Artist, historian and rebel

From Socialist Worker :

Alan Maass honors a revolutionary who helped keep the history of our movement alive.

April 17, 2009

Franklin Rosemont (center) with Penelope Rosemont and Paul Buhle (Thomas Good | Next Left Notes)

Franklin Rosemont, a historian, poet, artist and lifelong revolutionary, died suddenly April 12 at the age of 65. He was a part of movements for justice that spanned half a century, and as a writer and artist, he helped keep alive the traditions and history of the struggle for a better world.

Franklin was born in Chicago in 1943. His father Henry was a union printer who played a leading role in the nearly two-year-long Chicago newspaper strike of 1947-1949, editing the strike newspaper and writing scripts for a daily radio show, "Meet the Union Printers," broadcast on the Chicago Federation of Labor's station WCFL. His mother Sally was a jazz musician who became president of a union local for women musicians.

Not surprisingly, Franklin was drawn to the left early on--he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at age 7. Tiring of high school, he dropped out to hitchhike across the U.S. and Mexico, logging more than 20,000 miles by his count.

One regular stop was San Francisco's North Beach, the heart of beat culture, where he met Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the other poets at City Lights bookstore. Franklin was also drawn toward surrealist literature and art--first encountered, he said, in a high school anthology, where he came across the surrealist proverb "Elephants are contagious."

With U.S. society still in the grips of Cold War conservatism, the appeal of the beats and the surrealists was as a cry of defiance against the conformity of American culture. But Franklin always connected cultural rebellion to a political one, viewing surrealism not only as a form of artistic expression, but as a political philosophy.

By the early 1960s, the civil rights movement was shaking U.S. politics, and a new left was emerging. Back in Chicago, Franklin went to Roosevelt University, then a center of radical activity, and one of the few schools committed to hiring African American faculty--it was known as the "little red schoolhouse."

In the mid-1960s, he and his wife Penelope, a fellow artist, visited Paris, where they met Andre Breton, the main figure of European surrealism. Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, written in the 1920s, insisted on the connection of politics and art. Breton later visited Mexico to meet Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky--together, they wrote the manifesto Toward a Free Revolutionary Art.

Breton found kindred spirits in the Rosemonts. Franklin and Penelope came back to the U.S. and formed the Chicago Surrealist Group. Its members could be found at Solidarity Bookstore or Gallery Bugs Bunny--both places served as meeting space during organizing around the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

For the Rosemonts, exhibitions of their art went hand in hand with producing leaflets and posters for the struggle. Franklin worked with the IWW and Students for a Democratic Society. He also spearheaded the newspaper Surrealist Insurrection, which was singled out as an inspiration by radical students during the Prague Spring rebellion in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

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