Buffalo, New York

We have lost two inspiring leaders and steadfast lifelong revolutionaries this past year, with the deaths of Lydia Bayoneta in December and Gene Clancy in August, in Rochester, New York.

Lydia and Gene were life partners for 59 years, together helping to organize, strategize and lead the Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Youth Against War and Fascism and, over five decades, the Rochester branch of Workers World Party.

In its initial years, the Rochester collective consisted mostly of activists in their teens and early 20s, while Lydia and Gene were in their late 20s and had already started a family. However, their working-class grounding in their lives, workplaces and in their community gave them the skills to educate others while working in and being trusted by widely diverse groups. They were welcomed, considered friends and respected across a broad spectrum of multinational organizations.

Lydia was born in the Philippines and emigrated to the U.S. with her family in the 1950s. She was drawn to the rising tide of struggle for Black and Brown civil rights and the international struggles for liberation, joining her own experiences struggling against racism, sexism and colonialism with the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist left in the growing anti-Vietnam War movement.

Lydia was gentle and empathetic in manner with friends, passionate and fiery as a speaker, a perceptive analyst of history and present events who spoke plainly to her class. She became an important leader and spokesperson in Workers World Party, which she represented at countless rallies, marches, conferences and meetings.

In 1988, Lydia ran as the Workers World Party candidate for U.S. senator against Patrick Moynihan in New York state. Her clear, partisan, working-class perspective brought her candidacy plenty of attention!

In 1990, Lydia and three other Workers World Party comrades were responsible for organizing a trip they took with about 25 journalists from the U.S. and Canada to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, where Lydia was one of the main spokespeople for the group.

Gene and Lydia met in college in Syracuse, New York, where Lydia trained and became a nurse. Gene became a social studies teacher — a way for him to bring class consciousness and class truth to young people. He did this for 33 years, still continuing from a wheelchair for years before retiring.

Every year, students chose him as the best teacher. Everything he did personally also became political work. Gene was a founding member of his American Federation of Teachers local. He served on negotiating committees and helped to win fair wages and fights on many other issues along with his co-workers.

While Gene often wrote for Workers World newspaper about education from a Marxist point of view, he also willingly wrote on every other issue that the editorial staff asked him to research and write about and did so for more than 20 years.

Lydia and Gene organized a strong Rochester chapter of the All Peoples Congress in 1983 “to overturn the Reagan program of budget cuts, increased military spending, racism and sexism.” Like their work in founding and growing the Peoples Energy Committee, which fought the merciless utility shut-offs, their organizing drew the participation of many of the Rochester area’s most oppressed workers and families.

When much of the Rochester branch of Workers World moved to the West Coast, Lydia and Gene continued to build WWP in Rochester and went on to organize anti-war demonstrations. They helped fill many buses to Washington, D.C., for national anti-Iraq War demonstrations, fought against city budget cuts that threatened to close recreation centers for youth and took part in the fight against racism and police brutality.

They often traveled to Syracuse and Buffalo to help support important organizing efforts in those cities, to speak, to carry out tasks and many times to join in celebrations and picnics!

Despite all the challenges of life as full-time communists, full-time workers, full-time parents of three children and later poor health and full-time caregiving, Lydia and Gene exemplified and shared the strength of revolutionary optimism.

In 2016, as Trump was taking over the Republican National Convention, Lydia said: “The racist onslaught of police terror in the United States is part of a worldwide mobilization of racist, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and reactionary forces. [But at the RNC,] the eyes of the world will be focused not only on the reactionary forces, but also on the growing resistance within the U.S to racist police terror and all forms of oppression.”

Ellie Dorritie is a longtime activist and organizer with the Buffalo branch of Workers World Party.