Clara Fraser - Early Life

Early Life

Clara Fraser was born to Jewish immigrant parents in multi-ethnic, working class East Los Angeles. Her father, Samuel Goodman, was a Teamster. Her mother, Emma Goodman, was a garment worker and later a Business Agent of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Fraser joined the Socialist Party’s youth group in junior high school.

By 1945, after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in literature and education, Fraser was a recruit to the ideas of Leon Trotsky, whose campaign against Stalinism had gained adherents worldwide. She joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that year. In 1946, she moved to the Pacific Northwest to help build the SWP's Seattle branch.

As an assembly line electrician, Fraser joined the Boeing strike of 1948. When the union was slapped with an anti-picketing injunction, she put together a mothers' brigade to walk the line with baby strollers. After the strike, Boeing fired and blacklisted Fraser, and the FBI pursued her for a decade.

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, which explains the interdependence of the struggles for socialism and African American freedom and argues the key importance of black leadership to the U.S. working class.

The SWP, however, was supporting the Nation of Islam. The Seattle local conducted a long campaign to try to win the national party to its perspective. 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).