Gillian Furst

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Furst, Gillian Gillian Furst, a union activist and feminist whose selfless commitment to others touched many lives, died suddenly at her home in Minneapolis on July 20. She was 81. She was in the middle stages of Alzheimer's disease and her doctor believes she died of a stroke. Gillian, a British citizen, was born on Nov. 17, 1933, in Lahore, then a part of India when the country was under British control. Her father was accountant general in charge of the sugar supply, although he supported the cause of Indian independence and was an admirer of Gandhi. After her father's death, she and her mother returned to England, where Gillian eventually graduated from the London School of Economics, married David Holroyde and had three wonderful children: Lynn Adam, who lives in London, and Pippa Carlson and Harry Furst, who live in Minneapolis. She and David later divorced. Following in the footsteps of her labor activist grandmother, Gillian was arrested for civil disobedience in a peaceful demonstration organized by Bertrand Russell in support of nuclear disarmament in the early 1960s. Because she refused to pay the 5-pound fine, a judge ordered her jailed for 30 days. In the mid-1960's Gillian was co-founder of the Agnostic Adoption Society in England, which succeeded in overturning the requirement in British law that adoptive parents must belong to a religious group. In 1971 she played a key role in organizing the first women's liberation demonstration in British history, a march of 4,000 people. Gillian was a socialist and secretary of her Labor Party branch at BBC-TV, where she became a researcher producing a number of powerful reports exposing injustices. She worked for the current affairs program, "Braden's Week" and later for "Panorama," the British equivalent of "Sixty Minutes." In 1970 Panorama sent her to the United States to develop three programs on the mood of America after four students were killed by the National Guard during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio. She came across an article by Randy Furst, a journalist living in New York who had interviewed eyewitnesses to the shootings. She sought him out for help reaching his sources, and they fell in love. After he moved to Minneapolis, she and her children joined him and the two were married on January 6, 1972, by Susanne Sedgwick, among the first women judges in Minnesota. Randy is now a reporter at the Star Tribune. In Minneapolis Gillian was employed as a social worker at the Joyce Neighborhood House, and her connections with many of the city's downtrodden became a steady source of tips for Randy's articles in The Minneapolis Star. She became deeply involved in the causes of civil rights, women's rights, American Indian rights and LGBT rights. She was a key local organizer of a project that sent buses of protesters to Springfield, Ill., for a rally to support passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Working with the Minneapolis NAACP, she organized buses to take civil rights activists to Boston to support the busing of students for school desegregation. She was also the key organizer of a Mother's Day antiwar march and rally in Minneapolis, sponsored by Women Against Military Madness. In 1978, determined to advance the cause of labor, she went to work at Honeywell where she became a Teamster in Local 1145 and worked on an assembly line making thermostats. She was soon elected to the union shop committee and fought many grievances and contract battles on behalf of workers over the next two decades. In 1989 she was instrumental in founding the Minnesota chapter of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which was devoted to democratizing the Teamsters, ending corruption and getting the union to stand up for members more vigorously. She was elected the chapter's secretary-treasurer. In 1990, at her first national TDU convention, she was elected to the group's international steering committee. In 1990-91 she played a key role in organizing Minnesota support for reform candidate Ron Carey's campaign for international president of the Teamsters. She and a slate of reformers defeated the entrenched leadership of Local 1145 and were elected delegates to the Teamsters International Convention. Despite a deafening chorus of boos from the union's old guard, she nominated Diana Kilmury as an international vice president on the Carey slate. In one of the biggest upsets in American labor history, the Carey slate was elected and, thanks to Gillian and the group she assembled, Carey carried Minnesota. Over the next seven years she was involved in many Teamster causes, including the 1997 strike at UPS. Carey appointed Gillian to the International Teamsters' first Ethical Practice Committee, and she served on three member judicial panels, hearing cases and issuing findings in complaints brought by rank-and-file members against their union officers. Over the years she endured hostility and even threats from her opponents, but she never wavered. In 1998, over the objections of the Local 1145 leadership, the members voted to strike Honeywell. She established a strike hotline and her house became the unofficial strike headquarters. She was instrumental in organizing a series of picnics to commemorate the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike and its lessons for today on the 50th, 60th and 75th anniversaries. Her friend, Harry DeBoer, a leader of the 1934 strike, was a close collaborator on the first picnic. Among the speakers was her friend Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a leader of the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland, a cause Gillian embraced. Two days before her death, Gillian attended a ceremony to unveil a plaque marking the site of the shooting of innocent Teamster strikers in Minneapolis on July 20, 1934. Many of her longtime friends greeted her. She also had many friends in Overeaters Anonymous and her efforts helped others to find recovery from compulsive overeating. Through it all Gillian was devoted to her husband, children and three grandchildren -- Justin Adam (Stephanie) of Seattle, Wash., Brendan Carlson of Austin, Tex., and Nathan Adam, London -- and to her cousins, who visited her in recent years. She was funny and witty and great to be around. She loved the writings of P.G. Wodehouse, adored English poetry, the music of Mozart, crossword puzzles, and her Golden Retriever, Eugenie. In addition to her father, Harry Ronson, she was preceded in death by her mother, Vicki Webb Ronson. We owe a special thanks to the Senior Club at Walker Methodist where she spent many hours the last 1 1/2 years and also to the host of friends who helped out. A memorial program celebrating Gillian's life will be held Saturday, August 29 at 1 p.m. at the East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier St., St. Paul, Memorials may be sent to the Teamster Rank & File Education and Legal Defense Foundation, the sister organization of TDU; Women Against Military Madness; and the East Side Freedom Library.

Published on July 26, 2015