After weeks of militant multiracial fightback led by Black and Latin workers, the APD released body camera footage of the killing. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Atlanta’s killer kkkops, and politicians claim that Tort shot cops first, and thus, “deserved” to die. However, Tort’s family in Panama and friends in Atlanta called it: the police shot each other first and used it as ammunition to shoot at workers occupying the forest and killed Tort with 13 shots in the crossfire.
For the last two years, working-class fighters have occupied the Atlanta forest in protest of what fighters call ‘Cop City,’ a 85-acre $90 million police training facility through an Atlanta forest. Police forces from Atlanta to Israel will learn how to squelch working-class rebellion, especially any fightback led by communist fighters like Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
With bosses in the U.S, China, and Russia ramping up for World War III, and the U.S. bosses sinking deeper into crisis the last thing they need is militant multiracial working class rebellion in the urban centers.
The desperate rulers will need fascism to discipline the working class and will need to build more kkkop cities to keep workers in check as they spend trillions oiling their war machine while workers are pushed into starvation and homelessness. Black liberal mayors across the U.S. are proving they are the best candidates for the job.
Black-led city attacks Black workers
Georgia is a key state in the battle to win workers to pledge allegiance to the U.S. The bosses plan to build Cop City in “South River Forest,” called the Weelaunee Forest, “one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces, a prime example of environmental racism. The forest encompasses a three-hundred-acre, city-owned tract of land that sits in a poor and predominantly Black” part of Atlanta (New Yorker, 8/3/22).
After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, Atlanta workers responded with mass antiracist protest, marching toward and smashing the headquarters of U.S. liberal news media– the CNN building.
Keisha Lance Bottoms— former mayor of Atlanta and now part of the Jim Crow Biden administration—supports Cop City and openly shamed the protestors’ militancy and left her position to make way for liberal misleaders like Mayor Andre Dickens, Senator Reverend Warnock and Stacey Abrams.
“Most of the residents in neighborhoods around the forest are Black and municipal planning has neglected the area for decades. The plans to preserve the forest and make it a historic public amenity were adopted in 2017 as part of Atlanta’s city charter, or constitution. But the Atlanta city council wound up approving the training center anyway…” (The Guardian, 1/23)
The bosses want to ensure that they have a militarized and functioning force to attack the working class. The U.S. ruling class and bosses all over the world want to be prepared for the international uprisings that will spring up in the wake racist police murders.
Liberal politics and police murder
PLP stands with the protests against Cop City. With Cop City now being green-lighted, it is more urgent than ever that PLers connect the struggle to what’s happening locally and internationally. Antiracist leaders are calling protests the week of February 19-26.
For our class to smash racist police terror, workers around the world must commit to building a Party that will organize and shape struggle, galvanize it and focus it, and push for communist revolution.
Loudoun County, VA, February 14—“FIRE KEOLIS” rang out today as about 100 transit workers in ATU Local 689 and their allies took their over-month-long strike to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. Their demand? End the politicians’ deal with Keolis. The workers exposed a gang-up of these “progressive” political leaders with Keolis, the $6 billion French transit company perpetuating a two-tier wage system and cuts to benefits.
The Loudoun politicians, despite their crocodile tears for workers, are proving yet again that the state is a tool of capitalist class domination. By definition, the bosses’ politicians cannot represent workers’ interests. Workers must fight them and the Keolis bosses tooth and nail, defeating them and their entire system with communist revolution.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have played an important role in this strike. We have joined picket lines and brought revolutionary ideas by sharing CHALLENGE newspaper with scores of workers. We protested with workers at the French embassy and mobilized transit workers from other jurisdictions to join the picket lines (see previous strike reports in CHALLENGE, 2/1 and 2/15).
Reject cuts and wage disparity
Today’s action featured a fiery speech by a PLP member, the former president of striking ATU Local 689. He declared, to unanimous cheers, that if the workers’ demands were not met, the workers should initiate a general strike. Such an action, he said, would build on the great 1968 general strike in France that brought the French bosses to their knees and led to big increases in wages and benefits.
