Chicago-based poet, artist, historian, and street speaker

Born in Chicago on October 2, 1943, to the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont, Franklin Rosemont was a labor activist, artist, and the co-founder in 1966 of the Chicago Surrealist Group, a group of revolutionary, left-wing artists inspired by the Surrealist art of André Breton. At the age of seven, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an international, radical labor union, and remained a committed member for the rest of life. Rosemont dropped out of school after his third year of high school but spent a significant amount of time in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library learning about surrealism, eventually enrolling at Roosevelt University in 1962. Active in the 1960s with IWW, the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Franklin helped to lead strikes, as well as produce pamphlets, posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press. He passed away on April 12, 2009, and was married to Penelope Rosemont, who still resides in Rogers Park, Illinois.