This coming October 17 marks the 163nd anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry. A multiracial group of abolitionists led by John Brown wanted to spark an uprising against slavery that would spread throughout the South. It was a revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle! The fight against racist terror continues with the rebellions sparked by police murders this summer. As workers recognize the power of unity, the cops crack down harder on protests.

The Southern enslaving class was terrified by the Harpers Ferry raiders’ militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:

I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter.

From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery
This trust among white and Black fighters did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted 
on him, influencing Brown forever.
 He believed Black and white workers were completely equal. He put 
this knowledge into action daily.

As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y., near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).

Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, reaching out to Black abolitionists and former enslaved workers.

Tubman single-handedly freed 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her “owner” tried selling her as “damaged goods.” Instead she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.

Over the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, “I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.” Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as “General Tubman.” Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.

Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harpers Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.

Black rebels petrified enslavers
To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. The enslavers, although talking of “docile” Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of “outside agitators.” They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved work- ers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.

Today the “outside agitators” are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, Black nationalists and sellout union “leaders” to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?

Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the “natural” segregation capitalist society promotes. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.

Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradictions. Workers still often live in neighbor- hoods separated by “race” but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul “versus” country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.

Class struggle trumps racism
As in Tubman and Brown’s time, racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multiracial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latin workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to rehire all the fired immigrant workers!

In 2008 in the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers went on strike for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP had organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure. The fight against police brutality is a protracted class war still being waged today. It is the same war left unfinished by Tubman and Brown. This summer PLP joined the militant anti- racist fightback against the kkkops, who in less than a year’s time, stole the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake, and countless others. The multiracial character of these protests are glimmers of the revolutionary potential of the working class.

John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach us many lessons that are valuable to antiracists today. First, militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nation-wide.

The second is that multiracial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, Black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed word to their friends and helped harbor fugitive slaves.

PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multiracial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant antiracist demonstrations, build a multiracial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery porters did against slavery—taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.

Join Progressive Labor Party
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party. Today’s supporters of antiracist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 161 years ago — that revolutionaries, like the raiders then and PLP now, are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multiracial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.