Multiracial workers also spoke about the desperate need for significant improvements in their contract in order to survive. The two most pressing concerns are cuts to benefits and unequal wages: one pay scale for the union-represented commuter bus drivers, and one for the non-union local bus drivers. Workers are refusing this division between local and commuter drivers.
Union leaders have begun to take a more militant line—the current Local 689 president declared that he would not be fooled by politicians again and would not support any of them in the next election.
But the International union leaders continue to emphasize relying on Democratic politicians, which ties workers to the capitalist system.
The PLP approach of building a revolutionary party within these front-line battles in the class struggle must replace this self-defeating march to the ballot box.
Strike fever
Why did the workers zero in on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors? These politicians have a contract with bottom-feeding, Nazi-linked Keolis (Atlantic, 3/18/2014) which states that the company would be fined daily for failing to provide service – something Keolis can’t do with a 95 percent effective strike! But the politicians were happy to violate their own contract and not enforce fines against Keolis. The failure of the politicians to punish the French company in this wealthy suburban area has allowed the company to stonewall the striking workers rather than negotiate to meet their demands. As we have seen in countless strikes over the years, politicians will offer aid to their real bosses, the capitalist bosses who own the means of production. Workers may vote but capitalists are the rulers.
Strike action against Keolis has spread beyond Loudoun County. Teamsters local 639 in Prince William County, VA struck Keolis this week and joined today’s rally in solidarity. Keolis was run out of its contract in Las Vegas (thisisreno.com, 2/14), and lost its contract in Raleigh, NC as well. The transit workers in Reno have struck three times against Keolis to try for a decent contract. Strikes, as Lenin said, are schools for war where workers learn to fight against their class enemy, the bosses. Strike fever is growing!
Working-class solidarity
PLP members linked this transit fight to the intense negotiations between Montgomery County teachers (MCEA) with their Board of Education,
sharing flyers from that struggle in Amharic, English and Spanish. PL’ers also brought some well-received posters reflecting the broad importance of the struggle in transit. Transit and transit workers are essential to the bosses’ ability to run society. Even during the beginning of the pandemic, the bosses understood the necessity of keeping transit running.
One of the strikers who spoke carried and waved the sign, “A GOOD CONTRACT = PUBLIC HEALTH.”
Other workers welcomed the sign, “TEACHERS SUPPORT TRANSIT WORKERS.”
Our Party fights for multiracial struggle and internationalism. A transit strike in Loudoun County impacts workers all over the world. We talked with workers about a Senegalese railroad strike in 1947 that lasted 4 months, recounted in God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembene. That story also ends with a speech calling for a general strike in Dakar, Senegal, which linked nicely to the PLP call for a general strike here.
Of course, even a general strike and militant uprisings alone cannot defeat capitalism and racism. We call on workers to channel this militancy into building a revolutionary communist Party to smash this criminal system, and create a society led by workers that guarantees a decent life, without exploitation, for all. As the major imperialist powers build toward world war, workers will be under increasing pressure to sacrifice and produce for the bosses. The workers in Loudoun County are providing the leadership we need to defeat the bosses and build a world run by and for the working class.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were also present to distribute CHALLENGE. Between the presentation and revolutionary communist politics, debates and discussions show that these working class students are more than capable of both analyzing the world and organizing to change it. Workers and students like them can and should run the world—that’s communism, and our fight for that world is expanding!
The struggle spreads and sharpens
To the New Jersey college students in attendance, the first reaction to hearing about the struggle at KCC was disbelief and stunned silence. Upon viewing an improvised skit to illustrate KCC Public Safety’s appalling assault on the student, questions and comments began to pour in with some students sharing how this resonated with their own experiences.
New Jersey students took over from the KCC students in leading the discussion and sharp debates followed. Some students suggested that the police can be reformed through “better training” and “building bridges with the community” through diverse inclusion and representation on the police force. Other students responded that the history of policing itself dates back to racist slave patrols, and an inherently racist system cannot be reformed. The murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black cops is a good example that shows how reforming the police is a dead end.
