B. J. Widick
B. J. Widick (born Branko J. Widick in Okučani, present-day Croatia, October 25, 1910; died Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 28, 2008) was an American labor activist in the United Auto Workers union and socialist movements. Background An immigrant to the United States from Yugoslavia with his father when he was three years old, Widick attended the University of Akron in Ohio, graduating with a degree in economics in 1934. Career In the Great Depression of the 1930s, Widick became active in the political left, first as a sympathizer with the Communist Party USA, then as a participant in the American Trotskyist movement. He joining the Communist League of America in 1934 and followed the Trotskyist movement's various configurations through the decade, helping to form the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. Widick was a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal from 1933 to 1936 and was involved in drives by the Committee of Industrial Organizations to unionize the rubber industry in Ohio, becoming the research director for the United Rubber Workers in 1937. In 1937 Widick traveled to Mexico and met with the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky to discuss the American labor upsurge, and there he met Diego Rivera and