As the City University of New York (CUNY) community gears up to battle the college bosses — against a new contract demand on professors and staff, and a tuition hike for students — it is important to remember that we hail from a long line of fightback. In 1949, a strike shut down the City College of New York (CCNY) campus in Manhattan for a full week—what the New York Times called “the first general strike at a municipal institution of higher learning” in the U.S. The walkout grew out of a demand that the college administration fire two racist professors. One was guilty of anti-Semitism, the other of imposing racist segregation in a college dormitory.
William Knickerbocker, chairman of the Romance Language department, had withheld honors and advancement from deserving Jewish students and professors. He treated Jewish students contemptuously and made anti-Semitic remarks like, “Hitler was right when he attacked the Jews, but when he began attacking the Poles, that was bad.”
William Davis, an economics professor, was a director of the Army Hall dormitory established for students who were World War II veterans. He set up segregated sections for Black and white vets.
The actions of these two professors enraged the mostly Jewish and Black student population, many of whom had fought Hitler’s racism — over 300 students died — in the war against the Nazis.
The CCNY student body of that era had a militant, left-wing character. Two hundred belonged to the college’s YCL (Young Communist League) chapter. Eight hundred had joined the Students for Wallace club in 1948, backing Henry Wallace’s independent run for president against Democratic Party candidate Harry Truman, known for his Cold War policies against the Soviet Union and his genocidal atom bomb attacks against Japan in World War II. (Since then, the old communist movement’s support for lesser-evil candidates has proven to be a losing strategy.)
In the fall of 1948, 2,000 students sat in at the administration building, demanding the firing of the two racist professors. The following April, the CCNY Student Council voted for a general strike for that demand.
On April 11, 1949, two dozen students — many of them YCL’ers as well as veterans in their Army uniforms — picketed the main building. They carried signs demanding, “Fire Kickerbocker and Davis!” and chanted, “Jim Crow Must Go!” As thousands of students emerged from the subway on Broadway and streamed uphill toward the campus, they were greeted with what might have been the most concise leaflet ever created. Chalked across the width of 137th Street, in eight-foot-high letters, was one word—“STRIKE!”
When the students reached Convent Avenue, across from the main building’s picket line, they stopped and watched, holding their books and trying to decide whether to go to class. Suddenly squads of cops under orders from the college bosses, emerged to attack the picket line. The students fought back but were roughed up and shoved into waiting police vans. Seventeen were arrested.
Witnessing this cop brutality against a peaceful picket line, the students across the street immediately formed a new line, a thousand strong. An anti-racist strike was on. The students cheered as a car drove by with a student holding up the front page of the New York Sun (one of eight daily New York papers at the time) with a headline screaming, “Students Riot At CCNY.” Virtually no one went to class as the campus was shut down. Many in the faculty supported the strike. After it was over, one professor told his students that if they’d attended his class, he would have sent them out to join the walkout.
Davis was removed from his post as director of the Army Hall dorm. Knickerbocker resigned as department chairman, and later retired.
Two decades later, many of the striking students used their militant experience at CCNY in the anti-racist and anti-Vietnam War movements. Today, 66 years after the strike, it would be fitting for the current student and faculty body to call upon this legacy and strike for their demands against the bosses of CUNY and shut it down. It would be even more fitting for them to join Progressive Labor Party and joinf the fight for communist revolution, the only way to destroy the racism that continues to plague the working class.
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30th Annual Anti-Racism Feast: Celebrate Multiracial Fightbacks!
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- 12 December 2015 165 hits
WASHINGTON, DC, November 27 — More than 70 people celebrated the 30th annual “Thanks-For-Fighting Racism Feast,” a marvelous international, militant, youthful and multiracial event. Two carloads of Howard University students and a vanload of Baltimore youth kicked off the dinner. We raised funds to support the struggle against racism in Ferguson and sold dozens of new “No to Racism” buttons bearing the names Freddie Gray and Tyrone West, both killed by kkkops. The feast linked different aspects of the Party’s work — from transit and education to health and fighting police terror — as one movement of women, Black, Latin, youth and immigrant leaders for an egalitarian communist society.
Many worked long hours to make posters on the history of militant struggles in the Baltimore-Washington region. The posters attacked a range of racist crimes under capitalism, from supermacist gangs and police terror to modern eugenics and inadequate health care. These visuals prompted intense discussion.
