Ellen Spence Poteet, 1960-2024

Alan Wald

After teaching in the men’s prison in Batouri, Ellen Poteet relaxing with the neighborhood children.

ELLEN SPENCE POTEET, a former editor of Against the Current (ATC) and member of Solidarity, died at age 64 of an unknown illness in early April 2024 in the town of Batouri in the East Region of Cameroon. At the time, Ellen was on leave from her position as Lecturer in the History Department of the University of Michigan (U-M), planning to return to Ann Arbor in August.

That month she had planned, with editor Dianne Feeley, to complete a commissioned ATC article about the South African revolutionary Neville Alexander (1936-2012), whom she had long admired.

For much of the previous year Ellen had been teaching English and French four hours a day in a prison holding 400 men, without indoor plumbing or electricity. Her death occurred while she slept at the Jesuit Relief Service house in the Muslim quarter. According to her wishes, she was buried in Batouri.

From the time I met Ellen around 1990, she was a daunting role model for socialist activists and Marxist intellectuals. For starters, she was a natural polymath on many topics — including ancient history, the Greek and Latin Classics, Soviet Communism, racism, Eurocentrism, African politics, and pastoral culture, and she knew both ancient and modern languages.

But I was especially taken by her coolly thoughtful analytical prowess, a kind of compulsive brilliance of a rare sort.

All this was a product of an unusual background. She was raised in New Orleans, an only child especially close to her father. Ewing McLaughlin Poteet, a violinist and music critic, had been a teenage prodigy who toured the country in the 1920s and then studied at the Julliard School in New York.

From 1949 until 1957 he was the music critic and theatrical reviewer for the New Orleans Item.Subsequently he served as concertmaster in many cities — Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago — and taught at Newcomb College and Loyola University. Ewing Poteet was also an anti-racist radical and friendly with several activists in and around the Communist Party.

Among those who continued to remain close to Ellen after Ewing’s death in 1984, were Herman and Betty Liveright, best-known for founding the radical Berkshire Forum in Stephentown, New York. Herman was the son of the avant-garde publisher Horace B. Liveright, and a former Communist indicted for Contempt of Congress when he refused to answer questions from Senator Eastland’s subcommittee on internal security.

Another close friend was the radical novelist and civil rights militant Alfred Maund, who was married to a Communist and collaborated with Trotskyists and others. Ellen arranged for me to interview the Liverights about their experiences, and to work with Maund in republishing one of his books in a University of Illinois Press series that I was editing.(1)

Education and Activism

Ellen studied ballet as a teenager and attended both the Ursuline Academy and Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. She then graduated with a BA in History from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

After that she lived in New York City for several years where she was employed by the New York Public Research Group, an environmental organization, and had a connection with the Labor Research Association, a long-time labor statistics bureau associated with the Communist movement.

She came to U-M in the late 1980s and completed a History Department dissertation in Ancient Mediterranean History in 1998 called “The Apostolic Tracks of Christian Controversy in the Lives of Athanasius, Jerome, and Rufinus, 325 to 411 A.D.” The topic was the lives of the holy men and women of the ancient Christian Church.

For some years Ellen taught at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, but in 2006 she returned to the U-M as a lecturer, well-known for riding her red bicycle all over town.

During her time at U-M she taught an astonishingly wide range of courses, including ancient and medieval Africa (History 246), nomads in the modern world (History 230), and African revolutionaries in the 20th century (History 496).

Between 2006 and 2013 she provided no less than 20 different classes for the department. Her dedication as a teacher was deeply appreciated by her students, and in 2018 the Department’s majors presented her with the Undergraduate Teaching Award, a prize that is entirely overseen by students.

Since her appointment at U-M, Ellen — on six occasions — had taken a year away from teaching and traveled to Cameroon, where she volunteered as a teacher of English and French at three different prisons for men and children. This work was done without compensation and without recognition from the U-M. She told Dianne Feeley that she had found “a strange sense of belonging in the prison.”(2)

I recall that her political activities as a graduate student embraced every radical cause on campus: labor support, Latin America solidarity, divestment from South Africa, anti-racism, nuclear disarmament, protests against the Gulf War, graduate student union organizing, academic freedom, socialist education, and much more.

At one point she was meeting weekly with a graduate student in English to go carefully through each chapter of Das Kapital using the writings of Hal Draper as a guide.

As an active editor for ATC she planned many issues and contributed a series of brilliant essays on difficult topics: a review of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, a critique of Samir Amir’s Eurocentrism, a commentary on the collapse of the Soviet Union, and an analysis of White on Black: Blacks in Western Popular Culture are all online at the ATC website.

In regard to her projected work on Neville Alexander, she wrote that “Alexander is for me one of the most trenchant intellectuals and true revolutionaries of the last several decades….If he had not died when he did, I would have done everything in my power to meet him.”(3)

In another message she explained an added part of her attraction to certain South African revolutionaries:

“Chris Hani, for whom I have the profoundest admiration, was a fine Latinist, and said in an interview, not so long before he was assassinated, that he hoped to have the time to return to Tacitus — who helped him think about revolution. And Neville Alexander…(a friend of [Ernest] Mandel), said in an interview that if he had not begun with Latin or Greek instead of German, he would probably have gone the route of classics — without forgoing his dedication to revolutionary socialism.”(4)

Ellen was not an electrifying speaker, but she was always engaging and articulate, brainy with a sweet laugh and a memorably sly smile. In fact, she had a very dry sense of humor, serious in an impish way as she contemplated ethical quandaries with great nuance.

If the word “socialist commitment” has any meaning in the confusing world of the present, it can surely be found in Ellen’s far too short but morally incandescent life.

Notes

1. See Jessica Printz Kimball’s review of The Big Boxcar: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc085/p1684./
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2. Ellen Poteet email to Dianne Feeley, 13 January 2024.
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3. Ellen Poteet email to Wald, 15 May 2021.
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4. Ellen Poteet email to Wald, 22 April 2021.
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November-December 2024, ATC 233