By Carl Finamore

Franklin Fried devoted more than 70 years to supporting and fighting for freedom, justice, equality, and liberation for working and oppressed people in the U.S.

 Frank Fried was the principal presenter of folk and popular music in Chicago for a quarter of a century, but he always thought of himself, first and foremost, as a revolutionary socialist. In his own view, his signal achievement was a historic 1968 series of benefit concerts for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he organized at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also produced the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 Chicago appearances, along with innumerable concerts by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Miriam Makeba, Pete Seeger,Frank Zappa, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and many other artists.

 Frank was a radical, a socialist, and a labor and civil rights activist throughout his life, and he took great pride in never having abandoned his principles of fair play throughout his storied show business career. “After shaking hands with some managers and promoters in the business, you would have to check if you still had all your fingers,” he would half jest. The colorful story of how he tried to be different, with mixed success, is recounted on his website, showbizred.com.

 Frank was born in 1927 on Chicago’s north side. His father, a lawyer in private practice, died when Fried was a child. His mother, who worked as a secretary for the Illinois State Athletic Commission, felt compelled to send Fried to a military school for proper discipline. After military school, he attended the University of

Chicago. He dropped out after two years to serve in the United States Navy at the end of World War II.

 After the war, Fried joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as a teenager and worked as a welder in Chicago’s booming U.S. Steel South Works plant. He was attracted to the SWP’s democratic vision of world socialism. In 1947, he and his Chicago comrades helped lead a broad and successful defense campaign for James Hickman, who was up on murder charges. Hickman, an AfricanAmerican sharecropper who had recently moved his family to Chicago from the South, was accused of shooting the landlord who had burned his family out of their apartment, killing three of Hickman’s children. With help from SWP organizers, community pressure got the charges reduced and Hickman released. The dramatic story is recounted in a recent book from Haymarket Press, People Wasn’t Made to Burn, which is dedicated to Frank.

 Frank called the campaign “perhaps the party’s finest hour” and credited that organizing experience for much of his later success in building broad coalitions for social justice. Frank had a remarkable ability to collaborate with folks from across the left spectrum, and to help others reach out and build in ways they would not have done without his help and counsel.

 Frank stumbled into show business when he met the Austrian folk singer Martha Schlamme at the Gate of Horn, an early folk music venue in Chicago, in 1958.

Many of the folk artists were unabashedly radical, and some, like Pete Seeger, were still blacklisted. Frank took special pride in being one of the first commercial promoters to book Seeger, whose soldout concerts on Frank Fried’s stage in 1957 marked a defeat for the McCarthyite blacklist. Meanwhile Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Mathis, and Barbra Streisand remained regulars on his stages.

 Throughout his career, Frank tried to weave themes of social justice into his cultural promotions, paying special attention to Miriam Makeba and other politically engaged artists.

 In 1977 he returned to his roots in the steel industry as a key backer of Ed Sadlowski’s insurgent “Steelworkers FightBack” campaign. Franktraveled the country with Sadlowski, working plant gates and union halls in an attempt to divert the Steelworkers Union from what Sadlowski had dubbed “tuxedo unionism” and toward a militant workingclass perspective. He and Sadlowski became lifelong friends.

 Frank’s friendship with Miriam Makeba inspired him to active solidarity with the fight against Apartheid in South Africa. After Apartheid, he was a stalwart supporter of the struggle to build a Socialist alternative as the only way to guarantee the promise of Liberation. He helped launch Amandla!, a popular radical current affairs magazine.

Frank met the writer Daniel Singer when they fought together to defend Solidarnosc against the Polish and Soviet Stalinist parties and in the 1990s, Frank led the launch of the Daniel Singer Prize, an annual essay competition for young people on topics related to socialism.

 Preceded in death by his first wife, Francoise Nicolas, and his elder sister, Vivian Medak, Frank is survived by his wife Alice, his children Pascale, Isabelle, Bruno, Troy, and Teasha, and many grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

 Carl Finamore is a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He can be reached at .

This piece was first published on the Counterpunch website prior to Frank’s memorial service, and has been edited to reflect the passage of time.

Frank Fried: A Mensch through and through

Amandla founder, friend and mentor, Frank Fried died at his home in California on 13 January 2015. We have lost a wonderful and inspirational comrade who gave so much to so many causes that are dedicated to fighting oppression and for social justice. 

We wish to share with you, our readers extracts from the dedications that his death has inspired. He touched many people in the 87 years of his life, not least of all the many of us that developed the Amandla project.

Amandla editor, Brian Ashley’s message to Frank Fried memorial service 

Warmest greetings from South Africa. We write this on behalf of the Amandla Collective all of whom have been moved by his on-going support for Amandla and his solidarity with our struggle for social justice.

Frank said to me during a visit in 2006 “you need a left publishing house”, a few days later, a typical Frank Fried fund-raiser generated the start-up capital for Amandla! magazine,

The prestige of the magazine grew rapidly, and in 2008, as Amandla! Publishers, a highly significant colloquium on Continuity and Discontinuity of Capitalism in Post-apartheid South Africa.

Participation in this event was to be the last time Frank was able to make the long and arduous trip to be with us in SA. Who will ever forget how Frank brought the 120 delegates to their feet, with his touching message. Many of you will recognise the essential Frank when I share with you; Frank was at the podium tears flowing in emotion at being recognised for his contribution to our struggle, as the delegates gave him a standing ovation.

