The previous issue of CHALLENGE (3/3) remembered Langston Hughes as a writer sharply critical of Jim Crow segregation during World War II and as a poet for the U.S. working class—particularly Black workers. Now we’ll flash back to the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became an advocate for multiracial, anti-capitalist revolution.  
A tradition of antiracist fightback ran deep in Hughes’s family history. In 1858, his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, married Lewis Leary, an abolitionist who died in John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry. Her second husband, Charles Howard Langston, was an educator and ardent abolitionist.
Hughes’s influences
According to his biographer Arnold Rampersad, young Langston Hughes was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay, along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the antiracist, pro-communist writer and historian. In June 1921, Hughes’ poetry was published for the first time in a professional journal. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” came out in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP.
In September 1921, Hughes moved to New York to attend Columbia University. Not yet ready for college, he withdrew before the year was out. He plunged into Black cosmopolitan New York and met Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, both writers at The Crisis, and the poet Countee Collins. By 1924, after a journey to West Africa and Paris and an extended sojourn in Washington, DC, he’d become a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance. In March 1925, a landmark issue of Survey Graphic, “Harlem:  Mecca of the New Negro” (edited by Alain Locke), contained 10  poems by Hughes, including: “I, too, sing America./I am the darker brother. . . .”  
In 1926, Hughes published his first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, and a famous essay for The Nation (June 23, 1926).  In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes wasn’t yet ready to attack capitalism or embrace the need for militant, collective antiracism. Instead, he argued for the importance of Black identity and called for racial pride: “Why should I want to be white? I am Negro—and beautiful.”
By the late 1920s, when Hughes was enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black institution outside Philadelphia, he was meeting communists as well as Harlem’s cultural leaders.  In December 1926, four of his poems were published in the communist monthly New Masses, though they were nowhere near as politically sharp as his work to come.  
With the Great Depression, beginning in November 1929, communists took leadership positions in major labor unions. They had an explanation for the Depression and a solution for racist inequalities and capitalist exploitation. They called for multiracial unity and revolution.  Hughes was drawn to these ideas in New Masses, and he put his art at the service of revolution.
The Scottsboro Boys
For Hughes and millions of others, a political turning point came on March 25, 1931, when nine young Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white young women in a railroad boxcar in Alabama. The arrest and trial of the Scottsboro Boys galvanized communists and antiracists throughout the world. Eight of the teenagers were quickly tried by the racists and sentenced to death; a mistrial was declared for the ninth because he was underage. The Communist Party USA sent in lawyers to challenge the case. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions; one of the women recanted her accusations and even went on tour to defend the defendants. Yet they languished in jail, many of them for decades.

Hughes responded with a terse four-line poem, “Justice,” for New Masses (July 1931), which accompanied a drawing of a lynching by artist Phil Bard.

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we poor are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once, perhaps, were eyes.

For the November 1931 New Masses, Hughes wrote “Scottsboro, Limited:  A One Act Play.” The cast roster includes “Red Voices,” who counter racist “Mob Voices” and shout out: “We’ll fight! The Communists will fight for you./ not just black—but black and white.” At the end of the play, the “Red Voices” declare: “Rise from the dead, workers, and fight!” For the finale, Hughes directs that “Here the Internationale may be sung and the red flag raised above the heads of the black and white workers together.”
To Hughes and others in the communist movement, the trial of the Scottsboro Boys was both the cutting-edge antiracist fight of the day and a huge opportunity to unite Black and white workers.  For the June 1932 issue of New Masses, Hughes wrote the poem “An Open Letter to the South.”           

