Abra Quinn (1966-2025)

Adam Hefty

ABRA QUINN WAS a lifelong socialist; she was involved in organizing social movements from anti-apartheid and Central America solidarity to the antiwar movement. She died in her home in San Leandro, California, in October 2025, after a recurrence of endometrial cancer. She is deeply missed.

One of Abra’s legacies as a socialist is her unique combination of loyalty to loved ones, to a political tradition she knew deeply and to intellectual and interpersonal curiosity. This combination resulted in a mix of tenacity and flexibility, which represents some of the best of a generation on the socialist left that was navigating the collapse of one set of hopes and a new political landscape.

Born in 1966 in Madison, Wisconsin, Abra’s political life began, precociously, when she was a child. Her parents, Patrick and Martha Quinn, were involved in the Socialist Workers Party opposition (which was aligned with the majority in the Fourth International in the 1970s). Abra’s distinct memories of childhood included contentious meetings, international guests, protests, and sharp exchanges with a couple of anticommunist teachers who weren’t used to being questioned.

Evaluating Political Activism

She was involved in her own right in the Central America solidarity and the anti-Apartheid movements in the 1980s, a “survival era” for radicals in social movements. After high school, she earned a scholarship to study French in Paris and visited family friends in England. She spent parts of the next several years living in England and France; she was active with Fourth International-aligned groups in England and worked for the International itself in France for a period of time.

These experiences, along with her political orientation, led her to be an internationalist who was always curious to get into the particulars of the national and local situations of places she followed closely; if she was talking to someone who smoothed the rough edges of reality by imposing generalizations based on a political line, she could cut through the B.S. quickly, even if it was a line to which she was more or less sympathetic. She remembered being the youngest founding member of Solidarity in 1986.

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Abra was very interested in the analysis of those of us who had been involved in the global justice movement. By the time of the 2001-2004 antiwar movement, she and I had become close friends, sharing analysis and gossip, usually agreeing but sometimes arguing about priorities within Solidarity.

Solidarity didn’t have a “line” on what an antiwar movement should look like, but most of its founders shared a sensibility, learned in predecessor organizations, that mass action (starting with marches of thousands and tends of thousands and building from there) had the social power to do something that civil disobedience by dozens or hundreds of people could never achieve. (A few were dismissive of civil disobedience as middle-class radicalism.)

A new antiwar movement was taking shape after 9-11, impacted heavily by the direct action oriented, often anarchist-led global justice movement, which was the most politically dynamic force in radical social movements. Solidarity went through a process of debate. For those of us who hadn’t been around in the 1960s and ’70s and didn’t understand the stakes of the classic debate over mass action, there was a lot of confusion. Abra was one of the people who could translate.

Having been politically attuned from a very young age, she could totally understand why some from the ’60s generation were hesitant about rethinking this strategy, while she could also understand what was compelling about the call to direct action. Before long, Solidarity made the decision to use opportunities for both mass and direct action in building the antiwar movement.

Abra engaged in that with a great deal of curiosity and an attitude of conscious experimentation, particularly within Direct Action to Stop the War in the Bay Area. She would never move too quickly, intellectually, when the group seized on a popular way of thinking that jarred with hers. She would raise her objections in no uncertain terms to people who would listen. And then, not long afterwards, she would tell me about a talk by Starhawk that she recently attended, and how I really ought to attend one soon, myself.

When the antiwar movement and the global justice movement ebbed, she maintained close personal friendships and political-intellectual connections with people around the Bay Area she knew from those organizing circles. That curiosity about and engagement with anarchists and anti-authoritarians was a defining part of her life.

She visited Occupy protests in 2011 and was interested in just how far the revival of interest in socialist politics around the extended orbit of Bernie Sanders might go. Her commitment to Palestinian liberation made her rethink in the final year of her life the Zionist weaponization of U.S. politics. She ended a close friendship due to political disagreements over Zionism a couple of weeks before realizing her cancer had returned.

