Worldwide, the summer months have historically been a time of training for Progressive Labor Party (PLP). As we gear up for summer of learning, fightback, and recommitment to communism, it’s to reflect on one of PLP’s pillars from inception: the fight against racism is key to revolution.
Join our international 2023 Summer Project in the NYC-NJ area from July 6 to July 12, and our Party Convention “Build the Party Under Sharpening War and Fascism” from July 14 to July 16. Contact your local PL’er for more information.
In 1964, the young Progressive Labor Movement played a lead role in the historic Harlem Rebellion, the first Blackled urban uprising of the era against police terror. On July 16, an off-duty cop, Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, shot and murdered James Powell, a 15-yearold, 122-pound ninth-grader, in cold blood. For six consecutive nights, the anger of the Black masses boiled over in open rebellion in central Harlem and then in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 raised the fight against racist oppression to a new level while exposing the class treason of Black reformist leadership. After Harlem, more than 100 cities in the U.S. felt the torch of rebellion. PL’s leadership in this struggle set the tone for our unceasing fight against racism:
From the 1970s to the current day, PL’ers have organized hundreds of attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis wherever they spread their racist garbage. Rejecting the pacifist mythology that these gutter racists would fade away if ignored, we have attacked them head-on—and confronted the capitalists’ cops who protect them. We have mounted these anti-racist, multiracial actions in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Detroit and St. Louis. We’ve done the same in smaller communities like Tupelo, Mississippi; Scotland, Connecticut; Jamesburg and Morristown, New Jersey; and scores of cities and towns in California. We invaded the Nazis’ headquarters in Chicago. We beat a white supremacist leader in a Boston television interview. These militant anti-KKK/Nazi actions have involved an estimated 100,000 or more workers and youth.
On May Day, 1975, we mobilized 2,500 anti-racists in Boston to march against the segregationist, terrorist organization called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights, accurately nicknamed Racists On A Rampage). When they physically attacked us, we routed them. We subsequently organized a summer project to combat ROAR’s mob violence and its anti-busing racism. We integrated formerly all-white beaches, held anti-racist summer schools for Black children, and rallied to escort Black children into their first day of integrating formerly all-white schools. Our efforts smashed ROAR.
On May Day, 1976, we marched into Chicago’s Marquette Park, where Nazis had barred Black people. We integrated that neighborhood.
Simultaneously, PLP exposed academic charlatans — like E.O. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein, and Arthur Jensen — who spewed racist filth about the “inferiority” of Black workers and the Nazi fantasy that unemployment was inherited in their genes. We mobilized demonstrations wherever these racists appeared, chased them off auditorium stages, and even poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head in the middle of a lecture. (Our member called out, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”) PL’s position was clear and uncompromising: No free speech for racists.
Throughout this period, PLP helped organize the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), a mass anti-racist, multiracial group that led many of these struggles.
In Southern California, our Party has organized against the anti-immigrant Minute Men. We have gone to border towns to fight racist attacks on immigrant workers from Mexico, rallying support from citizen workers around the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
In 2015, PLP advanced the protest against the cops’ murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. We raised our slogan — “Fight Like Ferguson!” — among thousands across the country. Our Party was building a movement for rebellion against racist police terror, not pacifist appeals to ruling-class officials from then-president Barack Obama’s Justice Department on down. We were doing the same in solidarity with workers and youth in Baltimore who are outraged by the cops’ murder of Freddie Gray.
More recently, PL’ers have taken to the streets—before, during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic—from Brooklyn to Chicago to Los Angeles to protest the police murders of Black women, men, and youth by racist cops.
Antiracism on the Shop Floor
PLP has consistently raised the issue of racism among organized workers to unite them against the bosses’ racist attacks.
In 1973, when a New York City Police Department undercover cop shot a Black 10-year-old in the back in Queens, a PLP club at the Ford auto plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, brought the atrocity onto the factory assembly line. Our Party petitioned the do-nothing union local leadership to take a public stance and demand that the cop be indicted for murder. The workers’ response was electric. They were galvanized into action during a contract struggle that previously had been limited to economic issues. Their heightened political consciousness and militancy led to a weeklong wildcat strike against 100-degree temperatures in the plant, which in turn set the tone for the Chrysler Mack Avenue sit-down strike two months later (see CHALLENGE, May 6).
Beginning in the 1980’s, PLP has provided antiracist leadership to 6,000 Washington, DC Metro transit workers. At one point, the local’s overwhelmingly Black membership elected a white PL’er as their president, defeating a passive Black incumbent. As Metro bosses exclude people convicted of crimes by the rulers’ criminal injustice system, they close one of the few avenues for many Black workers to obtain a decent-paying job. PLP has demanded that the union oppose racist background checks. Many workers have been won to our Party in this antiracist fight.
Fighting Racism Internationally
PLP is still small but mighty and connected across the U.S., Latin America, South Asia, and East Africa.
Ever since the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, with tens of thousands still living in tents, we have spread the struggle against U.S. imperialism and racism, which have enslaved workers there for two centuries.
In Colombia, comrades are putting “Black workers are key to revolution” into practice by organizing among Black workers and fighting against imperialism.
In Israel-Palestine, PL’ers exposed and fought the intense racism of the Israeli bosses (with U.S. ruling-class support) against workers from Africa and Palestine, who are victims of super-exploitation. We are also organizing workers against the Israeli rulers’ mass evictions of villages inhabited by Palestinians.
In Pakistan, PL’ers are mobilizing thousands of workers to fight racist super-exploitation and against floods. In the past, the bosses have slaughtered thousands in sweatshops and in Obama’s drone attacks.
These are only a few highlights of PLP’s long fight against racism, the ideological foundation of the profit system. The struggle against racism will prepare our class to overthrow capitalism and obliterate exploitation and divisions among workers. It is the watchword of our Party.
