A seasoned organizer and experienced communist, Jerry Tung mobilized fellow students and workers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook during the anti-Vietnam War movement, organized garment workers in New York City sweatshops, and fought for minorities’ rights as a Lower East Side community organizer. Repeatedly harassed and jailed many times, he was set up by the government in 1969 on 29 counts of “conspiracy to riot” and jailed for a year.
After initiating the Asian Study Group in 1973, he drew Marxist-Leninist collectives and leading individuals together into the Workers Viewpoint Organization. In October, 1979 he led the WVO to found the Communist Workers Party, U.S.A. and was elected General Secretary of the Party, and head of the Central Committee.
Now 34 years old, Jerry was born in China and raised in the United States by his mother, a garment worker. His father, a visiting student in Raleigh, North Carolina, was killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1951. Twenty-eight years later, Jerry Tung personally organized the funeral march, and then a full-scale campaign, to avenge the November 3, 1979 murders in Greensboro, North Carolina, of five CWP members by a KKK/Nazi/FBI terror squad.