White workers of the South:
. . .
I am the black worker.
Listen:
That the land might be ours,
And the mines and the factories and the office towers
At Harlem, Richmond, Gastonia, Atlanta, New Orleans;
That the plants and the roads and the tools of power
  Be ours   
 …
Let us become instead, you and I,
One single hand
That can united rise
To smash the old dead dogmas of the past—To kill the lies of color
That keep the rich enthroned
  . . .
Let us get together, say:
“You are my brother, black or white.
You my sister—now—today!”
  . . .
We did not know that we were brothers.
Now we know!
Out of that brotherhood
Let power grow!
We did not know
That we were strong.
Now we see
In union lies our strength.
 . . .
White worker,
Here is my hand.
Today,
We’re Man to Man.   

Good Morning, Revolution
As Hughes wrote the poem, in the spring of 1932, he was preparing to join a group of 22 writers, journalists, and actors to travel through the Soviet Union. He mailed back from the USSR to New Masses his rousing poem “Good Morning Revolution,” which was excerpted in the last issue of CHALLENGE. After writing a number of commissioned pieces for Soviet journals and a short book, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Hughes returned to the U.S. in the summer of 1933. It was a pivotal period in U.S. politics, when communists played a big role in the fight against rising fascism, both in Europe and inside the U.S.
For the remainder of the 1930s, Hughes continued writing his radical poetry. He also traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War—the topic of our next CHALLENGE article.
The work of Hughes shows that a capitalist understanding of art as being from and for the individual is used to divorce workers from the material world. Hughes is an example that art from and for the working class can advance our fightback. Let’s celebrate Langston Hughes as part of our communist legacy. His antiracist work and writing gave us a model for working-class unity and revolutionary optimism.

Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford, 2002; and Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 3 vols.  Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Meisha Porter, new face of liberal racism
Bad News! Meisha Porter has been appointed as the first Black woman to lead as NYC’s chancellor of the country’s largest public school system, effectively becoming the new face of liberal racism.
While Porter has been promoted as an antiracist Black woman leader, and champion for “equitable schools,” her history proves otherwise.
Three years ago, she was the Superintendent of District 11 in the Bronx. This is the same district where my child previously attended a New York City Public school. This community, composed mainly of working-class Black, Latin, and Caribbean families, has always been terrorized by racist cops and decaying schools. This is also the same neighborhood where racist cop Richard Haste murdered 18-year-old Ramarley Graham for existing while Black.
Three years ago, a white teacher, and known Trump supporter, committed an openly racist act against two Black teachers. During a small after-school training, he made a noose in front of the teachers.
Knowing this teacher wanted to make his racism clear to everyone, the two teachers immediately filed a complaint. The next day, antiracist members from the community distributed a flyer within the neighborhood and in front of the school. The leaflet displayed a photo of the racist teacher and demanded he be fired.
One of the women who was targeted had asked for the racist to be reassigned until an investigation was complete. However, instead of firing the teacher, Porter allowed the racist to continue teaching while she conducted a perfunctory investigation.
To seem as if she addressed the racism, she mandated that school staff attend “anti-bias” trainings. The racist got off scot-free! Although the leaflet from the community was a good start, Porter managed to keep the press away, and pacify any other form of fightback from parents, students, and teachers. To this day, the racist teacher continues to teach at the same school.
There have been many liberal misleaders claiming to fight for “equitable schools” throughout New York City and do nothing but pacify workers and students from fighting back. It came as no surprise that Meisha Porter did nothing to discipline this teacher and set an example for other racists to see.
Black capitalist ideas, promotion of identity politics, and provoking racist division among workers are trending in an era of U.S. capitalism in decline. Porter is part of this latest trend of patriotism, which gets workers to accept U.S. racism as part of “who we are” as long as Black and Latin workers get a seat at the table of rulers and wannabe oppressors.
PLP rejects, not makes amends with, racism. Only communism gives us a vision of how racism can be defeated; we will abolish profit and exploitation, the material basis for racist divisions.
In this public school system, communist presence inside the fight to remove metal detectors is the real good news, not the changing of this boss for that one at the top.
*****
I’m no scientist…I am a communist
I am no scientist. But what I know of climate change I get from the media and what I know to be indisputably true; capitalist society throughout the world is inclined to make profits at all cost. This drive for profits has no regard for the well-being of the planet, let alone the working class who produce all, but do not control the instruments of labor.
I am no scientist. But does it take a scientist to see the effects of Climate Change: the increase in number and intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, winter storms, etc. Can capitalist society with its “coercive law of competition” stem the tide it created?
I am no scientist. But I do know this: when the electricity goes out those who suffer the most are the working class, employed or unemployed. Those who suffer the most are the bearers of the racist attacks who are used to increase the profits of the capitalist class, dividing us into smaller controllable units and weakening our ability to stand together and fight back.
I am no scientist. But when a winter storm recently hit our community and the electricity went out, I made a discovery. The temperature dropped and we endured. Those of us who could relied on bottled water to survive, creek water to flush our toilets, propane stoves to cook. We slept in our winter clothing and waited. Time slowed down as the hours turned to days.
I am no scientist. But it seems to me that if you can land a rover on Mars, you should be able to keep the electricity flowing. What daunts me is where is the profit of a rover on Mars? And yet I know there must be or the investment necessary wouldn’t have been made.
I am no scientist. But I heard and read recently that the infrastructure of electrical cables and grids are in disrepair, that the maintenance of this infrastructure is necessary and costly. The investment has not been made in years. Profits over human lives is the priority.
I am no scientist. But I hope this letter provides some warmth in the knowledge that a day will come when we live in a society where humanity, not profits, is the priority. Long Live Communism! Power to the Working Class!
*****

