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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

president of a UE shop in Queens, Waldes Zipper, and later finally left and went back to get his teaching degree and became a teacher in the high school system. He, who was very critical of the communists at the time, marks his association with the radical movement as a positive thing. I think historically it's positive in our lives. I think it's positive.

Q:

We can pursue that for a second. I want to come back to the other details, but when you make that kind of a judgment that it's positive, what does that mean? Why do you say that? What were the benefits?

Foner:

The benefits, first of all, while you learned a lot that was wrong, you learned a lot that was right. You learned methods of work, you learned the responsible way of organizing and being involved in an organization, things that most people don't have or don't experience. Then many of things we did, none of us would fault, involvement in Spain, fighting against fascism, all the other things.

Q:

Joining the YCL was not any big emotional watershed. It was just something that came naturally?

Foner:

No, no, it was not a terrible thing. Later, see, when I graduated college, I got a job, I was still working in the Registrar's Office part- time, doing more hours, and my brothers got me an appointment to a full-time position at the college in the Registrar's Office, and here you quickly became part of that whole left movement there. There while we were members of the College Teachers' Union, and Anti-Fascist Association; and the Communist Party put out a bulletin, Teacher/Worker. I remember one of the things we fought for and won is we campaigned that the college adopt a change in its faculty to have a course in Negro history to be taught by a black. The college finally agreed. There was a course and I registered for it. We had to fill it up, too. It was given late in the afternoon in the School of Education, and the person who we won to teach it was Max Yergan.

Q:

When was that campaign, do you recall?

Foner:

That would be around '37, '38, '39.

Q:

What were the last two years of college like for you?

Foner:

They're frantic in the sense that in my junior year of college, I decide I'm going to be a student. Of course, until then I did nothing. I start to major in history and my grades start changing. But I go to school until 1:00 o'clock and at 2:00 o'clock I'm at City College in 23rd Street, and I work there from 2:00 to 6:00 and sometimes later. And you go home and you have to do your homework and call people, so





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