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Because Eliot’s remarks about Howard pertain directly to Howard’s work on behalf of Mumia, we reproduce them here separately from the rest of the tributes to Howard.
Tribute to Howard Keylor by Eliot Lee Grossman, Attorney-at-Law, Academic
Member of the Permanent Seminar for Chicano and Border Studies, National
Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico City.
I first met Howard Keylor in the San Francisco Bay Area around 1978, after I graduated from law school, was admitted to the California Bar, and started working with the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal defense organization politically supported by the Spartacist League (SL) just as the Militant Caucus in Local 10, of which Howard was a founder, was politically supported by the SL. Howard was an inspiring role model for a young “revolutionary” radicalized by the anti-Vietnam War movement and Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. I deeply respected, and continue to respect, Howard as a truly proletarianized intellectual with many years of political experience in the trade-union movement as a principled oppositionist raising unapologetically the Trotskyist “Transitional Program” from the demand of 30 hours work for 40 hours pay, to ousting the class-collaborationist trade-union “misleaders,” to the call for a Workers Party to fight for a Workers Government.