Biography
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of the most consequential American radicals of the twentieth century. As a teenage organizer in the early 1900s she became a leading figure of the Industrial Workers of the World, leading textile, silk, and miners strikes from Lawrence, Massachusetts to Paterson, New Jersey to the Mesabi iron range — Joe Hills 1915 song The Rebel Girl was written for her. She was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 and remained on its board until 1940, when she was expelled in a closed vote because of her membership in the Communist Party USA, a vote the ACLU formally apologized for in 1976.
In June 1951 she was indicted in the Foley Square Second String — the federal governments second wave of Smith Act prosecutions, which targeted thirteen members of the CPUSA national board after the original Dennis 11. Convicted at trial in early 1953, she was sentenced to three years in federal prison and began her sentence at the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia, in January 1955 at age 64. She served 28 months and was released in May 1957. Her prison memoir The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner appeared in 1963. She became national chairwoman of the Communist Party USA in 1961, a position she held until her death in Moscow in 1964.
