Remembering Nelson Peery Chicagoan And Dyed In The Wool Communist

       “I owe my life to the comrades in this room—and to Nelson.”



       Monje spoke a few feet from a small spread of memorabilia from Peery’s life, including a side-by-side World War II veteran’s baseball hat and a Soviet Army officer’s cap adorned with a hammer and sickle.



    Attendees at the memorial service remembered seeing Peery wherever the action was. A nephew, Joe Peery, once came to visit Nelson in Los Angeles, where he and his late wife, Sue-Ying, lived and organized at the time of the 1965 Watts riots. As Joe walked towards Nelson’s house, he saw an increasingly agitated group of what he described as poor black people listening to an impassioned soapbox speaker; as Joe drew closer, he saw that Nelson was the speaker. 



       “That changed my whole perspective on Nelson,” he said.



       Although his political vision may sound arcane in the 21st century, many people, especially many young people, seem newly interested in Marx following the 2008 financial crash. “It’s not your grandfather’s communism,” Rosenbaum joked. 



       “We’re all family,” he said. “That’s not just some hippie shit.That [insight] is how we’re going to save the planet. I think ‘communism’ is the best word that we’ve got to express that.”