American labor activist and surrealist, artist, historian, and poet who, along with colleague Dave Roediger, compiled the Haymarket Scrapbook, an anthology of articles, primary sources, and illustrations commemorating the centennial anniversary of the 1886-1887 Haymarket Affair.

A native of Chicago, Franklin Rosemont dedicated his life to art, scholarship, and political activism in support of labor and the American left. He was born October 2, 1943 to two labor activists, printer Henry Rosemont and jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Although he dropped out of Maywood schools after his third year of high school, he was able to gain admission to Roosevelt University in 1962 where he studied under St. Clair Drake. There he became involved with Roosevelt’s student movement. He was a lifelong member of the I.W.W. and co-founded of the Chicago Surrealist Group with his wife Penelope Rosemont in 1965. Throughout the 1960s he was also active in the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop, and Students for a Democratic Society.

After helping coordinate the successful World Surrealist Exhibition at Chicago’s Gallery Bugs Bunny in 1968, Rosemont became managing editor of the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, the oldest radical and labor press in the United States. A labor historian and poet, Rosemont also produced his own scholarship. His major publications include Joe Hill: The I.W.W. and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers, Revolution in Service of the Marvelous, and The Morning of a Machine Gun: Twenty Poems and Documents. He coauthored with Robin D. C. Kelley Brown and Beige, Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora.

Rosemont died in 2009.