20 years since the death of Tom Henehan

A fighter for international socialism

On October 19 the Socialist Equality Party in America will hold a public meeting to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Tom Henehan, a leading member of the Trotskyist movement who was gunned down at the age of 26 in Brooklyn, New York.

The Socialist Equality Party is holding this meeting to honour the life of this extraordinary young man, who made an enormous contribution to the struggle for socialism in the space of only four and a half years, and to put before the widest possible audience the great principles for which Tom gave his life.

Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Tom Henehan entered into political life as a student at Columbia University in New York City. By the time he graduated he had decided to dedicate himself not to a career in business or academia, but to the defence of the interests of the exploited and oppressed.

Tom joined the Workers League, the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party, in 1973 and embraced its perspective of world socialist revolution. He quickly became a leader in the party's turn to the working class youth and the most militant sections of workers. When a series of coal miners strikes erupted in 1974 in defiance of the union bureaucracy, Tom travelled through the West Virginia coal fields, distributing the Bulletin newspaper and meeting with groups of dissident miners. He later conducted political work among young and mainly minority workers at the Brooklyn Navy yard and among bus and subway workers at the New York Transit Authority.

He was elected to the leadership of the Young Socialists, the party's youth movement, and then to the Central Committee and Political Committee of the Workers League. He was trained as a professional printer and placed in charge of the press on which the Bulletin, forerunner of The International Workers Bulletin, was printed.

When the Workers League launched a campaign to free Gary Tyler, a 16 year old black youth framed-up and sentenced to death in Louisiana, Tom played a central role. It was while supervising a YS fund-raising activity in Brooklyn, as part of the campaign to publicise the case of Gary Tyler, that Tom was fatally shot in a politically motivated murder.

On October 22, 1977, one week after Tom's assassination, the Workers League held a memorial meeting in New York City attended by 250 workers and youth, including Tom's mother, brothers and sisters. The speakers included a representative of the British section and statements were read out from the other sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Gary Tyler sent a statement from his prison cell in Angola State Penitentiary.

In this issue of the International Worker we are reprinting two of the speeches given at the 1977 memorial meeting. The first is by SEP National Secretary David North, at that time the National Secretary of the Workers League.

Speech by David North to the memorial meeting for Tom Henehan in New York City
Speech by Ed Winn to the October 22, 1977 memorial meeting

Top of Page
Contents