Jonathan Melrod’s “Fighting Times”

Sebastopol's Jonathan Melrod talks about his new book 'Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War' and about how you too can become an “implementer of change.”

By Jameson Rush

An attorney, a student radical, a factory worker, an author, a union organizer, a record producer, a revolutionary, and a cancer survivor walk into a dispensary… no, this isn’t the set up to a joke; this multitude of identities is contained within one man with long white hair, twinkling eyes, and an FBI file almost a thousand pages long. That man is Sebastopol resident Jonathan Melrod, and at the age of 72, he’s just published his first book, Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War (PM Press, 2022).

Fighting Times is a memoir reflecting on his path from campus rabble rouser in the heady 1960s to union organizer in the toxic and troubled factories of Milwaulkee and Kenosha, Wisconsin. With the book, Melrod hopes to pass on hard-won lessons gained from decades of struggle to the next generation. 

“When we went to work in the ’60s and ’70s in industry,” Melrod said, “we really had no mentors, no veterans of the earlier struggle to give us guidance, and it was a bit difficult to figure out how to get started… I was in an auto plant of some 6,000 people being the only organizer. And I didn't have anybody to go to and say, ‘What do you do?’” 

Melrod v. American Apartheid 

Born in 1950 in Washington D.C, the young Melrod witnessed the violent excesses of the American apartheid system firsthand, when the demand to desegregate the local park prompted members of George Lincon Rockwell’s American Nazi Party to empty gallons of bleach into the swimming pool. Later, Melrod attended Putney, a progressive boarding school in Vermont, where he was introduced to the works of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Franz Fanon, and Malcolm X. Inspired, Melrod and his classmates joined the movement to end the war in Vietnam.

As a student of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the 1960s, he threw himself into the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) — disrupting a ROTC recruitment lecture his first week on campus. In February of 1969, he supported a campus uprising led by the militant student group, Black People’s Alliance (BPA), demanding— among other things— the creation of a Black Studies department and the recruitment of more students and faculty of color. Weeks of occupations, and pitched street battles with police and the National Guard followed. While not every demand of the demonstrators was met, the UW-Madison established its first Afro-American Studies program in the Fall of 1970. 

His campus activism soon put him in touch with the local chapter of the Black Panthers, which in turn first earned him the notice of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. This was to be just the beginning of decades of surveillance, culminating in the aforementioned tome of an FBI file.

Melrod spent the summer of 1969 working for Obreros Unidos, an independent union organizing farm laborers in Wisconsin. He had enthusiastically volunteered after attending a talk by founder Jesus Salas on the history of United Farm Workers and agricultural organizing in the United States. 

This first foray into labor organizing provided an early lesson in the power of class-conscious solidarity to overcome even deeply entrenched racial and gendered divisions. Melrod recounts a particularly moving moment in which a room full of tough white steelworkers broke out into a rendition of Solidarity Forever, after voting to support a picket line of Chicano farmworkers in front of a local Krogers. 

Melrod v. The American Motor Company

 In 1970, along with thousands of other idealistic young radicals, Melrod left school to join the ranks of America’s industrial working class, with the hopes of inspiring, to quote from his book, “a class-conscious, radical, working-class movement with the goal of fundamentally remaking society.”  He landed a spot at the American Motor Company plant in Milwaukee, in the trim department, installing tail lights. After 60-days probation he was a full-fledged member of Local 72 of the United Auto Workers. 

After organizing coworkers to fight a speed up on the production line, Melrod was illegally fired. After two years of legal turmoil, the company was forced to put Melrod “back to work, against the FBI’s advice.... The FBI had told [American Motors], ‘Don't ever let this guy back in here. He's no good and, you know, he's an organizer and he leads work stoppages.’” In 1976, he was transferred to AMC plant in Kenosha, WI. There, he joined the rank-and-file caucus of his new local, Local 75 of the UAW. 

As anyone who has tried to organize humans to do anything will know, it can take time to learn how to move people. Describing these growing pains, Melrod said, “when I first got down there, I was doing more politically oriented work, I was out in front of the gate selling the Milwaukee Worker, and I hadn't really dug into the day-to-day struggles. 

“When I ran for steward the first time, I'd only been there a few months. I took three guys out to the polls to vote in my car at the union hall. Next day, when I came into the plant, and everybody's gathered around the sheet that has the vote tally in the cafeteria. I had to stand on my tiptoes to see over everyone, and my name was last in line. I only got three votes. I didn't even get votes from one of the guys I drove to the polling place.” Defeat led him to reevaluate his approach.

Melrod got another chance just a few days later, when news of an incoming blizzard hit the factory floor. “We had asked the foreman, ‘Can we go home early?’ This was because a lot of the guys lived in Milwaukee, which was an hour drive on the freeway. And they said, ‘No, nobody can leave, we need the production.’ So we started passing the word, ‘Let's walk out at noon.’ And at noon, quite a large group of us headed for the main exit. There was a group of supervisors in their white t-shirts blocking the way and we basically just pushed them out of the way and walked out and went home and they had to shut the assembly line.” 

Melrod realized “that's how people had to see me first. And they could see me “political” only after they understood more who I was, and what I was willing to do to stand up to the company. And I never held back. You know, the next election I was elected steward, and I said to everybody that I talked to, ‘Ask me anything you want about my politics, and I will tell you. I'm very open about it. So don't believe rumors, and don't believe scare tactics and don't believe when the company runs around and says, “Melrod is a goddamn communist, and he's gonna drive this company out of business.’” Come talk to me about what I believe.’ 

