06/17/2026
We are mourning the loss of Bea Lumpkin, who died June 15, 2026, at 107 years old.
Bea was a tenured mathematics professor at Malcolm X College and a proud member of Local 1600 and the Chicago Teachers Union. She came to teaching after years of blue-collar work in laundries, machine shops, and assembly lines — and she brought that working-class perspective into everything she did. She authored books, published scholarship, and shaped countless lives in the classroom.
But Bea's impact stretched far beyond education. She was a fierce union advocate, a co-founder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974, and a fixture on picket lines for decades. She chaired the Wisconsin Steel Workers Women's Committee alongside her husband Frank as he led a 17-year fight for justice after Wisconsin Steel closed without paying its workers. She joined Chicago teachers on strike. She stood with Wisconsin public employees fighting for collective bargaining rights.
She wrote about all of it in her autobiography, Joy in the Struggle: My Life and Love — a title that said everything about who she was.
Bea Lumpkin is survived by her children and grandchildren. Her legacy lives on in every student she taught and every activist she inspired.
Read our full tribute:
Beatrice Lumpkin, a tenured professor of mathematics at Malcolm X College and a lifelong labor activist, passed away on June 15, 2026. She was 107 years old.Born Beatrice Shapiro on August 3, 1918, in the Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents who were members of the Jewish Labour Bund...