Four youth from Baltimore spoke about their West Wednesdays rallies against the racist murderers of Tyrone West and a high school walk-out to protest the murder of Freddie Gray. Another high school student addressed the intensifying racism aimed at undocumented workers. A professor from China—sharing the viewpoint of many workers there—called the U.S. Thanksgiving a myth of all-class unity that glossed over the genocide of indigenous people in the New World. He said he was happy to be at a dinner in the U.S. where workers agreed with that idea! His friends are pleased that we are fighting back against racism in the U.S.
A mother whose son, Gary A. Hopkins, Jr., was killed in 1999 by the Prince George’s County cops, was heartened to see so many militant youth and called on them to step up and fight back. Ongoing struggles by the People’s Coalition include the fight against the “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights” and demands for other reforms. The mother noted thatthe problem of police terror went deeper than “a few bad apples.” As long as other cops maintain the Blue Wall of Silence by protecting murderers in their ranks, she said, there are no “good apples.”
Members of Progressive Labor Party presented their work in the American Public Health Association. On World AIDS Day, December 1, the main target was the big drug companies that value huge profits over workers’ lives (see page 3).
A Howard student, invited by a friend, gave a moving spoken word entitled “One.” It addressed the need for unity as one force against racism. Afterward, she said she was excited to be at the dinner and connect with so many people who are fighting back.
A young Metro bus operator campaigning for union office spoke about the bosses’ attacks on transit operators, including cuts in the pension plan, hikes in health care contributions, the racist background check policy, and increased harassment in the new discipline policy. Back in August, he said, the idea of going on strike was not taken seriously by many Metro workers. After four months of organizing, however, workers have been moved closer to striking to gain leverage over the bosses. But as the driver emphasized, striking alone cannot solve the problem of racist, capitalist exploitation. She talked about the need for a disciplined Party to uproot capitalism and plant communism in a society run by and for workers.
As we prepare for another year of battles against racism and its source, the capitalist system, we are optimistic that more workers will be joining the battle. In the coming year, we need connect racism in the U.S. to racism in the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and worldwide by highlighting PLP’s international leadership for the working class. The future remains bright!
In Beersheba, Israel-Palestine, a terrorist attack on 19 October revealed the true nature of Israeli society. An innocent Eritrean migrant named Habtom Weldemicheal Zerhom, who was only in the town to renew his Israeli work visa, was lynched.
Terrorizing civilians is nothing new in Israel-Palestine, and never ends racism and exploitation. Indeed, the founding of the Israeli state involved many such terrorist attacks on unarmed Palestinian civilians by Zionist groups.
As the attack by a young Arab-Israeli unfolded that night, Zerhom and his friend Yohanns Arefayne ran from the bus stop where they waited. Upon entering a nearby building Yohanns turned to find his friend Zerhom was not with him. Zerhom had been shot by a security guard who “mistook” him as a second terrorist, and was dying in the street. As he lay bleeding, he was set upon by an Israeli mob that brutally kicked and beat his lifeless body.
In the “fog of war” terrible accidents happen, but only racism explains why a mob attacks an unarmed black man fleeing from a violent situation along with others.
Consider the following:
The Economist magazine in 2014 noted: “the unemployment rate among Israel’s Arab men is twice that of Jewish men, and rising. Arab women are three times less likely to have a job than Jewish women. Moreover, Jewish men in Israel earn roughly twice as much as their Arab counterparts.”
A 2011 Israeli law legalized segregation within Israeli borders by allowing majority Jewish communities to exclude people it considers “socially unsuitable”.
A 2014 article in the Haaretz newspaper reported: “Arab high-schoolers from a weak socioeconomic background receive 42% less (education) ministry funding than Jewish high-schoolers from a similar background”.
The killing in Gaza and the occupied territories is often posed as Israel fighting for its survival in the face of aggression. What kind of Israeli society is surviving though? A segregated, racist, exploitative country where workers are divided to benefit the wealthy, is not in the interest of Jewish and Arab working class people.
The fact that the Jewish population of Israel is in decline drives the rulers of Israel crazy. Into this racist brew arrives the recent influx of African migrants. Anti-African demonstrations and graffiti have become commonplace, referring to them as “monkeys” and worse. The new arrivals are “ghettoized” and rounded up, as they are in many parts of the world; and are routinely harassed and attacked.