By demonstrating his willingness to confront injustice head-on, Melrod slowly rose through the ranks of Local 72, ultimately ending up on the bargaining committee, sitting directly across the table from the bosses.

There were, of course, times that Melrod’s open militancy landed him in hot water. Once, while drinking at the bar near the factory gates, he felt something poke his side. “I looked over to see why the guy next to me was poking me, and it was the barrel of a 38 …  So I said to the bartender, ‘Hey— Midori— double shots.’ And I started talking to this guy and he said, ‘You're that fucking Jewish commie, who puts out that newsletter Fighting Times. I just want you to know, I'm a member of the White People's National Socialist Party, the Nazi Party.’ And I said, ‘Wow, well, let's talk about it. Fighting Times… didn’t we just have an issue in your department, the trucking department, and fight because there had been a worker injured there?’

‘Yeah, you did,’ he said. And then I ordered another round of double shots. And we kept drinking for about three hours and, at the end of it, he was hugging me, telling me how much he loved me as a union brother, and he became a supporter.” 

His book Fighting Times focuses primarily on his experience in the Midwest labor movement up until 1985 when Melrod left Kenosha to attend law school at the University of California, Hastings. After graduating, he helped start what became a very successful law firm in San Francisco, representing refugees and asylum seekers. His work with refugees fleeing political persecution led him to co-found Atzlan Records— an independent record label that specialized in “Rock en Español,”  a genre with a revolutionary history all its own; defiantly flowering in the shadows of some of the most repressive right-wing regimes in Latin America. At a time when openly espousing leftwing ideas could get you killed or worse, Melrod said, “the only way that young people could protest was through music.” 

Melrod v. Cancer

In his life as an activist and organizer Melrod had fought the police, the FBI, the bosses, private detectives, scabs, and corrupt union leadership. Melrod said, “In those days, one of the major slogans that we lived our life by was "Question Authority," and that became a lifelong value.” 

This remained true when, in 2004, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Like many in his situation, Melrod now found he was waging a two-front war: against cancer and against the often inflexible dogma of Western medicine. 

“When you enter the Western medical system, the doctors and the surgeons become the gods and goddesses of all treatments, and you're expected to follow precisely what they prescribe for you to do. And in my case, after I regained consciousness from them removing the tumor on the tail of my pancreas, they told me I only had six months to a year at most to live. And I told them that that just wasn't going to be, that I had a 10 year old and a seven year old, and I was going to be here for them as they first got Bar Mitzvahed, and then went to college, and then were married. And that meant that you had to really challenge the allopathic medical system as not being the one and only.” 

It was at that point that Melrod decided to leave urban life behind. “I left the stress of the city. I left trying to find a parking space for half an hour a night when I got home. And I said, ‘I'm going to move up to the country to breathe clean air. I'm going to jog every morning. I'm going to change my diet, and I'm going to remove myself from the urban stress that daily weighs on you.’”  

Now, 15 years later, Melrod lives on a large lush property in Sebastopol that he shares with his wife, the prominent Filipina actress, artist and activist Maria Isabel Lopez; and his two sons. His plan for a quiet retirement was to be short lived. “After I moved up here, initially, I was just trying to beat the disease. And then the county sheriffs murdered 13-year-old Andy Lopez, and I decided I had to get back into the game.” Melrod became one of the lead organizers of the Justice Coalition for Andy Lopez (JCAL) and then went on to represent five more families of the victims of police violence. 

Melrod v. Marcos Jr.

Melrod and his wife, Maria Isabel Lopez, are also both deeply involved in political struggles in the Philippines. This January, a coalition of Filipino Trade Unions is sponsoring a book launch of a Filipino edition of Fighting Times, featuring a juried show of workers’ art organized by Isabel Lopez, who is also an accomplished mosaic artist. Melrod says the show is an opportunity for workers to express, “their working conditions and their desire for liberation from capitalist exploitation.’ 

They are also strong supporters of the Lumads, a people indigenous to the southern islands of Mindanao. Fleeing persecution by the military at the behest of international lumber and mining interests, many Lumads people now live as refugees in Manila in harrowing conditions. Melrod said he and his wife go there every year that they can “to put on Christmas parties [with them] and more importantly to really participate in their mass demonstrations demanding the return of their ancestral lands.” 

Melrod passes the torch

In raising his own children, Melrod said, “I never wanted to overtly interject my politics into my kids’ upbringing. I wanted to model for them the kind of life I lead.” He said he always hoped that they, “as I did, and as my father did, would understand the importance of leaving the world a better place than when you entered it.” He added proudly, “They’ve very much done that.” 

Melrod’s children, Eli and Noah, are now both in their twenties. Eli Melrod, motivated in no small part by his father’s struggle receiving alternative treatments for his cancer, founded Solful, a cannabis company specializing in local, sun-grown and hand-harvested products with locations in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa. Noah works for Solful as well.

With his new book, Melrod hopes to inspire the next generation of organizers and revolutionaries. 

“The main thing I'd like people to get out of it is to be inspired to believe that change can be made and that each of us can be an implementer of change. And that could mean anything from a living co-op, to alternative medicine, to organizing on the job as a nurse in Kaiser or going to work in places like Amazon and Starbucks. I hope to inspire people with that message.”

You can purchase Fighting Times from his website jonathanmelrod.com, at Copperfield's Books, or request it at your local library. To learn more about Jon Melrod’s life and to read expanded selections from his book, visit jonathanmelrod.com.