It’s tragic when a person in his 40s dies suddenly of a mysterious illness. But it’s especially tragic when he is a working-class revolutionary, a staunch unionist, an immigrant from Jamaica who yearned to visit the motherland in Africa.
Derrick Duncan met Workers World Party in 1995 at the annual Caribbean Day celebration held in Brooklyn, N.Y., during the Labor Day weekend. A flier about the fight to end the death penalty and save the life of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal attracted him to the struggle. Always a fighter to end racism and police brutality, Duncan’s worldview expanded as he read Abu-Jamal’s essays about the prison-industrial complex and connected the dots to capitalism.