The lynching of Habtom Weldemicheal Zerhom is nothing new in a society that thrives on racist division. Racism can only end when capitalism ends. The only hope for African, Arab, Jewish and other workers is to fight for a society that eliminates violent racial injustice. Fight for communism!
In the wake of the slaughter of workers in Paris, there is no limit to the selective outrage and grief of the capitalist ruling class. The small-scale terrorists of the Islamic State (ISIS) are now targeted for an intensified aerial bombardment by the biggest, most lethal terrorists the world has ever known: the imperialist bosses of the United States and Europe. As imperialist cheerleader Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times, “Saving Paris from the Islamic State will take ruthlessness — but save it we must” (11/21/15).
After barely registering the ISIS bombings that killed more than 40 people in Lebanon the day before, the capitalist media—egged on by shameless U.S. presidential candidates—whipped up a racist frenzy against Muslim, Black and immigrant workers. Donald Trump called for the closure of mosques and a national Muslim registry. Jeb Bush—a “moderate,” mainstream Republican—clamored to close U.S. borders to all Muslim refugees.
The Paris bombings and shootings were a cowardly, despicable attack on unarmed workers. But we must not forget that thousands are murdered by capitalist state terror every day. When the U.S. bosses aren’t bombing hospitals in Afghanistan, they are wiping out whole families with reckless drone strikes. They’re shattering the lives of millions with mass racist incarceration, deportation and unemployment. To divert attention from their own monstrous crimes, the bosses are exploiting fears of ISIS and Al Qaeda to stir anti-Muslim racism and divide workers against one another.
At stake is the immense oil wealth of the Middle East. The imperialists in Russia and China want this cheaply extracted oil for themselves, while U.S. and European capitalists will stop at nothing to secure their control over it.
Racism, sexism and endless imperialist war—this is what capitalism offers the international working class. The Progressive Labor Party organizes in more than 25 countries to smash all racist borders with communist revolution. We call on all workers to stand together, fight back, and refuse to be suckered into the rulers’ global game of divide and conquer!
Fascism: Bosses Discipline for War
Heightened racism and police terror against the working class is one aspect of rising fascism. Another aspect is the move by U.S. and European bosses to discipline their own ranks and sort out disputes among the billionaires. Where will the next big global conflict play out—and who will foot the bill? These questions must be resolved if the bosses hope to get workers to accept a military draft, and to fight and die in the next major ground war.
In the book The Prize, Daniel Yergin shows how control over oil determines the course of capitalist empire. While challenged internationally by rival Russian and Chinese bosses, and domestically by the Koch brothers, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class still dictates the global production and distribution of oil through companies like Citigroup and ExxonMobil. This finance capital wing will stop at nothing to coerce the Koch faction to fall in line—or to smash them, if need be.
In their responses to the Paris attacks, there was little real difference between liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Clinton proposed a no-fly zone over Syria; Rubio, another mainstreamer, pushed for “a substantially increased commitment” of ground forces; Cruz, a Tea Party favorite, clamored for air strikes with more “tolerance for civilian casualties” (New York Times, 11/14/15). All three were calling for a re-escalated U.S. assault in the devastated region, which means a future of yet more death and displacement for millions of workers.
ISIS: Exxon’s Mirror Image
The origins of ISIS trace back to 2003 and the U.S. imperialist-led genocide in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein’s regime fell out with Exxon over oil profits. “Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers” (Washington Post, 4/4/15). This explains ISIS’s military success, as well as its ability to pump oil to fund its own anti-worker atrocities. As Bloomberg News reports, “the terrorist group is actually taking in $500 million from oil a year” (11/19/15).
Beneath its religious façade, the ISIS ideology is all about profits, soaked in workers’ blood. When U.S., French, Russian or Chinese bosses work themselves into a made-for-media rage over ISIS terrorism, they are screaming at their own reflection.
Bosses’ Nightmare: International Working Class Unity
Over the last 50 years, U.S. and allied bosses have been constrained by a history of mass, militant anti-imperialist movements. In 1964, in New York’s Times Square, the Progressive Labor Party led the first U.S. demonstration against the Vietnam War, part of a worldwide anti-imperialist, anti-racist upsurge. This international wave of strikes, rebellions and military mutinies, led mainly by Black workers and soldiers, was so powerful that today’s bosses remain unable—as of yet—to mobilize for a major ground war.
