Veteran activist and founding Communist Peter G. King dies in Grand Rapids and is buried in the Lithuanian community’s secular, leftist cemetery.

‘Party Suffers Loss of Organizer in Grand Rapids’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 3 No. 301. January 6, 1927.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Jan. 4. The body of Comrade Peter G. King, city organizer of the Workers (Communist) Party of Grand Rapids, who died recently, was accompanied by a large number of friends and comrades to his final resting place at the Laisve Cemetery. That Comrade King was an active comrade and well beloved by his comrades was attested by the large number present, more than 200, and by the many floral offerings from the various organizations of which Comrade King was a member or with whom he was in contact.

The organizations sending flowers were the following: The Workers (Communist) Party of Grand Rapids, the Young Pioneers, the International Labor Defense, the Freiheit Club, the Lithuanian Chorus, the Lithuanian Dramatic Society, the Sons and Daughters of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Alliance Aid Society. A number of speakers addressed the assembled comrades and friends of the deceased in Lithuanian and English, first at his home and later at the cemetery where the simple and solemn Communist ceremony was concluded by the singing of the Internationale by the members of the Young Pioneers.

Comrade King has been a leading spirit in the movement in the notorious “Open Shop Furniture City” of Grand Rapids. Comrade King has been a member of our party ever since It was organized and his untiring activity, his unflagging enthusiasm and unselfish devotion to the movement was to a large degree responsible for whatever small successes were achieved in this city.

His fine spirit will be missed by those who have worked with Comrade King and the whole membership is agreed that in his death our party has sustained a very serious loss which can only be made up by an increased activity on the part of every member of the party. They feel as Comrade Barkin, the spokesman of the Young Pioneers so well expressed it, that “Comrade King was a link in a long powerful chain which reached around the world. This link is now broken. And it is up to us who remain to heal the breach; to replace the link and to weld the chain closer together by our renewed activity for the cause of revolution and the emancipation of the workers of the world.”

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1927/1927-ny/v03-n301-NYE-jan-06-1927-DW-LOC.pdf