From Tyre Nichols to the KCC students’ own experiences, Black cops, under a Black police chief and (at KCC) a Black college president have only changed the appearance of capitalist oppression. The underlying essence of increasing brute force, obedience and terror disproportionately targeting Black, Latin and immigrant workers —fascism— is concealed by identity politics pushed by the very same liberal politicians today sending billions of dollars in weapons to the capitalists running Ukraine and Taiwan. Soon enough, they will be sending working class youth here to kill other working class youth in Russia and China, and die for U.S. imperialism.
At places like KCC, however, the capitalists’ bootlicking servants are letting their mask of identity politics slip enough to reveal who they really serve. As our struggle spreads, communists in PLP are organizing to channel working class resistance exemplified by these students into class war against fascism and imperialist war for communism.
‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’
The success of this college event is a political victory and reveals the potential for a mass militant antiracist student movement beyond New Jersey and CUNY. For Kingsborough students and faculty, the opportunity to return to New Jersey and share organizing experiences brought us full-circle: we first came to New Jersey last year to help pack the courts during the antiracist fightback at the Rodwell-Spivey trial.
Student eyewitness reports of the bosses’ legal system threatening Justin Rodwell with over 40 years in prison for trumped-up charges inspired mass growth in KCC’s antiracist club Common Ground in defense of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers. With one of our new student comrades bringing a wealth of fighting experience from the student movement in Haiti, the antiracist movement built last year continued growing and is now leading mass antiracist fightback at KCC.
Racist school administrations in NY/NJ can catch a fire
As the event was closed and to nurture the growing bonds of working class solidarity, students and faculty heard reports from other racist attacks and antiracist struggles and discussed how to link them together. From supporting an antiracist high school teacher recently terminated to supporting student strike organizing at Rutgers, this period of relative student growth means students and faculty have a responsibility to continue building a militant antiracist movement.
Another concluding organizing lesson was the importance of consistently waging antiracist fightback while building a multiracial base with an emphasis on Black student leadership. A New Jersey student commented on the worldwide character of the response to the mass Black worker-led rebellions after George Floyd’s murder. He reasoned that workers around the world are inspired by and look in solidarity to the Black working class for political leadership, to the extent that both Black workers’ culture and resistance are appreciated and emulated worldwide. Black student and worker leadership is key to our multiracial working class movement, and as communist leaders will be the key force in smashing capitalism once and for all.
Smashing borders locally prepares us globally
Back on the KCC students’ side, organizing and traveling to New Jersey also enabled us to bridge the psychological distance between our areas. Even though New York/ New Jersey are part of the same metropolitan area and connected at points by mass transit, many KCC students had neither been to New Jersey nor felt totally comfortable making the trip. The bosses’ media obsession with subway crime sees these divisions.
While not having the same hurdles as crossing the bosses’ borders from Haiti to the Dominican Republic or Mexico to the U.S., students and workers separated by a few miles and a river overcome these barriers and are planning to do it again. From Newark to Brooklyn and New York to Beijing, the struggle continues!
This is part one of a three-part series. This article is a republication and originally appeared in CHALLENGE in February 2021. The history here is worth reprinting, revisiting, and relearning every year.
Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly for Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and organizers made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers.
The 1930s was also the decade when many well-known artists embraced communist ideas in their quest to end the racist inequalities of capitalism. In 1932, Hughes went to the Soviet Union with a group of Black artists and filmmakers to create a film about Black life and racism in the U.S. South (The project was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt recognized the USSR). Later Hughes traveled to Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly newspaper, to cover the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War. This was the period of his most radical poetry, much of it submitted to New Masses, a weekly edited by members of the Communist Party USA (CP). One of his most famous was “Good Morning Revolution,” which Hughes wrote in 1932. It openly calls for a society run by and for the working class. Here are some excerpts:
Good-morning, Revolution:
You’re the very best friend
I ever had
We gonna pal around together from now on.
…
Listen, Revolution,
We’re buddies, see –
Together,
We can take everything:
Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
(Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
All the tools of production,
(Great day in the morning!)
Everything –
And turn ‘em over to the people who work.
