Devastated. My long time friend Joffre Stewart has died. Joffre, a long time anarchist and pacifist (after serving in the military during World War 2) was a poet and was referred to in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. [Ginsberg was taken by Stewart when they met years ago at a gathering in San Francisco. In his poem “Howl” Ginsberg refers to Stewart as a man “with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing / out incomprehensible leaflets.” Stewart says, “Later I met Ginsberg again, and I said I did not think my leaflets were incomprehensible. He said that was a reference to his state of mind and that it had nothing to do with the leaflets themselves.”].
He was active at various times in the IWW, Peacemakers, and the War Resister’s League. He was a regular contributor to the Bulletin of the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF). He attended, as did I, Roosevelt University. from which he received a B.A. in 1952 In June 1948 he was arrested in downtown Chicago for attempting to get a haircut at a barbershop in downtown Chicago which would not serve African-Americans. [Some at Roosevelt said he had “embarrassed” the university, but others supported his battle against segregated barbershops. The controversy led to the election, in the Roosevelt student government of a slate led by Harold Washington (who became student body president) , later to become Chicago’s first African-American mayort. He was an early participant in the Beat movement. He was barred from the Roosevelt University building at one point because as a speaker at a student organization program he burned an American, an Israeli, and a UN flag to signify his rejection of government, and a number of student groups subsequently made it almost a point of honor to invite him to speak at least once a year to defy the ban, quickly sneaking him in nd out of the building. On April 29, 1994, he was arrested while trying to attend a poetry reading at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in downtown Evanston, Illinois, after being mistaken for a vagrant (as if a vagrant had no right to attend a poetry reading, what a messed up world we live in), and spent 11 days in jail. He at times worked as a doorman at various bars and music venues. I first met him in 1965 and we had many friends and interests (both political/anti-political and literary) in common. He was a frequent overnight guest on my couch back in the 1960’s during the years that I customarily always left my door unlocked for him and several other people frequently in need of temporary lodging on the northside of Chicago. That led to numerous fascinating all night conversations with him from time to time. He had an amazingly broad range of experiences. He was well known for attending a wide variety of protest demonstrations and public meetings and passing out handwritten or photocopied versions of his poems and statements and for submitting long letters to various publications with the admonition to “print all or nothing at all” as he loathed being edited. His book Poems and Poetry was published by the Every Now and Then Publishing Cooperative in 1982. He was a unique individual and the world will be a far sadder place without him in it. Most of all I will miss his smile and his laugh.
There will be a wake for him at Taylor Funeral Home on 79th Street on Tuesday, March 19th from 6-7 PM.โ
He told me he stopped talking, literally stopped talking, for a year to force them to discharge him from the military and when they did he had to learn to talk all over again. He was a tax resistor for many years. He was a kind and deeply principled man. Joff Stewart. Presente!!
Lester Dore
March 15 at 11:23 PM
Joffre Stewart Presente!
(1925-2019)
In 1963 I lived on North Avenue near Wells St. I was a green kid, a college dropout from Tulsa Oklahoma who went On the Road with my friend Richard Battersonโwe ran out of money in Chicago and we stuck around. I was working as a dishwasher at the North Ave. Marquis Lunch and in nice weather hung out with the beatniks and proto-hippies and meth monsters at the hot dog stand near there. Thatโs when I first met Joffre Stewart and from him learned about anarchopacism and its Four Noโs: No Cops Courts Jails or Taxes. A bearded soft spoken tireless advocate for the masses, Iโd see him in loose shirt, shorts, and sandals walking the streets If Old Town with a shopping bag of radical literature, pamphlets, flyers, and his own handwritten poetry, manifestos, and accounts of his police beatings and arrests, all for walking while black. The cops and the straight people thought he was a weirdo. I thought then, at the impressionable age of 19, that he was heroic, a secular saint, a wise and charismatic teacher, and I wanted to live as he did, without compromise, shunning the idea of wealth as success, preaching the gospel of anarchism. His ideas led me to affiliation with the IWW, the Yippees, the Chicago Seed (an underground newspaper) and eventually Karma Farm, a hippie commune in Juneau County. Eventually I was corrupted by attraction and aversion, unable to rise above my own fears and desires. But whenever I thought of Joffre, I remembered that it was possible to exist and resist the social pressure to conform to societal norms. I know that later on his zeal for anti-Zionism led to his being labeled by many people as an anti-Semite, and that is always a risk to critics of Israel. I find it hard to believe that he ever hated anyone for what they thought. I am very sorry to hear of his death. For some time now Iโve harbored the idea of going to Chicago and hunting him down to thank him for encouraging me to make art and write poetry and speak truth and shun materialism. Too late. I will not be able to attend the wake. But if any of you who read this will be there, and if you are sharing memories, please read this, my tribute to Joffre as a teacher, aloud to whoever might find it worthy.
