Belden preparing for a PACA solidarity demonstration, 1991
Anyone who knew Belden Fields understands that he was an institution in Champaign-Urbana, someone who injected a message of social justice into our daily lives. Everyone will have their own way of remembering him. He was very smart, very funny, and very friendly toward all. But he was also a serious socialist and union member active in just about any movement that promised greater fairness and equality. I came to know him well on a personal level through this labor and socialist activism.
I first met Belden in the 1980s through PACA, the Peoples’ Alliance on Central America. My wife Jenny Barrett and I had been active around Central American issues when we lived in North Carolina, and Belden and many other wonderful people offered us a chance to continue this work. We were on the sidelines; Belden was at the center. From this point in the eighties, he and his life partner Jane Mohraz welcomed us into this community and enhanced our lives here.
A few years later he and Gene Vanderport invited me to lunch and asked if I would like to join them in setting up a new socialist organization for our community. I met many wonderful people through the project, but it was clear that Belden was always the heart and brain of Socialist Forum, which operated for about five years in the 1990s. The group was non-sectarian—no dogma, and everyone was welcome. Each meeting was divided between an hour of committee reports and planning for protests and educational events, and an hour for political education, the latter usually a discussion of a classic or a contemporary socialist article. When it was running on all cylinders, the group had about 30 members divided into several working groups—labor, education, reproductive rights, etc. It included academics like Belden and me, but also teachers, manual and clerical workers, and others. Socialist Forum played an important role during the strikes and lockouts—the “War on the Workers”—in Decatur, Illinois during the early nineties. We also planned annual May Day celebrations and educational events on campus and in the community.
Several other movements spun off from Socialist Forum, including the Living Wage campaign and Jobs with Justice. The former had some success in Urbana City and Champaign County, and the latter was instrumental in strike support and other labor organizing in town. Members also played a role in the foundation of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, WRFU, and the Public i. Belden took a leading role in all of these. If you think of the importance of these institutions, you begin to grasp Belden’s importance to our community. It was characteristic of Belden that during the Living Wage campaign he felt at home visiting churches to urge support for the measure. If it was a matter of social justice, then he was equally at home with preachers, janitors, and building trades workers as well as PhD students and tenured professors.
Belden sports his support for labor
Belden joined the local labor movement early in his career and remained loyal to it throughout his life. He helped to establish the Union of Professional Employees (UPE), later renamed the Campus Faculty Association (CFA), in the 1970s and served as an executive board member, officer, and AFL-CIO delegate for decades. As Al Kagan explains in his piece in this issue, it was through his faculty union activism that Belden had an impact on the UIUC Senate, the movement against the Chief, and governance generally on campus. Throughout his life, one could always expect to find him on picket lines: for the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), the service workers (SEIU), the clerical workers (AFSCME), or the building trades. Many people contributed over the years to the strength of Champaign-Urbana as a labor town and the University of Illinois as an organized campus. Belden did so daily.
In a rigidly segregated community, Belden was often a link between us over the race line. He worked with building trades unions to open apprenticeship programs to Black youth. As she notes in her own essay here, Belden was an important supporter of our state representative Carol Ammons from the beginning. Her tenure in Springfield and Aaron Ammons’s as County Clerk have helped to transform politics in this town.
What did I learn about Belden from all this? On the one hand, he was deeply committed to values of inclusion and fairness—and you could depend upon him. He always showed up ready to work. On the other hand, he tended not to take himself too seriously and was always open to all sorts of people and ideas. He had a wonderful sense of humor and irony. As a result, he was able to work effectively with civil rights and labor activists as well as religious people and academics.
But a list of organizations and movements misses perhaps the most important part of Belden as a treasured leader of our community and our movements. He was simply a delightful person. With Jane, he was the center of an enormous, loving social circle that enriched our lives daily. We will all miss him, never more than at the community’s picket lines and demonstrations.
Jim Barrett is a historian of class, race, and ethnicity in the United States and author of History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History (2017).
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