"Clifton Deberry"(1924-2006).

Was an American Communist and two- time candidate for president of the United States of the Socialist Workers Party.He was the first black American in the 20th Century to be chosen by a political party as its nominee for President.Clifton was born in Holy Springs Mississippi.He worked as house painter and was a trade unionist.In the 1940s,Clifton left his native South and moved to Chicago,where he worked in a factory owned by International Harvester.He became active in the Farm Equipment Workers Union and joined the Communist Party.He grew critical of the official Communist Movement,and in 1953 he joined the Socialist Workers Party,a Trotskyist organization.During his Chicago years in the late 1950s,he found it hard to keep a job.He would get a job and it would last only 3 days.Clifton would go from one job to another.The FBI would visit his boss and he would be fired.Clifton gave up on the city and moved to New York in 1960.Clifton career as political activist began in the late 1950s.In 1955 he helped organize a mass protest in Chicago to protest the lynching of Emmett Till back home in Mississippi.Clifton spoke out in defense of the Cuban Revolution,in support of African liberation struggles,and demanded withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.Clifton marched for civil rights in Selma,Alabama and Memphis,Tennessee and was a supporter of Malcolm X in the 1960s.He was a delegate to the founding conventions of the Negro Labor Congress and the Negro American Labor Council.In November, 1963 Clifton ran for Councilman in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.He received 3,514 votes in the race.He was the Socialist Workers Party's candidate in the 1964 election.Clifton was the party's first African American candidate as well as the first African American candidate of any existing party (he was preceded in 1960 by marginal candidate Clennon King).His running mate was Ed Shaw, a printer from Illinois.In the 1965 City election,he was the SWP's candidate for Mayor of New York City.In 1970,he ran for Governor of New York City and polled 5,766 votes.Clifton ran again the United States presidential election,1980as one of three candidates the party had that year,the others being Andrew Pulley and Richard Congress .Matilde Zimmermann was the vice presidential candidate on all three tickets.Clifton died of heart failure in a hospital near his home of Union City,California.A memorial meeting was held in his honor by the Socialist Workers Party in New York Cityon April 29,2006.