Beatrice “Bea” Lumpkin Is Too Busy To Get Tired
The 102 year-old activist first organized laundry workers in the 1930s, now she’s supporting new organizing efforts across the country.
The year was 1937. The season was summer and inside New York City’s laundry presses, the workers were ready to step outside for their lunch break. That’s when a 19-year-old Beatrice Lumpkin (neé Shapiro) might hand them a flyer and tell them about Section 7A of the Wagner Act: “the right to bargain collectively.” Lumpkin was paid $10/week by a union to organize laundry workers.
In 2021, Lumpkin lives in Chicago and is working on a documentary about police brutality during a strike at a Chicago steel plant in 1937. Before the pandemic, she swam every morning at her local Y.M.C.A. She is 102.
Lumpkin was born in the East Bronx in 1918 to a family of Russian Jewish emigres. Her father was a prominent enough figure in the 1905 Russian Revolution to be broken out of prison and then ferried to the United States. Her mother wrote poetry in Yiddish and canvassed for the International Workers Order in New York City. The family made their living from the income of a single laundry shop and in 1932, during the Great Depression, they faced a choice of paying for groceries or bills to the large steam laundries. They chose food and Lumpkin chose the family business.
Bea found her first job soon after The Wagner Act was passed in 1935. The federal legislation guaranteed workers the right to collectively bargain and provided Bea an opportunity to organize laundry workers for the Congress of Industrial Unions (C.I.O.).
“The first thing I did when I got a meeting together was to read the first section of the Wagner Act,” Lumpkin said in a phone interview. She said workers feared losing their jobs for trying to organize but the new law had created a favorable political climate. “After you assured them they had a legal right to join and were protected then it was relatively easy to organize,” she said.
In 1937, Lumpkin helped organize 20,000 laundry workers into what would become the United Laundry Workers Union (U.L.W.U.). However, the laundry owners’ association refused to negotiate with the U.L.W.U. because of the union’s militant politics. So, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (A.C.W.U.) took over in an ‘unfriendly merger’. The A.C.W.U. preceded to fire Lumpkin, and other organizers, ahead of union elections and later, Lumpkin found out she was put on a ‘Don’t Hire’ list.
“They [Bea] get kicked out of the unions they helped found because of their continued radicalism,” said Jenny Carson, a history professor at Toronto University and an author of an upcoming book about laundry unions.
But, Lumpkin avoided the control of the A.C.W.U. She joined Local 328, a leftist union, and started working for a laundry in Brooklyn. When a vote-rigging operation by the A.C.W.U. led to a second election, Lumpkin was elected as an officer of Local 328 in 1939. However, efforts by the A.C.W.U. to undermine the democratic process continued. The A.C.W.U. sent hand-picked delegates to the state convention in 1940. After Lumpkin and her colleagues found out, they drove upstate in the middle of the night with two men standing on the running boards outside the car and three seated inside for the 300-mile drive. She raised an objection at the convention and was joined in protest by the transport union who left the convention hall.
In the present day, Lumpkin is encouraged by the actions of Joe Biden who reminds her of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Neither were expected to be reformers and Roosevelt’s first actions in office were to save the banks. But F.D.R. was a good listener, she said. “The New Deal was his willingness to respond to the unemployment councils who had mostly communist leadership,” said Lumpkin. As for Joe Biden, “every indication is that if workers keep up the pressure, he may outdo what Roosevelt did.”
At 102 years old, Lumpkin remains a role model to her colleagues in progressive politics. Her activism has inspired friendships. “We wanted to be like her when we grew up,” said Debby Pope, who knew Lumpkin through the Chicago Teachers Union and remains friends with her.
The pandemic has made it difficult but not impossible for Lumpkin to see friends and family. When we spoke, her son was in the middle of a long drive from Philadelphia to visit for the weekend. She donned a hazmat suit, recognizable from a viral photo of her at the ballot box during the 2020 election, and they went out to eat. Carson recounts asking Lumpkin, in a moment of doubt, if she ever gets tired. Her reply was, “There’s too much to do. I don’t have time to get tired.”