 In Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy (2020), Ben Macintyre describes the evolution of Ursula Kuczynski, from an incipient revolutionary into a career of one of the most successful Soviet spies before, during, and after World War II.
Time of great conflict & revolution
Between two world wars, fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and Asia. Germany was roiling with street battles between fascists, the German Communist Party, and the Social Democratic Party.
A wide gulf existed between the ultra-rich and everyone else. The Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, was characterized by mass unemployment, economic insecurity, and savage political conflict. In one year alone, 1918-1919, roughly 900,000 Germans died of hunger. In 1920, the Nazi Party was founded. A year later Adolf Hitler became its leader. On January 1, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party but were captured and assassinated by right-wing German army officers, possibly sanctioned by leaders of the anti-communist Social Democratic Party.
In July, 1921 the Chinese Communist Party was organized in Shanghai. In 1927 a leader of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-shek, broke with the communists. In one day, on April 12, 1927, KMT military forces allied with local criminal gangs, killed 5,000 - 10,000 students and workers loyal to the communists.
The capitalist world after World War I, from Europe to Japan, was dominated by militarists, fascist heads of state, and their financial backers, all of whom espoused various forms of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, jingoism, militarism, and imperial conquest.
The critical difference between the 1920s-‘30s in Europe and today was the existence of an international communist movement. The result of the Bolshevik revolution in November, 1917, was that the working class, led by the Bolshevik (communist) Party,, held sway in the largest country in the world. And the Bolshevik’s goal was to create an anti-racist society of equality rather than one based on private property and profit
During the 1920s and early 1930s revolutionary communist movements in Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and China were battling the fascists for state power. The Comintern and the Soviet Union gave material and ideological support to these struggles.
Ursula Kuczynski
Into this political and social cauldron, Ursula Kuczynski was born in 1907 to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. When she was sixteen she was beaten by the police in Berlin during a May Day demonstration, learning a lesson she would never forget: politics is at bottom a power struggle, most often decided by mortal combat.
Ursula Kuczynski was a professional spy who ran agents and networks against the fascists in her own country, in Japanese-occupied China, in Poland, Switzerland, and then, during the Cold War period, in Great Britain. She eventually became a Red Army colonel and, among her other espionage successes, ran Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist who enabled the USSR to get the atomic bomb, thus breaking the American monopoly on atomic weaponry.
After the Second World War she continued to spy for Moscow. Often suspected, she was never caught. In 1943 the Director of Soviet intelligence said this about her: “If we had five Sonyas in England, the war would be over sooner.”
Forever a communist
She died in Germany on July 7, 2000, age ninety-three. Her son, Peter, summed up his mother’s long life this way: “There were two important things to her, her children and the communist cause.”
Urusla Kuczynski was also called Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton, Mrs. Burton, and Ursula Hamburger, but her most enduring name, her spy name, was Sonya.
The book Agent Sonya is fascinating because it contextualizes how from the 1920s to her death nearly eighty years later, a young woman born into a rich family became a radical communist and never relinquished her commitment to fighting fascism and trying to bring a socialist world into being. In February 1950, she chose to live in socialist East Germany rather than England. She believed that, however deeply flawed it was, East Germany was a more humane place than capitalist West Germany, where thanks to the Western Allies Nazi murderers remained in power. Such ideas of lesser-evil politics were a key characteristic of the old communist movement and this weakness led to its failure.
Revolutionary optimism
Even as the GDR was falling apart in 1990, Ursula reaffirmed her basic belief in communist principles. “I have no reason to feel ashamed on moral or ethical grounds.”
Her enemy had always been fascism, and “for that reason I hold my head up high.”
Even as East Germany was about to dissolve, Agent Sonya addressed a huge rally in Berlin telling the crowd not to lose faith: “Go and become part of the Party, work in it, change the future, work as clean socialists! I have courage. I am optimistic because I know it will happen.”
Learning from the victories and mistakes of the old movement, PLP fights directly for communism. We carry with us a revolutionary optimism that reminds us that however dark the current era of class struggle, we have courage because we too know communism is the future.

