For more than 90 years, Beatrice Lumpkin brought a zeal for fairness and a fierce desire to protect working-class employees to her civil rights and workers’ rights activism.
Lumpkin, 107, died of heart failure on June 14 at the Montgomery Place senior living community in Hyde Park, said her son John. She had lived in Hyde Park for the past 15 years, and previously had lived in the South Shore neighborhood.
Fearless, Lumpkin was a dogged union organizer in many settings and was a civil rights advocate and an interracial marriage pioneer who protested Jim Crow laws, while also teaching math in the Chicago Public Schools and at Malcolm X College.
One of Lumpkin’s longest and most rewarding struggles was fighting to gain compensation for the more than 3,000 employees of the Wisconsin Steel plant on the Southeast Side who lost their jobs when the plant abruptly closed in 1980. After a 17-year fight, workers received a $15 million settlement.
“People always focus on her extremely long life which is remarkable, but what I think is really remarkable about Bea is this sort of red thread that ran through her life — she wasn’t just a list of a million organizations and causes,” said Roberta Wood, a longtime friend and the former secretary-treasurer of the Communist Party USA. “It was a red thread, based on her love and confidence in the working class, and every struggle about that and related to that. She was always looking to build justice for Black workers and equality.”
Born Beatrice Shapiro in New York City’s Bronx borough in 1918, Lumpkin was the daughter of parents who operated a laundry business. Her parents’ work informed Lumpkin’s sympathy for the plight of workers.
“My mother ironed shirts and washed and stretched curtains. That meant standing on her feet long hours,” Lumpkin wrote in her 2013 autobiography, “Joy in the Struggle.” “Her legs were thick with swollen veins. It hurt my heart, watching my mother stand on swollen legs every day. But that’s the way it was.”
Lumpkin attended James Monroe High School in the Bronx, where she joined the Young Communist League. She was drawn to that group’s organizing in free speech fights.
“From the moment I joined the YCL … I can truly say that I have never had a moment when I had nothing to do,” she wrote. “There were always picket lines for workers on strike, demonstrations to demand food for a hungry family, knocking on doors to sell The Daily Worker (newspaper) or bringing people out to vote.”
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In 1935, Lumpkin was arrested when she was part of a mass picket line in front of a New York City department store, Ohrbach’s, where clerks were striking. She and fellow picketers were released several hours later.
Lumpkin earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in New York City in 1939. During college, she helped to organize local laundry workers in a union, and she also organized the National Student Strike for Peace, which earned her a suspension from school.
After college, she returned to laundry work, though this time in New York City’s Brooklyn borough. Accused of being a Communist, Lumpkin was expelled from her laundry union — and, from the industry — and she shifted to working as a drill press operator at a machine shop in Queens, and then as an engineer for a radio maker.
During World War II, Lumpkin moved to Buffalo, New York, and took a job with a radio transmitter maker. While in Buffalo, she married and divorced Roderick Mohrherr, and then married Frank Lumpkin. With jobs in Buffalo scarce, the couple moved to Chicago in 1949, settling in an apartment at 37th Street and Lake Park Avenue. In 1950, Frank Lumpkin took a job with Wisconsin Steel.
Seeking more income to support a growing family, Beatrice Lumpkin took a technical job with Allied Radio in Chicago in 1952, where she worked for the next 11 years. In 1954, she and her husband moved from Woodlawn to Gary, where they lived until 1962.
Lumpkin left Allied Radio and spent six weeks writing ad copy for the Gary Post-Tribune before taking a job as a metallurgical lab test report clerk at National Tube in Gary. She then returned to Allied Radio in a role building and wiring electronic equipment.
Lumpkin and her husband moved to west suburban Broadview in 1962 when Allied Radio relocated its operations from the Loop to Maywood. She also had been taking night courses with an eye toward becoming a public school teacher, and she picked up a master’s degree from Northeastern Illinois State College in 1967. In 1965, Lumpkin began teaching math at Crane High School on the West Side. She then shifted to Manley Elementary School, a few blocks away. In 1966, she began teaching at Austin High School.
