Frances Sweeney and fellow reporter William Harrison featured in Life magazine, Oct 1942.

Sweeney was an Irish American reporter whose journalism exposed far-right organizing and antisemitism (particularly among Irish Catholics). She died in 1944, aged 36.

Sweeney's work attempted to disrupt the flow of far-right misinformation through fact checking and uncovering the sources of racist rumours.

After her death, her collaborator, a Greek socialist named Gus Gazulis, managed a committee in her name that confronted antisemitism.

Aldino Felicani, pictured above with Sweeney, was a prominent Italian American anarchist and a friend of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was Felicani who was chosen to break the news to Sacco and Vanzetti that their execution was scheduled for August 1927.

Sweeney surrounded herself with leftists, though her own political identity was primarily antifascism interpreted through her own devout Catholicism. This made her an ideal antagonist to Boston priests and bishops, whom she regularly confronted over their silence on antisemitism

Nat Hentoff, who dedicated his autobiography to Sweeney, remembered her "deep blue eyes that could be unbearably cold or joyfully defiant, as when she was thrown out of a new-fascist meeting in 1941 for heckling the speakers"