24 Facts About Henry Spira

Henry Spira was an American activist for socialism and animal rights, who is regarded by some as one of the most effective animal advocates of the 20th century.

The family was comfortable financially; Henry Spira had a nanny and was educated at a French-speaking lycee.

Henry Spira joined a Jewish youth group and began to learn Hebrew.

Henry Spira's father sent for them in 1938; he had opened a store selling cheap clothes and jewellery, mostly to sailors, and Germany was an increasingly unsafe place for Jews.

Henry Spira was sent to a Roman Catholic school run by nuns, where lessons were conducted in Spanish, until his father ran out of money and could no longer afford the fees.

Henry Spira spent the next year working in his father's store.

Henry Spira's father worked in the diamond industry there, and they rented an apartment on West 104th Street.

Henry Spira decided to leave home when he was sixteen, taking lodgings and an afternoon job in a machine shop, and attending school in the mornings.

In 1944, Henry Spira became a supporter of the Socialist Workers Party.

Henry Spira became a merchant seaman in 1945, joining other Trotskyists who were active in the National Maritime Union.

Henry Spira was drafted into the US Army, serving in Berlin from 1953 to 1954, where he was assigned to speak to several hundred troops each week about news and current affairs.

Henry Spira covered a United Auto Workers strike in New Castle, Indiana, during 1955, in which striking workers were injured and martial law was declared.

Henry Spira wrote extensively about the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Florida, in 1956, during the bus boycott; and about the larger fight against segregation and for voting rights through the 1960s.

Henry Spira was known for talking directly to people involved in struggles and relaying their stories, and for building bridges between the labor and civil rights movements.

Henry Spira's writing led the SWP and other leftists to form the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which worked to inform Americans about Cuba and prevent a US invasion.

Two weeks before the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Henry Spira warned of preparations involving CIA coordination with Cuban exiles.

Henry Spira was involved in the Committee for NMU Democracy in the early 1960s, during a time when dissidents faced beatings and threats of violence by supporters of union president Joseph Curran.

Henry Spira wrote exposes of the ways in which Curran was "ripping off" union members, inspiring dissidents and rank-and-file workers within the NMU and in other trade unions.

Sociologist Lyle Munro writes that Henry Spira went to great lengths to avoid using publicity to shame companies, using it only as a last resort.

The museum halted the research in 1977, and Henry Spira's campaign was hailed as the first ever to succeed in stopping animal experiments.

Henry Spira took a photograph of a primate who had been imprisoned for months in a Bethesda Naval Hospital chair to the Black Star Wire Service, which sent the picture around the world.

Nevertheless, Henry Spira was an advocate of gradual change, negotiating with McDonald's, for example, for better conditions in the slaughterhouses of its suppliers.

Henry Spira proved especially adept at leveraging the power of the larger animal welfare organizations, such as the Humane Society of the United States, to advance his campaigns.

Henry Spira died of esophageal cancer in 1998, at the age of 71.