Frank was of the view that we need a broad and non-dogmatic left journal that could provide critical analysis of the unfolding situation in South Africa and bring to the attention of South African activists development in Africa and beyond. For the last eight years Amandla! has been arming a new generation of activists with the capacity to make left politics in new ways and it is now paying off.

On Monday 12 January, the day before he died I had the opportunity to share with him, that there is a process towards a recomposition of the workers and popular movement as a result of the rupturing in the ruling ANC Alliance. I shared with him the news of the formation of the United Front, a coalition of trade unions and people’s organisations. I could tell him about the union of metalworkers, NUMSA and their initiatives to open space for the rebuilding of an independent, militant and democratic trade unionism. And I said to Frank “you know what, they are talking about building a socialist party”

I am not sure how much Frank heard and understood, but he responded and said “very exciting”. I can only hope he left this world with some satisfaction that the left was on the move again in a country Frank had adopted “as the most exciting”, and to coin a phrase, the lose link in the imperialist chain. In this perspective he shared the view of that great socialist and humanist Ernest Mandel.

In fact, we first met Frank in Paris at Ernest Mandel’s memorial. He came up to us and said “I hear you are from South Africa, I want to introduce myself I am Frank Fried and I am coming to South Africa to make a film on migrant workers in Namibia” or Nabibia –Frank’s American tongue could never pronounce the country correctly  and none of us felt we should correct him.

Frank loved nothing more than organising lunch meetings were you were introduced to his friends and comrades, especially the ones he thought could be useful for distributing Amandla in the US.

Inevitably the objective of the meeting would fade into the thousands of stories (which he did not mind repeating). These stories gave one the most penetrating insight into the US left, its twists and turns, especially its terrible decline. And if Frank noticed your dismay he would adeptly titillate you with a story of one of the hundreds of celebs, the rich and famous of the entertainment industry that he knew and worked with as a music and events impresario. After all this was the man who brought the Beatles to the USA, promoted the Rolling Stones and organised some of Martin Luther King Jr’s most successful rallies.

For most of his conscious life Frank remained a socialist and a revolutionary. He was one of the few that never sold out regardless of his own personal circumstances. Money and fame could not corrupt Frank. In this he should be an inspiration for the new generations of young activists that are being born into left and radical politics today.

Frank was a pillar of support to many left initiatives and impulses, always ready to help and not just financially. It was from this vantage point that Frank could develop important political relationships with people on the left coming from different political traditions. Frank could relate to and work with many comrades from the Communist Party, from the struggle of Afro Americans such as Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, our very own Miriam Makeba and many others of the Anti-Apartheid movement.  It was this approach that helped shape the politics of Amandla! and enabled us to engage with the forces breaking with the politics of the SA Communist Party and from the ANC. In this we owe a massive debt of gratitude to Frank, whose politics he shaped in the most humble and unassuming of ways.

A Leninist and a Lennonist

by economist Joel Geier 

MY DEAR, close friend and comrade Frank Fried has died. Frank’s amazing life was legendary. He was a large figure in important political battles, fulfilling his life’s mission as a fighter for working-class emancipation and the liberation of the oppressed.

What’s more, his career ran “from Lenin to Lennon,” as he humorously put it. He was a musical Houdini, reinventing popular venues and performances as the leading show promoter of his generation. He used his position as a “show biz red” to aid the civil rights, antiwar and socialist movements. His legions of friendships with unsung movement activists from all parts of the left extended to Martin Luther King, Ed Sadlowski, Daniel Singer and a Who’s Who of musical greats.

His involvement with South Africa began with his close personal ties to the great South African singer Miriam Makeba, attending her wedding to Stokely Carmichael. From that moment, he established deep ties personally and politically to the struggle against apartheid and for South African liberation. He travelled to South Africa and helped to provide support for the South African socialist magazine Amandla, becoming a member-at-large of its editorial collective.

A remarkable human being – Pat Quinn

FRANK FRIED, AMONG the most remarkable U.S. revolutionary socialists in the second half of the 20th century, passed away at the age of 87.

Frank was attracted to the political views of the Socialist Workers Party in Chicago as a teenager. He joined the SWP in 1944 just before he entered the U.S. Navy. It was not a propitious time to be joining the party. Its leaders, including those who led the famed 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis and the SWP’s founder, James P. Cannon, were in the federal prison in Sandstone, MN having been unjustly convicted in 1941 of “violating” the Smith Act.

Frank was fired from his industrial job at the U.S. Steel Works in Chicago after the FBI pressured his employer to discharge him — a widespread FBI practice against militant socialists in the 1950s. And subsequently, as with other socialist militants, the FBI made it difficult for Frank to obtain another job.

In the early 1960s he formed a partnership, Triangle Productions, with Fred Fine, a former member of the Communist Party. And when the Beatles first came to the United States in 1963, Frank and Fred organized a concert by them at Comiskey Park.

It was shortly after his very successful Beatles concert that Frank began sharing the wealth that he had accumulated (and would continue to accumulate) with various socialist and progressive organizations, a process that would last until the end of his life.

With Frank’s passing, we have lost one of the very best of that generation. We salute Frank and the legacy he bequeathed to future generations of socialist militants.