Rule and run ‘em for us people who work.
Fighting Jim Crow and police murder
The political ground shifted in the 1940s, as the CP focused less on communist revolution and more on building an anti-fascist united front to defeat Germany in World War II. Black workers and communists advanced the “Double V” goal—victory against the fascists in Europe and victory against segregation at home. In 1942, Hughes was hired by the Chicago Defender, another prominent Black newspaper. His columns attacked the racist abuse of Black soldiers stationed in the South, which Hughes compared to Nazi Germany. In a February 26, 1944 column, Hughes described a Black soldier just returned to the U.S. from fighting overseas. The soldier suffered from “Jim Crow shock, too much discrimination—segregation-fatigue which, to a sensitive Negro, can be just as damaging as days of
heavy air bombardment.” In August 1943, when a Black soldier was shot and wounded by a cop after a fracas at the Braddock Hotel at West 126th Street, the rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. In the ensuing rebellion, stores were looted and property damage was estimated at up to $5 million. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called in and over six hundred people were arrested. (See Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943, Philadelphia: 1977.)
To Hughes, the politics of the incident were clear. In his August 14, 1943, Chicago Defender column addressed to “White Shopkeepers Who Own Stores in Negro Neighborhoods,” Hughes wrote: “The damage to your stores is primarily a protest against the whole rotten system of Jim Crow ghettos, Jim Crow cars, and Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers. But, you say, you are not responsible for those Jim Crow conditions. Why should your windows be broken? They shouldn’t. I am sorry they are. But I can tell you WHY they are broken.” Hughes goes on to cite Black workers’ grievances, from racist unemployment to price gouging and substandard housing. He ends by observing: “I do not believe in mob violence as a solution for social problems. But I do understand what it is that makes many young people in Negro neighborhoods an easy prey to that desperate desire born of frustration—to which you contribute—to hurl a brick through a window.”
In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes included the poem “Harlem,” which expresses visceral sensations of pent-up rage:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore----
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over ----
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Writing and Fighting anti-communist opppression
In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalist rulers vied for world supremacy against the socialist Soviet Union, the bosses’ federal government led the charge to investigate and harass members of the Communist Party USA. In January 1949, twelve CPUSA leaders, including Black New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr., went on trial for violating the Smith Act by “advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Though Hughes never officially joined the CPUSA, his communist sympathies were clear. The FBI placed him under surveillance. Writing in the Chicago Defender, February 5, 1949, he declared that the trial was
the most important thing happening in America today . . . because it is your trial—all who question the status quo—who question things as they are—all poor people, Negroes, Jews, un-white Americans, un-rich Americans are on trial. . . . They are being tried because they say it is wrong for anybody—Mexicans, Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Armenians—to be segregated in America; because they say it is wrong for anybody to make millions of dollars from any business while the workers in that business do not make enough to save a few hundred dollars to live on when they get old and broken down and unable to work anymore; they are being tried because they do not believe in wars that kill millions of young men and make millions of dollars for those who already have millions of dollars; they are being tried because they believe it is better in peace time to build schools, hospitals, and public power projects than to build warplanes and battleships.
By the 1950s, the bosses’ blacklisting and FBI harassment led many communists and leftists to retreat from open activism. But Hughes kept writing for the Chicago Defender until 1962. His bold and lyrical poetry, notably the two poems of One-Way Ticket (1951) that address lynchings in the South, live on as an inspiration to all who struggle against racism and for the international working class.
Through our intense involvement in the movement against racist police violence in Southern California, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have met family after family whose loved ones were taken from them by these animals who wear uniforms, serve the capitalist class and protect their profits.
These continuing murders (at least three more workers’ lives were stolen by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in the first two weeks of 2023) have only hardened our belief that no reform or lawsuit can stop the hemorrhaging of the blood of our class by the cops. Only the violent take-down of the capitalists and their government and the establishment of communist working-class rule can put an end to this slaughter. Gradually, more family members are coming to agree with our politics.
