Just a minor historical query, but I was wondering if anyone knows anything about Ginger Katz? Apart from having a really fantastic name, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin dedicated the second edition of Anarchism and the Black Revolution to her:
"I dedicate this second edition of Anarchism and the Black Revolution to Comrade Ginger Katz, one of the founders of the original North American Anarchist Black Cross almost 15 years ago. It was Ginger Katz who almost single-handedly arranged for the typesetting, publishing and printing of the first edition, and then she went out and sold them by the thousands. Without her, this second edition would not have been possible.
She had to fight to get the books published, and to get a hearing for myself and other Black Anarchists, who had things to say about the direction of the movement. The "Anarchist purists," who wanted to keep the movement all white and as an Individualist, counter-cultural phenomenon, fought her tooth and nail. Some of these criticisms and struggles were thinly veiled racism, and I am sure that they frustrated and exhausted Comrade Ginger. If so, she never relayed it to me, but I heard it from other sources. I remember my dealings with Anarchists in the movement during the 1970s, who denied the existence of racism as something we should fight entirely. But not Comrade Ginger. She was one of the few Anarchists who understood how the American state was organised, and how it used white skin privilege to split the working class, and to continue the dictatorship of Capitalism through such "divide and rule" tactics.
I still have some of the letters that Ginger wrote me 15 years ago when I was in prison. But I lost contact with her since the early 1980s. In 1983, I was released from prison, and became estranged from the Anarchist and prison movements, so I do not know where she is. But wherever she is, I hope she will know how much I appreciate what she did to make this project a reality, and how she laid the seeds for the growth of the present and future Libertarian Socialist movement on this continent, and hopefully around the world."
Which makes her sound like a relatively important figure, and someone who had a real impact on the development of the anarchist movement over the last few decades, but I've never seen even a brief biography of her or anything. It seems like she wrote at least two pamphlets, "Fascism/Syndicalism/Counter-Culture" and "Growing Up in Nazi Germany, which both sound quite interesting but I can't find scanned copies anywhere. Does anyone know any more, or is this a story that's lost to history beyond Ervin's dedication?
Let me come back to this. Read on a computer. I have some personal familiarity