Hope and Heroes – Stewart Acuff’s Poems from the Frontlines of the Class Struggle

One of dozens of immigrant rights marches held around the country, this one in San Francisco, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2006

For four years Stewart Acuff lived in a small Appalachian village called Shepherdstown in West Virginia above the Potomac. There he wrote a poem a day from 2020 to 2022. Many of these short works are collected together in Love is Solidarity in Action. The poems reflect not only on the natural beauty of the town and the region, but the deep and rich experience of Brother Stewart’s organizing trajectory:

Aftter shiftr change . Hymies Bar across from the Edgar Thompson Steel Works. in Braddock, PA. Photo: Robert Gumpert 1986

“Yeah I stayed pissed off.

Sitting on a hotel room bed in Center, Texas home of Lightning Hopkins listening to women wonder which would be fired first cause we lost the union election

I drank a couple barrels of bourbon getting over that night and I still get pissed off

when I remember

Seeing and smelling the insides of county jails across South Georgia fighting for

Jobs and a life beyond working like a mule

Getting out and getting drunk

Fighting the Ku Klux Klan in East Texas on a picket line of Black women scared

But overcoming with courage ready to fight every night

And I still get pissed off”

May 12, 2020

The collection is best read at the pace of a poem or two a day, which means the 130 pages, may take a while. But read, pause and reflect on the richness of Acuff’s experience reflected in these short works. He has certainly personally been on the front lines of the class struggle in America and particularly the effort to rebuild a vibrant labor movement by organizing millions of new workers. He is retired now, but I first met him when he was head of the central Labor Council in Fulton County Georgia (Atlanta). He was leading an effort to make sure the 1996 Atlanta Olympics meant justice for workers. He also was a force within the movement to reform the AFL-CIO with the election of John Sweeney as President. In 2001, a few years after the the New Voice movement took over the AFL, Acuff was appointed Organizing Director, and I collaborated with him as Organizing Director of the West Coast Longshore Union. We have been friends ever since.

I also have discovered that Acuff is not alone in the aspiration of writing a poem a day. This appears to be a tradition in the form. Anita Barrows has written a poem a day since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Palestine. And then there is the poem a day website

Acuff’s poems resonate with outrage over man made climate change, racism and the treatment of working people. He also teaches history by referencing one simple historical fact or often-unsung heroes of our movement in each poem. Reverend James Orange is a particular comrade favorite of Stewart’s. He is a man brought up in the civil rights movement who worked later with Stewart for the AFL-CIO. Stewart pays tribute to him often in a manner that suggests that Orange gets too little credit for his role in the civil rights movement and labor.

“A night of six of us in Dekalb County custody won medicines for poor, homeless and weak

Reverend Orange leading our sit in at the commissioner’s office winning safe staffing

There is power only known to those confronting wrong with our own bodies”

February 15, 2021

Acuff’s poems send you running to the Wikipedia search engine to unearth the history of heroes and particularly unknown heroines of the movement:

“Sing this weekend for the unsung

Who sang freedom with their actions

Like Carrie Williams in East Texas

Leading her co-workers to justice

Etra Mae and Mae Nell in small towns like Palestine

All the folks across Georgia standing against plantation thinking.”

September 4, 2021

Acuff has great pride in his two children, Sam and Sidney,s and visiting or communing with them is the subject of many poems.

Harbor City, CA. 13 August 08. View of the Wilmington Refinery from park. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2008

“Hurricane Ida in the magic city of our culture

And fires where son Sam labors

With thousands of others to save our Earth

From human destruction

We did it

Now time to fix it.”

September 9, 2021

Poetry has never been my thing and certainly the free form that Acuff writes in is an acquired taste. But that taste I have indeed acquired out of respect for a comrade brother. I promise to dig deeper into the art form, maybe even read a poem a day! This collection is easy to order and is a great bedtime companion. Acuff reflects on the stakes in the election of 2020 in a poem that resonates again in 2024