I always enjoyed coming across Joffre at one of the many demonstrations, meetings, social justice events etc. where he would appear with his leaflets. I will miss him.
My stepfather, who was active in the Chicago CPUSA & NAARPR in the early 70s told me about Joffre after we had one encounter with him during a visit in the 80s. My strepdad said was well known that Joffre had attempted to integrate whites-only bars and other establishments across Chicago on his own, and often took severe bearings for it. I donโt know Iโd this was true or not but it was tons to me with a mix of respect and paternalistic dismissal of anarchists.
Thank you for posting your tribute! I knew Joffre from War Resisters League and war tax resistance, especially the latter. He came to many years of meetings of National War Tax Resistance, always on the bus and often involving some variety of adventure – snow, missed connections, border patrol – one thing and another. He was one of a kind and I have missed him the past couple years since he could not travel anymore. Please share condolences with family and friends from we war tax resisters!
A friend and fellow street agitator in anti-war action, nonviolence, and war tax refusal since 1957 when I first met him at Friendship House in Chicago while I was in my last year at the University of Chicago. The following year I invited him to give a talk at my new little storefront Catholic Worker shelter for homeless men near Cabrini/Green Homes. When he submitted a topic title referring to the Catholic Worker as “The Little Vatican Bastard by the Bowery”, it seemed a little too much for my Catholic piety to print it in my one page fledgling newsletter to CW supporters, so, to my eternal shame, I dropped the invitation. Ten years later, when I invited him on another occasion, he laid a full-sized American flag at the threshold of our apartment for guests to wipe their feet on, and then burned miniature Vatican and U.S. flags during his talk to highlight his anarchist opposition to all States. While not a practitioner of such tactics myself I was okay with his choices.
For many years, after being assaulted and beaten by Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League thugs, his obsessive opposition to Israeli State Zionism seemed to many to be anti-Semitic, but for those who listened more carefully he was not prejudiced against Jews or Judaism, beyond his general atheistic opposition to religions and the worship of any gods. (After fifteen years as a good practicing Catholic, I reverted to an agnostic atheism. acknowledging no gods for myself, while retaining my identity still as an activist in the radical Catholic Worker movement.)
What I mostly learned from Joffre was more care about the use of euphemisms and implicit biases in the use of language (though he slipped up himself in his screeds about Zionism and Israeli abuse of Palestinians). Thus it was not “our war in Vietnam”, but “the U.S. war in Vietnam”; it was not “the Defense Department”, but throughout my lifetime “the U.S. Aggression Department”; it was not the “defense budget”, but the “military budget” and the “war budget”.
Lost, a good friend of sixty-two years. The bell tolls also for me, and before too long for thee.
Karl Meyer – Nashville Greenlands
Joffre was invited to speak and read poems into my class in high school. He caused a stir by reading a poem by the light of a burning Constitution. He distributed little American flags and books of matches and invited us to join him in their ignition. He described the many times he had been arrested for walking while black. I always thought of him as a thinker and deeply commited to his admirable viewpoint.