Abra’s tenacity sometimes would come across as needlessly hardheaded. With the years behind us, there are moments I still remember as stubborn and wrong, but others in which she turned out to be right, and much, much later, I decided I had been at least partly wrong myself.

Abra lived most of her life in multiracial, urban areas: Chicago and Oakland/East Bay, California. Throughout her life, she engaged with politics and life experiences that rejected white supremacy and centrality. She recounted being “the only whitey” in a gospel ensemble in high school; after moving to California, she spent the rest of her life teaching in East Bay schools where students of color were the by far the majority.

She loved designing creative teaching materials for students that encouraged artistic engagement and helped them learn about daily life, culture, and geography in parts of the world that are often reduced to geopolitical simplification. One of her advisors in graduate school was David Roediger; her work looked at gender, race, and class in the union organizing drives of lumber workers in Louisiana. Far from being an appropriator or someone obsessed to prove how “down” she was, she readily shared anecdotes that highlighted awkward moments as well as bonds.

(See “Wobblies on the Southern Home Front,” in ATC 116 and “Meeting Alexandra Kollontai,” in ATC 139 for a glimpse of her writing style.)

Perhaps stemming from a confidence that came out of this range of experiences, Abra was skeptical of organizational solutions to what she saw as the political problem of the white domination of many left political spaces. Organizational approaches were very popular in the Bay Area left in the 1990s and 2000s, years before the dangers of incorporation came into sharper relief.

I never questioned the honesty with which she approached the question. However, I disagreed with her conclusions, and we argued about them (with humor as well as occasional sharpness) around the time we first became friends. Years later, after Solidarity and other groups we both knew had varying experi­ences trying these organization-forward solutions, and many of the attempts as well as some of the organizations had foundered, I thought again about many of the points Abra had raised.

I wouldn’t necessarily answer those questions today the way she answered them in 2001, but she interrogated the thorns of a prickly problem fearlessly. She stuck to the clarity of her own ideas, even though they weren’t popular in the surrounding milieus of teaching and the left.

Being Loyal Amidst the Swirling Chaos

In the memories of Abra shared in the weeks after her death from loved ones, the words “loyalty” and “tradition” came up a lot. Along with her well-informed and historically tested loyalty to Fourth Internationalist, “Mandelite” politics, she did not shy away from loyalties that might feel contradictory in a left-liberal, Bay Area world.

She loved her family’s Thanksgiving traditions, once claiming that “we eat what our families have eaten since the 1910s in Lake Geneva … and probably before that, in Chicago and southern Illinois and Kansas City, Kansas.” Every year, after I moved away, she would lovingly recount each dish being served and the traditional provenance of most of them.

The last conversation I had with Abra was a couple of weeks after the Charlie Kirk assassination. From her hospital bed, she was railing at the choking sensation of the national hagiography that had emerged around him. She was keeping score about whether her father and her political mentor, Joanna Misnik, who both died over the previous several months, were being memorialized properly. In one of her last online posts, she wrote, “I think I want to name my main T-6 spine tumor Keir Starmer. I hate him so very, very much.”

I feel glad to remind myself that politically and intellectually, she did not go gentle into that good night, but armed with intellect, wit, and battling will until very near the end. I am also glad that her final days were cozy, with her cat on her lap in bed and surrounded by family, including her sister Rachel, her nieces Ruby and Rosemary, her stepmother Mary Janzen Quinn, and her brother-in-law Tim Marshall.

I am sorry that I cannot talk to her today about Mamdani, the shifting politics of millions of young people around Palestine, the unlikely tenacity of the Bernie Sanders moment in U.S. politics, or what Trump’s variation on imperial adventures in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba portends for the conjuncture and multipolar realignment. I am sad that I we cannot share catty jokes about boomer leftist memes, and I am sad that we will not be able to ask each other how this year’s Thanksgiving dinner is shaping up.

July-August 2026, ATC 243