Numerous tributes to Jane McAlevey’s remarkable record — four books published in the past decade alongside a life’s work of training organizers based on well-documented campaign victories — will surely be published in the coming months in the wake of her death yesterday at age fifty-nine following her battle with multiple myeloma. I will not attempt to do justice to the fullness of Jane’s amazing life but rather focus on how I knew her best: as a big-hearted humanist and beacon to the international workers’ movement.

Jane’s father, John McAlevey, was a World War II fighter pilot who later became an important progressive politician in New York state politics. Her mother died when she was young, and she would often accompany her father as a “campaign prop,” as she would later say. From her father, she developed a lifelong hatred for fascism and learned what it takes to fight and win in the trenches of political struggle. From her mother, she learned that life is fleeting, and not a second of it should be wasted.

Jane got to work young, as a student organizer and outspoken critic of US foreign policy. As president of the Student Association of the State University of New York, she led a campaign that resulted in a historic act of divestiture from apartheid South Africa. After university, she traveled to Nicaragua to support the revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. There she learned another key lesson from a Sandinista, who told her that if she was truly committed to dismantling US imperialism, she should go back to fight from within the belly of the beast. Always a close listener, Jane did just that.