Pat Grogan

Pat Grogan (1946–2014) was a longtime member and supporter of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Like many of her generation, Grogan was inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the Black struggle, and the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people during the US war against their country. Pat joined Young Socialist Alliance members when...

Pat Grogan (1946–2014) was a longtime member and supporter of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Like many of her generation, Grogan was inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the Black struggle, and the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people during the US war against their country. Pat joined Young Socialist Alliance members when she was a 21-year-old student at Columbia University and soon after joined the SWP.

She was a leader in the Columbia Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, wrote for the campus paper and ran the first of many election campaigns as an SWP candidate. Grogan joined in the SWP’s participation in the fight to legalize abortion in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and later in the fight for the national Equal Rights Amendment.

In 1976 Grogan was living in Chicago, where she was among the first wave of party members who got jobs in the steel industry to be part of developing working-class resistance there. She joined “Steelworkers Fight Back,” a current in the United Steelworkers that fought to democratize the union and transform it into a fighting instrument capable of resisting the steel bosses’ attacks.

Grogan served on the SWP National Committee and carried out a variety of leadership responsibilities. She was a staff writer on the Militant newspaper and edited its “Women in Revolt” column. She ran as an SWP candidate for public office in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Utah. Along with longtime party leader Evelyn Reed, Grogan wrote Abortion Is a Woman’s Right! The pamphlet includes an interview with Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a champion of the right to abortion in Canada, who was put on trial four times by the Canadian government.

Grogan helped to build the socialist movement in Milwaukee and Salt Lake City after leaving New York. She worked together with other unionists in Salt Lake in the early 1990s to organize tours for Eastern Airline strikers, a British coal miner, Pittston Coal strikers, and two members of the African National Congress Youth League. Along with these fighters, Pat spoke at union meetings, community halls, and in workers’ homes. At the time Grogan was a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union at the Phillips Refinery and later the United Steelworkers at the Kennecott Copper mine.