Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio.

On today's episode I have back on the program for the third time, the wonderful historian

Peter Cole to talk about a book he wrote in 2006 and 2007 but has now released just this

month, a second edition which expands the book almost twice its original size with brand

new documentation, etc.

and that book is Ben Fletcher, the life and times of a black wobbly.

This is an undercover figure in labor history and black liberation history and socialist

history in this country and it was a figure that I myself was not even fully aware of and

so being able to prep for this episode and have this wonderful conversation with Peter

I think is wonderful and I want to extend and promote the life and legacy of Ben Fletcher

and this work by Peter is really an essential part of doing that and on the show we pump

it out to tens of thousands of more people.

He really is a figure that needs to be remembered on the left, honored on the left and at the

end of this episode we talk about how Ben Fletcher died and because he was poor when he died

he was buried in an unmarked grave and right now the wobblies in New York are trying to

campaign to get a marker at his grave and that campaign will start taking donations

possibly in the next month or two.

When it does we'll make that known on all of our platforms and try to get the RevLeft

audience to pitch in and then maybe beyond even that we can think about moving towards

finding some sort of memorial, founding some sort of memorial to Ben Fletcher in his life

in his original city of Philadelphia.

So keeping the memory and the legacy of figures like Ben Fletcher alive is one of the core

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