Frank Wilkinson, 1914-2006

Frank Wilkinson led a remarkable life as a courageous, curmudgeonly champion of the right to dissent:

Frank Wilkinson, a Los Angeles housing official who lost his job in the Red Scare of the early 1950's and later became one of the last two people jailed for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether he was a Communist, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 91...

After doing his time, he founded the National Committee to Abolish HUAC – the House Un-American Activities Committee (NCAHUAC), later renamed NCARL - the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation.

Wilkinson had sued the FBI in 1980 for documents about himself and his organization, the Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, founded in the 1960s. Members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, who had a close relationship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, cited informers who said Wilkinson was a Communist. On that basis the FBI had amassed more than 130,000 pages of documents concerning him and his associates...

It turns out that he was a Communist, or at least was for part of his life. Wilkinson joined the Communist Party USA in 1942. He quit the party in 1975, far too late, but at least he made the break. I didn't ask about it the night he spent under my roof - it didn't come up, and his biography, "First Amendment Felon", was yet to be published. He came to the Palouse on a speaking tour in my last year of law school, and I drove him around in my beater car to speaking engagements and interviews in Moscow and Pullman. He slept in my dumpy basement apartment on a twin bed, and ate my student spaghetti. I liked him immensely. Eternal rest grant unto him.

Bonus links:
Here is a link to a PDF file of a Loyola-LA law review article by him, "Revisiting the McCarthy Era: Looking at Wilkinson v. United States in Light of Wilkinson v. Federal Bureau of Investigation."

And here is more about him from LAist, a post titled, "Fear of the Red Menace in Chavez Ravine," a link to the Chavez Ravine documentary, and other links to the new Ry Cooder album "Chavez Ravine", with a song about Wilkinson, "Don't Call Me Red."