Remembering A Fighter Who Died Too Young

[I think I might have met Neal Gammill. Once. These moving memorial thoughts by my friend and comrade T. Shelton of Tennessee give some idea of how much I missed.]

photo credit: Whitney Wood

"Hey, you're with that Freedom Road group, right?"

Those were the first words Neal Gammill ever spoke to me. He had walked right up to me at an anti-war event, and as I would come to know in his true-to-form way asked the political question on his mind. Over the next 5 years we shared countless hours talking politics, and doing politics--from trade unions, to community campaigns, from police killings, to movement surveillance, to revolutionary feminism, to the centrality of racism and methods for organizing working class whites to destroy white supremacy. And internationalism. In fact, always internationalism.

More than anyone else I know Neal always centered his revolutionary internationalism and the struggle to destroy white-supremacist imperialism headed-up by the USA. His internationalism and anti-imperialist line was always with him and his beloved Éire (Ireland). These same lessons he shared time and again on the picket, at the rally, at the prayer meeting, at the public forum demanding self-determination and independence for occupied Palestine. A mid-southerner, the application of these politics to his own home was no different, always noting the imperialist root of US racism and seeing the struggle against white supremacy and for Black liberation as central fronts in our movement for real justice and freedom.

Neal could be counted on as a first responder to every threatened and undertaken act of US aggression, from Libya to Iran, from Egypt to Iraq, in Syria and Columbia. And Afghanistan. That was an imperial project he had seen firsthand, had participated in while in the Air Force and one, he would confide, he felt he had never been meant to make it out of alive. Like so many others, he did make it back from Afghanistan alive, but with those scars on the soul that the US military gives to vets.

Neal's politics grew on anti-authoritarian and anti-fa roots. Both as a working class white kid and in the military, he spent time in and around the white power movement. As is true for too many, the allure of whiteness and the ideas of Third Position politics were a quick mental exit ramp towards some taste of power. But even then Neal was always

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