Bob Muehlenkamp grew up in an upper middle-class Catholic family in northern Kentucky. His family was deeply religious and conservative.
His adult life would be different. Teaching would lead to union organizing, social justice, and political activism. All of that led him to help launch Third Act Maryland.
“I am deeply grateful to Third Act, where I found a community of seniors committed to the fight for the two existential issues of our time—climate and democracy,” he said.
Muehlenkamp attended eight years of Jesuit schools, went to the University of Chicago for doctoral study, then became a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin, where he became the founding president of the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA), the country’s first teaching assistant union.
The Vietnam War sent Muehlenkamp in a new direction. “Like many of us in Third Act, I became active in the antiwar movement and civil rights struggles,” he recalled. In 1969, he said, he told his local draft board in Kentucky that they ought to pass on drafting him: “You really don’t want me,” he said. “I will be trouble!” They never contacted him again.
Because of his TAA work, 1199, the Hospital Workers Union, recruited Bob as an organizer and assigned him to Baltimore. In just 18 months the union organized over 6,000 workers at Johns Hopkins and other major hospitals, and over 35 nursing homes. He worked at 1199 for 23 years, becoming the executive vice president and organizing director.
In 1982, Muehlenkamp was one of the three principal organizers of the June 12 antinuclear march and rally, which drew over 1 million people to a demonstration and concert on the Great Lawn in New York City’s Central Park. And in 1989 Muehlenkamp was the field director for David Dinkins’ successful New York City mayoral campaign.
Then, after rank-and-file reform members took over the 1.5 million-member Teamsters Union in 1992, the union’s new president, Ron Carey, asked Muehlenkamp to be his assistant and the organizing director.
After leaving the Teamsters, Muehlenkamp worked with many other unions on organizing drives, contract campaigns, and strikes against major corporations including General Electric, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, and United Airlines. Muehlenkamp was co-founder of U.S. Labor against the Iraq War and was on the senior staff of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.
From 2000 to 2004, Muehlenkamp taught a course on political economy and American social justice movements at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. From 2006 to 2016, he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, teaching week-long residencies at small liberal arts colleges.
In 2015, Muehlenkamp became very active with Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. “Bernie perfectly captured and expressed, in very popular language, the grotesque inequality, which, to this day, underlies all of our social, economic, and political problems.” He cochaired Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign in Maryland with former NAACP President Ben Jealous.
Throughout all his union, political, and social justice work, Muehlenkamp said he had little understanding of the science of climate change or of the climate justice movement. Then, in 2021, he read Naomi Klein’s book, “This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs. the Planet,” and that changed everything for him.
He helped start Third Act Maryland and became very active in the DMV, working with others in March 2023 to organize a big rally in Washington to protest four of the largest U.S. banks funding the fossil fuel industry: Citibank, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.
With other Third Actors, he was arrested at Citi Bank in Washington during that 2023 demonstration.
Last year, Muehlenkamp and Karen Ackerman, who have lived in Takoma Park since 1993, celebrated their 50th anniversary. They have three children and six grandchildren. “Like a lot of other activists in Third Act, I want to be able to say to my kids and my grandchildren that I fought for a legacy of a safer planet and democracy.”
Profile by Uta Allers