Ed Shaw

Who was Ed Shaw?

Edward "Ed" Shaw was an American socialist and lifelong member of the Socialist Workers Party.

Born in Zion, Illinois, on July 13, 1923, Shaw grew up in a family of working farmers. In his youth, he rebelled against the fundamentalist religious assumptions that surrounded him in Zion. After high school, at the outbreak of World War II, he entered the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Shaw moved to New York City in 1942. There, while still in his late teens, he entered the military-run Maritime Service training school at Sheepshead Bay, where he got his papers as a fireman/watertender in the merchant marine.

On his way to start a job on a boat on the Great Lakes in 1943, Shaw found himself helping a Black worker escape a racist lynch mob during a race riot in Detroit - an act that ended up marking the rest of his life. From that moment on, he identified with, and later became an active participant in, the struggle for Black rights. During World War II, Shaw sailed mostly on what were called "liberty ships." While in Murmansk, in the Arctic region of the Soviet Union in 1943, on a ship carrying arms and supplies, Shaw got his interest piqued in socialism.

A few months later, on a ship in a Philadelphia harbor loading cargo for the USSR, Shaw met a seaman who had gotten to know a member of the Socialist Workers Party on another trip. This seaman told Shaw that 18 leaders of the SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters had been imprisoned on charges of "conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government," because of their opposition to World War II. Their convictions had been the first under the notorious Smith Act. As a result, Shaw joined the Socialist Workers Party in October 1944 and later served in the Army during the Korean War.