Carolyn, antiracist & communist till the end

Carolyn Eubanks, longtime Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member, died in her home in the Bronx at the age of 80. Despite her advanced age, Carolyn was brimming with life. A tireless antiracist fighter and communist leader till the end, Carolyn spent the last week of her life volunteering at La Morada’s mutual aid soup kitchen,  showing up at the courthouse to support the family of Raymond Chaluisant, a  young worker murdered by a NYC  corrections kkkop, and attending a political event at the CUNY graduate center.
Antiracist upbringing
Born in North Carolina to a working-class family who  worked in a local company mill , Carolyn often credited her upbringing with setting her on the path to becoming a communist. Despite growing up in a racist Southern town during the Jim Crow era, her parents instilled in her antiracist working class values. Racist language was banned in their home. She witnessed capitalist oppression firsthand–the differential treatment given to the children of workers and bosses in the mills in school and in the town. Carolyn’s mother insisted she learn arithmetic to calculate her wages correctly, because the mill bosses could not be trusted.
In 1958 when the Soviet Union Launched Sputnik the U.S. bosses passed the National Defense Education Act which sent thousands of young people, including Carolyn,  to college on scholarships to study math and science. Carolyn always credited the Soviet Union for her college education and her route out of the company town. After graduating from the University of North Carolina she joined the Peace Corps, spending two years in the Philippines, where she saw the effects of imperialism and the ways large U.S. multinational corporations exploited workers around the world.
Joining the Party and facing the KKKops
 Carolyn met PLP when she was in New York studying at Union Theological Seminary. She was immediately won over to the Party’s idea of smashing capitalism and building a communist world and joined the Party. In the summer of 1979, Carolyn joined a PLP summer project in Tupelo, Mississippi which the KKK had declared would be their headquarters. Along with over 40 other protestors, Carolyn participated in an antiracist, multiracial march straight through Tupelo’s town center. When the march entered the town square a racist, abetted by the KKKiller Kops, fired a shotgun into the crowd and hit Carolyn with buckshot. When a second march was organized just three weeks later, Carolyn boldly marched in the first row alongside her Black and white comrades.
Organizing Black students from Houston to NYC
Carolyn taught for many years at Worthing High School, an all-Black school in the segregated part of Houston. Carolyn attended football games with her students, organized trips and socials, and led fightbacks against the racist conditions. She helped to organize a march in Houston commemorating the 1917 rebellion of Black soldiers who fought back against their racist abuse by white officers (see the book Night of Violence by Robert Hayes). She brought students and their parents to May Day demonstrations every year. She loved to host Game Nights at her apartment, where she made her famous chili. After many years teaching in Houston, Carolyn was attacked for being a communist. The death threats were real and constant. Carolyn slept with a loaded gun under her pillow but never wavered in her fightback.
After moving back to NYC, Carolyn taught math at John F. Kennedy High School, in the Bronx for twenty-five years. She helped students organize a sit-down protest when school security physically attacked several children. She also organized students, teachers and parents to fight back against cutbacks and the use of metal detectors.
Between 2005 and 2018 Carolyn made several trips to Israel-Palestine. Alongside comrades and workers in Israel and Palestine she helped organize against the fascist apartheid state, while raising internationalist communist politics. Her work united college students, medical workers, and educators in New York City and Israel-Palestine.She built close ties with workers living there, winning several of them to join the Party. In her 2018 trip, a group of students she inspired invited her to spend the day with them at a political camp they put together for Palestinian children. In New York, Carolyn was active in the international working group of PLP and once traveled with her comrade to Dallas to participate in a One State in Israel/Palestine conference, where she and a comrade insisted that the conference’s demand was insufficient if the state remained capitalist.
Bringing communism to the congregation
For years Carolyn was an active and beloved member of St Mary's, an integrated social justice church in Harlem She participated in Sunday morning services injecting communist politics into discussions of "grounds for hope," while sharing coffee. She was a mainstay in the food distribution program and, most importantly, she was a vital leader in the church’s justice and peace organizing. Through the Congregations for Justice and Peace, Carolyn, alongside comrades and friends, fought against Columbia University’s racist displacement agenda, organized to restore the community health clinic, and demonstrated against racist police terror.
Carolyn helped lead the fight against racist cop terror in the Bronx for more than 30 years. In the 90’s, she joined forces with the Baez, Vega, Zarate, and Rosario families - all whose children were murdered by the New York Police Department. She helped build Parents Against Police Brutality (PAPB), which was one of the country’s first family-led organizations, specifically assembled to unite the families of countless Black and Latin workers murdered by the NYPD.This organizing culminated with Carolyn helping to organize and lead the very first open and PLP-led march against the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999. Her commitment to the victims’ families was an example for all as she continued to lead and organize against the murder of Ramarley Graham and Shantell Davis.
A fighter til the end
During the last year of her life, she played an important role in helping to lead  PLP’s most recent struggle against the murder of Raymond Chaluisant, organizing several rallies in his neighborhood supporting his family, and attending almost every one of kkkiller cop Dion Middleton’s court appearances. Carolyn always made a point of building relationships with the families of these victims, while struggling with them and all workers and students involved, to understand that only a communist revolution will bring an end to racist cop killings.
Bella Ciao, Carolyn
Carolyn left an indelible mark on comrades, friends, and all those who knew her.  She devoted her life time  to serving the working class.We can honor her legacy by living each day as she did—with love and concern for the working class. In Carolyn’s memory: Let’s fight for a better world, let's fight for communism!