On  January 15, 2021, Elizam Escobar passed away, a former member of the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña and of the  Progresive Labor Party (PLP).  Elizam was a great cartoonist and artist whose political commitment was expressed through his art work in CHALLENGE during the early 1970s.  They are of lasting value and a tribute to the communist spirit he showed during those years. We have reproduced one of them here (see cartoon).
Unfortunately, Elizam quit PLP and joined the terrorist FALN independence group. He was arrested in 1980 and spent almost 20 years in prison for planning  terrorist acts to gain Puerto Rican independence. After his release he became a well-known art teacher in Puerto Rico.
A friend remembers him this way:
Elizam and I were roommates for a number of years. I still remember us attending the Saturday morning rallies in New York’s Upper West Side, selling CHALLENGE, the PLP  revolutionary communist newspaper. Back then, we were arrested several times. I remember one particular occasion when the New York Police Department police beat the (crap) out of us - they thought that they could beat us into submission, but our fighting communist spirit was greater! We were placed in two separate cells next to one another.
We were trying to keep our spirits lifted so we started to sing from the TOP OF OUR LUNGS protest songs in Spanish and English. This pissed off New York’s “finest” to say the least! We sang “Bella Ciao”, the “International” and “Mírala que Linda viene la revolución obrera que no da ni un paso atrás!” This infuriated the NYPD and they handcuffed us to the cell bars and beat and pepper sprayed us again!
This is the spirit that I remember of Elizam, bold and militant, a true comrade , fighter and communist who was always ready for combat!  Throughout the struggle in our cells we never stopped singing!
Thanks to Elizam, I met Juan Antonio Corretjer, general secretary of the Puerto Rican Socialist League, fraternal organization of PLP. We both joined PLP in 1971.
Elizam was arrested April 4, 1980 for seditious conspiracy as a member of Las Fuerzas Armada de Liberación Nacional (FALN) and sentenced to 68 years in prison. Elizam served 19 years and 6 months in state and federal prisons. In 1999 he and 10 other combatants of the FALN had their sentence commuted and he served an additional five  years on probation in Puerto Rico .
We can still hear on the PLP-LP Elizam singing loud and proud: “Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao,Ciao!”
Long live Communism! La clase obrera no tiene frontera! (The working class has no borders!)