Pittman, Margrit, 1919-2013

Margrit Pittman was a working class journalist and lifelong advocate of world peace, equality, and socialism. Pittman served for many years on the staff of the Worker and its successor newspapers, the Daily World and the People’s Weekly World. Her lifelong partner in that endeavor was her journalist husband, John Pittman, an outstanding African American writer and editor. He was co-editor of the Daily World when it was launched in 1968. She served as editor of World Magazine and as editor of the editorial page of the Daily World. In 1959, the family moved to Moscow where John and Margrit covered the Soviet Union for the Worker for three years. While there, they co-authored a book, “Peaceful Coexistence: Its Theory and Practice in the Soviet Union,” published in 1964 by International Publishers. They also co-authored “Sense and Nonsense About Berlin” in 1962. In the late 1970s, Margrit Pittman was assigned to cover the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia while John served as the representative of the CPUSA on the Editorial Board of the World Marxist Review based in Prague. Her writing in that period reflected her belief that the GDR “epitomized the repudiation by the German people of the Nazi past,” the Portside obituary reports. She wrote a book “Encounters in Democracy: A U.S. Journalist’s View of the GDR” published in 1981. During the years that she lived in Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic, she played a leading role in bringing trade unionists, including teachers and actors, writers and many others from the U.S. to the GDR to see for themselves what was going on in that country. Because of her efforts many in America were able to get an accurate picture of what life was like in a socialist country. Pittman was also a grassroots organizer, a leader of Women Strike for Peace in San Francisco, an organizer of events in New York that were sponsored by the U.S. Committee for Friendship with the German Democratic Republic, the Communist Party USA, and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. In her later years living in cooperative housing in the Chelsea community of Manhattan, she was active in neighborhood and tenant associations, and the movement for universal health care as well as Chelsea Standup Against the War in Iraq.