at the State Capitol. He was a delegate to the Boulder County Democratic Party assembly and gave talks at Left Hand Books. He marched in the Louisville Labor Day Parade several times, first with the Boulder Area Labor Council and then later with the Democratic Socialists of America. Last year, he had to go in a wheelchair in the parade and he was enthusiastically cheered by the crowd.