In 1967, Lumpkin started teaching math at Crane Junior College, which was soon renamed Malcolm X College. While there, Lumpkin gained a new appreciation for contributions to the field of math from ancient Egyptians and Africans, which sparked her desire to write a children’s book, “Senefer: A Young Genius in Old Egypt,” about an Egyptian mathematician, which was published in 1979.
In 1971, Lumpkin, a union delegate, joined City Colleges teachers in going on strike after the system’s leaders proposed an increased workload with no corresponding increase in pay. The strike lasted five weeks, and after it ended, Malcolm X’s president barred Lumpkin and two other union officials from campus, assigning them to a college satellite location in the Cabrini-Green housing project. Lumpkin was soon allowed to return to Malcolm X.
In 1974, Lumpkin picked up a second master’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. That year, she also helped found the Coalition of Labor Union Women, which supports trade unionist women.
“We wanted to fight for women’s rights through an organization of our own,” Lumpkin wrote in her autobiography. “Men were invited to join too, to help fight for women’s rights. My husband, Frank, was one of the first men to join CLUW.”
In 1980, Frank Lumpkin and 3,400 others lost their jobs when Wisconsin Steel’s plant abruptly closed. The laid-off workers immediately lost their union, and didn’t even receive their final paychecks. The Lumpkins spearheaded a long fight for justice for them, forming the Wisconsin Steel Workers Save Our Jobs Committee and lobbying and picketing. Finally, almost 17 years after the plant closed, the 2,700 former hourly workers from the plant received final settlement checks.
In 1999, Beatrice Lumpkin published a book she wrote, “Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker,” about the Wisconsin Steel battle.
Lawyer Tom Geoghegan, who represented the Wisconsin Steel workers, called Beatrice and Frank Lumpkin “a power couple for people who were absolutely powerless.”
“They worked together and complemented each other,” Geoghegan said. “And after Frank died, she just carried on — she went up and worked on campaigns and she was an activist.”
After retiring from Malcolm X in 1982, Lumpkin remained in the classroom, teaching as a substitute teacher at several city high schools before landing a teaching job at Bowen High School. She left Bowen in a staff cutback in 1990 but landed briefly at George Washington High on the Southeast Side before she retired again at the end of 1990.
Into the 21st century, Lumpkin continued organizing and remaining politically active. Upset over the high cost of heating one’s home during the winter of 2001, she helped form a coalition, Angry Utility Consumers, which demonstrated against Peoples Gas. Eventually, the utility was required to refund its customers an overcharge.
In 2008, Lumpkin was elected secretary of the national retiree organization Alliance for Retired Americans.
Lumpkin remained active well into her 11th decade and lived on her own until a year ago. That included attending demonstrations, such as the recent “No Kings” rallies.
In addition to her son, John, Lumpkin is survived by two other sons, Carl Mohrherr and Paul Lumpkin; a daughter, Jeanleah Mohrherr; three grandchildren; and a great-grandson. Frank Lumpkin died in 2010.A celebration of life service will take place at 1 p.m. on Aug. 9 at the CTU Center, 1901 W. Carroll Ave., Chicago.
In lieu of flowers, the Lumpkin family is encouraging contributions to the Bea and Frank Lumpkin Memorial Fund at the Illinois Labor History Society.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has declared Aug. 3 “Beatrice Lumpkin Day” in Chicago. In a statement, Johnson called Lumpkin “a towering figure in the labor movement, an unwavering advocate for fully funded education and a continued source of inspiration for us all.”
“Bea Lumpkin’s life was a testament to the power of principled activism and the enduring belief that ordinary people, working together, can change the world,” Johnson added. “May her memory continue to guide and inspire us and we honor her legacy and carry on her pursuit for justice.”
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Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.