Early Life and Career
Ignatiev was raised in Philadelphia, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He attended the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out after three years.
Under the name Noel Ignatin, he joined the Communist Party USA in January 1958, but in August left (along with Theodore W. Allen and Harry Haywood) to help form the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC). He was expelled from the POC in 1966.
Later he became involved in the Students for a Democratic Society. When that organization fractured in the late 1980s, Ignatiev became part of the Third-worldist and Maoist New Communist Movement, forming the group Sojourner Truth Organization in 1970. Unlike other groups in the New Communist Movement, the STO and Ignatiev were also heavily influenced by the ideas of Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James.
For 20 years, Ignatiev worked in a Chicago steel mill in the manufacturing of farming equipment and electrical components. A Marxist activist, he was involved in strikes by the mostly-African-American laborers of the steel mill. In 1984, he was laid off from the steel mill, approximately a year after an arrest on charges of attacking a strike-breaker's car with a paint bomb.
Read more about this topic: Noel Ignatiev
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