1978 Oxnard: Beat Back The Klan

From the 1970s to the current day, Progressive Labor Party has organized hundreds of attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and neo-nazis wherever they spread their racist garbage. Rejecting the pacifist mythology that these gutter racists would fade away if ignored, we have attacked them head-on—and confronted the capitalists’ cops who protect them. We have mounted these antiracist, multiracial actions in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Detroit and St. Louis. We’ve done the same in smaller communities like Tupelo, Mississippi; Scotland, Connecticut; Jamesburg and Morristown, New Jersey; and scores of cities and towns in California. We invaded the Nazis’ headquarters in Chicago. We beat a white supremacist leader in a Boston television interview. These militant anti-KKK/Nazi actions have involved an estimated 100,000 or more workers and youth.

The following is from an undergraduate college student who contacted the Progressive Labor Party for information about PLP and a PLP-led mass organization Committee Against Racism fighting the Ku Klux Klan in Oxnard, CA in 1978. He went on to write his dissertation, The Battle of Oxnard: How Oxnard’s Working Class Defeated the Klan, on this event. It has been lightly edited for subheadings and clarity.

In my paper The Battle of Oxnard, I wrote of how the Klan tried to organize in Oxnard, and how they were kicked out of the city. With a bold, militant, and well-organized protest led by the Progressive Labor Party, working-class Oxnarders and PLP organizers completely decimated any chance that the Klan could organize in Oxnard ever again.

The Klan was in a renaissance nationwide since the deindustrialization and other economic issues of the “stagflation” era was creating fertile ground for working class whites to be pitted against fellow workers. One of these new Klansmen was Tom Metzger, a John Birch Society chapter leader and native of the San Diego area who used the White Power network to lead a California organization of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK). Metzger began his efforts at Camp Pendleton in 1976. In California, Klansmen like Tom Metzger and David Duke tried to pit white workers against immigrant workers, forming a mostly performative (though it still caused fear for some people trying to cross) border patrol.

PLP organizes to smash Klan
On July 30, 1978, at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center (OPAC), the Klan was allowed, after facing performative protest at the city hall , to host a showing of The Birth of a Nation. Just days before the event, the PLP was hosting a convention for the Committee Against Racism organization in Los Angeles. When PLP and CAR members learned of the Klan’s event, scheduled conventional plans were scrapped and everyone worked on a plan to shut down the event. The PLP and CAR were met receptively, as Oxnard’s working class had a rebellious working-class culture from a generation of strikes, riots, the Chicano movement, and labor struggle that often led to fighting Sheriff's deputies. PLP and CAR members canvassed the neighborhood near the OPAC to rally workers. PLP and CAR members planned along military-like lines, with organizers waiting, divided into units waiting in the nearby park for the Klan’s truck to show up. The Klan planned this and tried to rush into the OPAC’s courtyard, where they were rushed by organizers with wooden sticks, newspaper-wrapped pipes and other weapons. They also fought cops stationed as guards. After janitors helped PLP members retreat from the courtyard, the main show began, with hundreds of protestors showing up, and a smaller NAACP-led march showing up as well.

Klan gets a beatdown at the hands of communists
PLP and CAR fighters, along with numerous community members, shattered windows with wood, bricks, and full soda cans, all while an effigy of a hanged Klansman was burned. The crowd of thousands fought police summoned from across the County to stop the demonstration, throwing bricks, sticks, pipes, and soda cans, with many running to garages to get baseball bats. At this point, the police negotiated with the Klan, who were told they could no longer show the movie, though Metzger claimed they “sat back” and watched the movie. The police then bull-rushed the crowd, with around a dozen organizers and protestors arrested, though many more were taken into the homes of sympathetic neighbors who hid them in garages and closets from the police, or even pretended they were at a high-school reunion in a backyard to avoid arrest. The Klansmen sped away from the OPAC, and with that the Klan has never tried to organize in Oxnard again, owing to the militancy of Oxnard’s community, led by the PLP into battle.

KKKops and Kourts go after antiracists
Many protestors and organizers faced years of jail time and lengthy trials, with some serving time. One PLP member, Stephen P. Bisson, faced the wrath of the L.A. County D.A. who introduced many pieces of evidence based on other marches, all on an anti-communist crusade explicitly designed to take down the PLP “fanatics.” In Oxnard, the PLP and CAR had a prime moment that wasn’t used to its potential. CAR had several recruits and started study groups with farm workers. CAR members were enthusiastically greeted by people on the streets because of how successful the militant protest was.

Unfortunately, this was not sustained long-term. This was mainly because of needing to travel between LA and Oxnard, but also overstepping. Many of the criticisms CHALLENGE lobbed against Cesar Chavez were correct but misplaced. It’s correct that Cesar Chavez’s stance on undocumented workers is chauvinistic and divisive, but to immediately lob criticisms at UFW locals when they had just arrived in Oxnard and had not yet led people in strikes was clearly overstepping the place as a new fraction in the union. Winning the trust of workers takes patience.

More positively though, the Oxnard protest emboldened CAR and PLP members to launch into anti-Klan and anti-Nazi protests across the state from 1978 and well into the 1980s with several successes.
One success is that because of these events, Oxnarders don’t fear the Klan in their streets.

CHALLENGE response: This struggle at Oxnard is a testament of the power of the working class and our need for multiracial unity. A few notes:

Cesar Chavez was a racist capitalist agent, and the PLP correctly attacked him for it.

Next, CAR grew into the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) and  many workers saw—from Oxnard, CA to Tupelo, MS to Boston, MA— InCAR as the main mass organization that can lead workers in the fight against racism and the resurgence of  fascist groups like the Klan. InCAR was eventually disbanded when PLP’s strategy changed from creating organizations to joining mass organizations (unions, community groups, associations) and recruiting workers to directly fight for communist revolution. This grew out of the assertion that we have confidence in workers to understand and adopt the most advanced ideas as their own.

Militant antiracism is one of our pillars, and Oxnard was one example of that commitment. For more, go to www.plp.org to read, “PLP History: Anti-Racism At Forefront Of Communist Fightback.”