Ed Teixeira died August 24 after a brief illness.

Born February 28, 1932 in New Bedford, he was the grandson of Cape Verdean immigrants.

At 16 he left school to work at a factory making electrical capacitors. He was fired after he became involved in organizing a union. He then went to work for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE). He was blacklisted in the New Bedford area for left- wing and labor union activities.

Arriving in Boston in the 1950s, Teixeira quickly became involved in community struggles. He was active in efforts to obtain African American political representation on the city and state levels, campaigning to elect Mel King to the Boston School Committee and John O’Bryant to the State Legislature in the early 1960s. Although their first campaigns were unsuccessful, later Mel King was elected as a State Representative and John O’Bryant was elected to the Boston School Committee. Both served for several years.

Active in the struggles to desegregate Boston schools, he helped to organize the Freedom Schools in Boston in 1964 and Operation Exodus in 1965.

He worked to maintain and increase affordable housing in the city of Boston. For example, he was a founding member of the Frankie O’Day cooperative in Boston’s South End.

Ed Teixeira was a lifelong active member of the Communist Party, which he joined at the age of 18. He served as New England party chair in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time he founded and managed the Frederick Douglass bookstore, specializing in African-American history and culture, as well as in Marxist studies.

With the upsurge in the civil rights movement, he became instrumental in setting up bibliographies and providing books on African American studies for many institutions in the state including the New Bedford Public Library and Harvard School of Public Health. In 1972 he ran for the State Legislature in Dorchester’s Ward 14, challenging the state’s law prohibiting Communists from running for political office.

Illness compelled Ed Teixeira to decrease his community and political activities; however, he never abandoned them. From the late 1990s and until his recent hospitalization he was an active member of the Boston chapter of Mass. Senior Action Council and worked on issues of affordable housing and health care.

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Juliet Teixeira (508) 222-2569 or Tilly Teixeira (617) 536-1330]