Nowak, Stanley and Margaret Collingwood Nowark

NOWAK, STANLEY (b. 1903) and MARGARET COLLINGWOOD NOWARK (b. 1908) were labor and political activists in mid-century Michigan. Stanley Nowak, born into a peasant family in Austrian Poland, migrated to the Back-of-the-Yards section of Chicago in 1913. Radicalized by the Palmer Raids and by packinghouse strikes, he became a left-wing journalist and speaker in the late 1920s and 1930s and a member of the Proletarian Party, a Socialist Party faction that focused on education. Relocated to Detroit, Nowak turned United Auto Workers organizer, working primarily with Polish and other East European workers. He pioneered the use of ethnic radio programs as an organizing tool.

Margaret Collingwood Nowak grew up in a poor Midwestern family deeply enmeshed in the Church of the Brethren and attributed her dedication to labor and social justice to this background. In the early 1930s, after studying labor and economic history, she joined the Proletarian Party and gave her first public address under the title “Women, Religion, and Socialism.” In 1932, at a party social event, she met Stanley Nowak, whom she married three years later. While Stanley organized for the UAW, Margaret worked as educational director for its women’s auxiliary.

Elected to the Michigan State Senate (1939–1948), Stanley Nowak helped found and became an organizer for the American Slav Congress during World War II. From these positions, he exerted great and, among Poles, almost uniquely powerful influence on the Left. Close to the Communist Party, he never officially joined. The government indicted him under the McCarran-Walter Act in preparing his deportation, but the order was overturned in court in 1957. The same year, he became editor of the Left Polish-language paper Glos Ludowy (People’s Voice), holding that post until 1984.

Margaret Collingwood Nowak served as secretary to her husband while he was a state Senator and in 1952 ran for the U.S. House of Representatives on the Progressive Party ticket. In her later years, she wrote a book overviewing the couple’s political life together. In the 1960s, the women’s liberation movement helped to spark a new interest in women’s studies, and she wrote a series of short biographies of American women activists, such as Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony, which were published in her husband’s newspaper.

Nowak, Margaret C. Two Who Were There. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.

Stanley and Margaret Collingwood Nowak Papers, 1938-1957, Archives of Urban Affairs, Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

https://reuther.wayne.edu/files/LP000003.pdf