An integral part of capitalist infrastructure here, METRO is the largest landowner in Los Angeles County (act-la.org/). Its 2022-2023 budget is $8.8 billion, with a 12.5 percent increase in spending for “public safety”, i.e. cops, fare inspectors, etc. (LA Metro, 5/25/22). It has a $786 million multi-year contract with the LAPD, LASD (sheriff's department) and Long Beach cops. Its Board of Directors is dominated by Democratic Party politicians, including LA Mayor Karen Bass, four current or former LA County Supervisors, and Inglewood Mayor James Butts. METRO, a supposed paragon of public service, enforces systemic racism. “Despite making up only 18 percent of riders, Black riders have been issued 50 percent of citations and arrests by METRO’s contracted” KKKops (act-la.org/metro-as-a-sanctuary).
Racist cop terror and lies stir working class anger
Like many other families in the LA area, Cesar’s family, including his mother and three sisters, has waged a heroic campaign publicizing their son and brother’s murder and fighting for justice. This organizing ensured that, during jury selection and every day of the two-week trial, jurors saw a multi-racial group of supporters sitting in the courtroom, including other victimized families, PLP members and local organizers. Day after day, family members thanked PLP members for our unswerving commitment to all the families’ struggles.
Many supporters of Cesar’s family understand that capitalism is at the root of racist cop terror and murder. Ron was never charged with any crime during the administration of former Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna, who was recently elected Sheriff of LA County. In fact, he was promoted to Sergeant. As one of Cesar’s sisters said to the Telegraph Newspaper “No amount of money is going to bring Cesar back … This is not justice for us. It would be for (Ron) to be in jail.” By definition, the capitalist court system cannot stop the carnage reaped by a police force that the ruling class needs in order to stay in power.
With one exception, all of the witnesses for Ron were cops or wanna-be “fare inspector” cops.
Their racism was palpable - their lies vicious. In response to a question from the family’s lawyer, the inspector who pulled Cesar off the train said he appeared “not normal” and “dirty.”
Several cop witnesses claimed Cesar tried to escape and in doing so lunged towards the oncoming train. One other defense witness actually told the ludicrous story that Cesar tried to run across the tracks in front of the train and Ron tried to grab and save him!
Courts serve the bosses’ interests, not ours
After the jury rendered its negligence verdict against Ron and left the courtroom, along with the judge, court supporters got a lesson in which class the courts actually serve. Cesar’s mother collapsed, weeping. Within two minutes, a dozen LA County Sheriff’s officers invaded the courtroom.
The cops claimed they were there to render medical treatment to Cesar’s mother, an out and out lie since none of them was a medical person. Ron had apparently complained to one of the Court Clerks that he felt harassed or threatened. So the Clerk put in a call, and Ron’s fellow pigs came to his rescue. In the face of these fascist tactics by the cops, the mainly female supporters of the family stuck together and told the cops to their faces that their help was not needed or wanted. As the Sheriffs backed off, the supporters escorted family members out of the courtroom.
A positive sign was the obvious effect that years of struggle against racist police violence in the streets has had on public perceptions of the cops. In pre-trial questions designed to elicit “bias” of the 50 person jury pool, person after person related negative interactions with cops, either personal or involving a family member or friend. There was much refusal to trust police testimony, and a desire to award the family monetary damages, even if the cop was found not responsible for Cesar’s death. One prospective juror said he could not be unbiased because the role of the police is as an arm of a government responsible for systematic oppression. Because of this wide-spread anti-cop sentiment, defense attorneys ran out of challenges to the jury makeup and were unable to keep off all of those who criticized the cops.
Only communism will end racism
Despite the jury’s $12.6 million verdict, it may be a long time before the family sees any of that money, if at all. Cop Ron’s attorneys will no doubt appeal. This battle has already gone on for five and a half years. However, the family will keep up the struggle. One of his sisters said that the cops’ lies about Cesar have just made her want to fight back harder. At the post-trial party celebrating this small taste of justice for the family, a PLP member pointed out that “our class still suffers daily at the hands of these attack dogs for the ruling class and only a communist revolution can change that.” We in PLP pledge an unending battle to bring that world about.