The capitalists’ ruthlessness should not be underestimated, however. Some bosses are banking on another world-altering event like 9/11, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, to rally U.S. workers to war. According to The Economist magazine, another finance capital mouthpiece:
With each attack that [ISIS] unleashes on the West, the [need] to use Western troops against it will grow. In the terrible event of a large strike on American soil, the matter would be settled (11/21/15).
As CHALLENGE went to press, U.S. imperialist ally Turkey shot down a Russian warplane over Syria for allegedly violating Turkish airspace. This incident will spur even greater efforts from bosses on all sides to impose fascism on the working class as they prepare for wider imperialist wars.
For now, the bosses are taking incremental steps toward fascism. In police states like France and Belgium, machine gun-toting cops sweep Arab neighborhoods. In Chicago, the bosses are girding for working-class rebellion after the belated video release of a kkkop murdering Black teen Laquan McDonald. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department is rolling out an “anti-terrorism” Critical Response Command: 527 kkkops with military-grade weapons and armor (New York Times, 11/20/15).
But PLP says: Fight back! The international working class still holds all the cards, including the potential to overthrow the entire murderous capitalist system. In our unions and mass organizations, workers must sharpen the struggle against the bosses’ drive for imperialist war. We must fight the racist and sexist divisions the rulers attempt to force upon us. No capitalist politician or reform can liberate our class. We need a communist movement of millions of workers, students and soldiers to smash imperialism and destroy capitalism forever with communist revolution.
And we need you to help lead this mass movement. Join us!
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French Bosses No Stranger to Terrorism
Massacres of workers must be condemned, be they in Beirut or Paris. But when it comes to terrorizing the working class, ISIS can’t compete with the brutal and racist history of the French imperialists. The French motto of “Liberté, egalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity) rings as hollow as ISIS claims of religious purity. After its defeat in the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the first successful revolt against slavery in history, the French rulers continued to terrorize the world, mainly western and central Africa, out of a “duty to civilize inferior races,” as dictated by French colonial boss Jules Ferry in a parliamentary speech of 1885.
But workers fought back. During World War II, through the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), immigrant and native-born communist workers led the massive resistance to the Nazi occupation. By that point, the international communist movement no longer advocated armed revolution. When the French bosses were returned to power, they showed what they’d learned from their Nazi mentors. Here are just two examples.
On December 1, 1944, white French soldiers received orders to indiscriminately murder African prisoners of war who’d been interned at the Nazis’ notorious Camp Thiaroye in the colony of French West Africa (later Sénégal). The death toll is unknown. More than a thousand of the African soldiers had mutinied when the French bosses refused to pay them as much as white soldiers. Survivors were sentenced by military tribunal to ten years in prison. A 1988 film on the massacre by the late anti-imperialist filmmaker, Ousmene Sembene, was banned in France and couldn’t find distribution until 2005. The French government refused to admit to the crime until 2012. Even today, this shameful history is ignored by schools in both France and Senegal.
On October 17, 1961, Paris became the site of another massacre by the French capitalist rulers. In northern Africa, armed Algerian workers were bringing French imperialists to their knees. Led by former Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, who’d deported more than 1,000 Jews to the death camps during World War II, French government security forces tortured Muslim workers in Paris’s Palais du Sports and slaughtered more than 200 of them, dumping their bodies into the River Seine. French cops also arrested 11,000 workers for demonstrating against Nazi-style identification cards and curfews for “Algerian Muslim workers.”
When the U.S. and French bosses wail about ISIS committing the worst atrocity “on French soil” since World War II, they reveal their contempt for the lives of Arab, Muslim and African workers. The massacres of 1944 and 1961 fail to qualify as “atrocities” in the bosses’ eyes. Nor does the French bosses’ mass deportation of Jewish workers to Nazi death camps during World War II. Nor does the murder of tens of thousands of workers in the imperialist war in Algeria itself. The descendants of those victims are among the more than five million members of today’s Algerian community in France, jammed into apartheid slums surrounding Paris.
These atrocities will end only when the imperialist murderers are wiped off the face of the earth by a communist-led international working class.
