Marjorie and Paul Colvin papers

Paul Colvin was born in Flint, MI. His mother was a member of the Proletarian party, and took him to meetings as early as age 7. In 1943 at age 18, he met a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Burbank, CA, and in 1946 he became a SWP sympathizer while attending the University of California at Los Angeles. Having served in the Navy during World War II, Paul worked as a merchant seaman between semesters. He began attending SWP meetings in 1949, but the House UnAmerican Activities Committee closely watched the maritime industry and the radical sympathizers within it. An informant in the Party turned him in, and he lost his seaman’s papers in 1954, the same year he became an official member of SWP.

The national SWP selected Paul to attend the Trotsky School at Mountain Spring Camp in Washington, New Jersey. He spent the 1959-1960 school year there, studying Marx’s Capital and American history. Afterwards, the Party asked him to be an educator in San Francisco teaching young party members about capitalism and political issues.

During the Vietnam War, Paul led the logistics committee for several antiwar demonstrations, which entailed gathering permits, banners, insurance, police, food, sound equipment, creating the march route, and raising funds to ensure the success of each event. He kept a file of people who were regular march monitors and collection volunteers; at one point he had nearly 700 names. At the time he worked the night shift at the San Francisco Chronicle, which allowed him to engage in political action during the daytime.

Paul was a member of SWP for 29 years and was part of a group that was expelled in 1983. He helped form Socialist Action, of which he was a member for 18 years. In the 1990s, he was active in the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. He went on to form Socialist Workers Organization, which publishes Socialist Viewpoint. In 2006, he joined the Workers International League.

Marjorie Colvin came from a religious, apolitical family in Texas. She attended the University of Texas at Austin where she was an anti-segregation activist. She moved to San Francisco with her daughter in 1960 and met Paul in 1961. She was a social worker at a geriatric hospital and later for the California Department of Employment. She received a M.A. in anthropology from San Francisco State College, for which she wrote her thesis on an Apache person she met through the Department of Employment. That association led to her later involvement with the American Indian Movement and Dennis Banks.

She became a member of the Socialist Workers Party in October 1962, after participating in a demonstration concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis, and remained a member until the late 1970’s. Marjorie was one of the top signature gatherers during the Proposition P campaign, collecting over 1,000 names to help get the measure on the ballot. Prior to joining the SWP, she was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in San Francisco in 1961 as well as the Communist Party.

Marjorie worked for the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco for 29 years as a drug counselor, mental health therapist, and an advocate for workers’ rights. A women’s detoxification center at the clinic’s Mission Street location in San Francisco is named in her honor.