Over 150 marchers — workers and students, white, black, Latino and Iranian — rallied with a banner and brought the message of class struggle, anti-racism, internationalism and revolution to thousands of workers in D.C.
The march ended on a bold note — a Howard University student grabbed the South African Apartheid flag out of the hands of a racist in front of the White House and burned it on the ground.
We began at Malcolm X Park and marched through working-class neighborhoods and commercial areas, ending at the White House to tell the U.S. government that the working class is on the move against capitalism!
PLP distributed over 150 CHALLENGEs and mobilized their friends at Howard University, Stoddert Terrace public housing, and Metro transit, creating a red-led worker-student-community alliance in the fight against racism and for communism.
The pre-march rally had a range of militants who discussed the fight against imperialist war; Obama’s drone murders; the U.S. concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) in Cuba; the struggle for more, bigger, and more militant unions; fighting racist mass incarceration; avenging the murder of over 800 Bangladeshi garment workers; and the need to smash capitalism.
Two highlights were speeches by two Metro workers from the D.C. transit system. She described the sharpening attacks on bus drivers and other transit workers and the growing battle to fight Metro’s racist policies. These including its ban on hiring ex-prisoners, management’s threat to privatize many of the runs on Metro, and their general assault on wages, benefits, and working conditions. She declared that only a militant, anti-racist fight that shuts the system down could make any progress in this struggle.The other Metro worker declared that May Day was critical in unifying the global working class against an increasingly destructive capitalist system headed for war and renewed economic crisis.
The D.C. Labor chorus led the assembled workers in working-class songs like “Solidarity Forever,” a stirring pro-revolutionary version of the spiritual “Soon and Very Soon,” and concluded with singing the Internationale in English, Spanish, and Arabic.
Having built up steam, the marchers burst onto the streets behind the banner (see photo) with chants of “Asian, Latin, Black, and White, Workers of the World, Unite.”
“Whose streets? our streets, What day, May Day”
 “Racism Means, We got to fight back.”
But trouble was brewing. Marchers identified two plainclothes cops who had infiltrated the march. A clash erupted with two arrests of marchers. Boldly defying police orders, the marchers changed their route to occupy a GAP clothing store in solidarity with workers in Bangladesh.
Over 800 were murdered in a factory collapse prompted by the profit-driven bosses in the U.S. and Britain (see page 7). These bosses insist on getting their clothes at the lowest possible “globalized” price, leading to bosses in Bangladesh forcing textile workers back to work even after their building had shown big cracks that would lead to a total collapse and hundreds of deaths.
The cops attacked the marchers, viciously shoving them out of the GAP store, throwing them on the sidewalk, smashing the bullhorn, and arresting one more marcher, who they spirited out the store’s back door. Chanting, “We’ll be back!” the marchers returned their focus to the U.S. imperialist monsters and headed for the White House where they encountered racist scum flying the Confederate flag and the South African Apartheid flag! That’s when that flag was burned. One more arrest was made in this anti-racist confrontation.
Elated at the militant spirit of the day, marchers vowed to return to their workplaces, schools, and communities to continue the struggle against racism and capitalism. Crucial to this is consolidation of our forces into a disciplined revolutionary party, the PLP, that can sharpen these battles and lead toward victory over capitalism.