Central Committee member Paul Scherrer:

Our party believes wholeheartedly
in the future of mankind

I first met Tom when I was a student at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn. The Young Socialists had been selling the paper there for some months. Through my own upbringing I had been exposed to socialist ideas and I decided to find out more about the YS.

The first person who spoke to me was not Tom. I was confused by what he said and chose not to get the paper. It was at the next sale that I met Tom, and purchased a copy of the newspaper. Tom had the ability to explain complex issues in a way that made a lot of sense to people.

The first major event that I remember with Tom was a demonstration in Washington held in the summer of 1975. The rally had been called by the unions to protest the budget cuts and about 50,000 workers assembled at RFK Stadium. When Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic politician, attempted to speak, he was drowned out by the crowd and prevented from speaking.

Riding back on the bus, Tom was extremely enthusiastic about this development. He stressed over and over that this demonstrated the beginnings of a break by the working class with the Democratic Party. It confirmed to Tom our party's position that the American working class, not various radical movements, would be the major force for social change.

An international struggle

Later that year, in November, Tom, along with Comrade Helen, led the North American delegation to the founding conference of the International Youth Committee of the Fourth International. Tom was elected onto the presiding committee.

For Tom, internationalism was not something reserved for holiday speeches and pledges of solidarity. Tom was enormously proud of our international movement, and he saw himself as a representative of a world party. He recognized that capitalism was an integrated world system and that the liberation of humanity would require the combined struggles of the international working class. It was for this reason that he opposed all those who advanced the notion of American exceptionalism, maintaining that the American working class was somehow different from workers in other parts of the world.

When Tom brought greetings to the conference he stressed that the American working class was part of the world working class. He explained that the recent victory of the Vietnamese and the final withdrawal of US troops was an expression of the strength of the American working class and its resistance both to the war and to the attempt of the ruling class to make American workers pay the cost of the war.

Tom had a genuine and personal feeling for every worker he spoke with. One image is burned into my memory. We were in a restaurant, reviewing a stack of perhaps 100 index cards with the names of workers and youth who had been met by the party. Tom knew exactly who each one was, and what experiences he or she had gone through. He knew whether a given contact had lost his job, or was facing budget cuts. He saw in the struggle of our party the solution to the problems that these workers confronted.

The fight to free Gary Tyler

In the summer of 1976, the Workers League and the YS learned about the frame-up of Gary Tyler the previous year, and of the state of Louisiana's plans to carry out the death penalty against Gary, even though he was only 16 years old. Tom played a central role in organizing our youth movement's campaign in Gary Tyler's defense.

Whenever Tom had the opportunity to speak to workers and youth about this case, he sought to explain the broad implications of such a frame-up and the need for a struggle against the entire system. It was at a dance sponsored by the Young Socialists on behalf of Gary Tyler that Tom was assassinated.

At the memorial meeting held in New York one week after Tom's murder, Gary Tyler sent a message which I would like to quote. He said:

"Tom was well experienced and he knew that in order for the people to be educated about this system, that he and others had to get out there and pass literature, publish papers and talk about this system. They had to wake people up to the fact that as long as this system is in existence, the youth, the minorities, the poor, the proletarians, would never be treated as equals."

There are many personal qualities which went into making Tom the person he was. One quality, however, stands out from all others. I would not say he obtained this quality from the Workers League and the Young Socialists. Rather, it was something that developed in Tom throughout his entire life.

Tom had a tremendous love for humanity and a confidence in its future. He deeply believed in progress and was hurt by every injustice that he saw. He believed passionately that social problems of poverty, hunger, racism and war could and would be overcome. What he found in our party was a way to explain the reasons for these problems and a scientific perspective to resolve them.

Tom did not believe that the value of life was based upon how much money you earned or the size of your bank account. To him the purpose of life was to improve the conditions of all humanity. Why, after all, does someone decide to dedicate his life to a movement? Tom was by no means alone in this. Throughout history, countless people have dedicated and sacrificed their lives in the struggle for equality and the battle against injustice and oppression-the civil rights movement, the resistance against the Nazis, the fight to abolish child labor and establish the eight-hour working day, the Russian Revolution, the struggle against Stalinism.

What all these people had in common was a willingness to sacrifice and a basis for that willingness-a profound belief in the betterment of humanity. I don't say this only about Tom, but about all of the members of the Socialist Equality Party and its forerunner, the Workers League.

In today's world, the notion that humanity, through its own activity, can bring an end to human suffering is scoffed at. But our party, the party which Tom joined, believes wholeheartedly in the future of mankind. Top of Page
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