Summer Project: ‘Committed to fighting this racist system’

This summer project centered around two major events: 1) a march in protest of the murder of Shantel Davis by police detective Phil Atkins in 2012 and 2) the imprisonment of Justin Rodwell and the legal attacks on him and his brothers for resisting police terror. These two struggles encapsulated what the party is all about and were an opportunity to demonstrate our politics in practice to everyone at the SP.
The march was a powerful experience; it connected the murder of Kyam Livingston to Alex Flores (LA) to Shantel Davis. Families of all three spoke about losing their loved ones is something no one should ever have to experience. But under capitalism these racist killings are the order of the day. We took the streets! It was a show of resistance against the bosses and their enforcers and also an unapologetic expression of the party’s politics. Many gave speeches about how we need to unite to fight this capitalist system that creates these police who kill us. This had a profound effect not only on the PL’ers and friends present but also on the workers who marched, chanted, and raised their fists with us.

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Justice for Adam Toledo: SMASH RACIST STATE TERROR

CHICAGO, April 13—Antiracist mass struggle is heating up across the city in the wake of the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) racist murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) called for communist revolution as the solution to racist state terror that is essential to capitalism (see box).
Adam was a student and resident of Little Village, a west side neighborhood that is a majority home to Latin workers.

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Smash anti-Asian racism with multiracial unity

BAY AREA, April 9—The nearly 3,800 violent assaults on Asian workers in the U.S. in the past year, focused on women and the elderly (San Jose Mercury News 3,26), are intolerable racist and sexist attacks on the working class. Only multiracial unity of Black, Latin, indigenous, white, and Asian workers can stand to defeat the racism that is endemic to the profit system.

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To end police terror, revolt!

ANNAPOLIS, MD—Chants and demands rang out in Maryland’s state capital as over 150 protesters, with support from 90 mass organizations, marched on the Annapolis statehouse. The collective of the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Police Accountability had high hopes that a bill repealing the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBR) would finally pass but as is the case with many reform struggles, these hopes came crashing down as multiple amendments obliterated demands. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the voices calling out the legislative betrayal of the working class and chanted: “only communist revolution will break our chains.” We can’t reform away racism that’s integral to this profit system’s survival.
PLP has been working with the coalition to end racist police terror and murder for years now. Several PLP members who also work with Community Justice in Prince George’s County and the West Wednesday Coalition in Baltimore attended the march, distributing copies of CHALLENGE.
Our message to workers: ending police terror and murder requires a revolutionary overthrow of the whole damn system—appealing to the legislature will never free the working class. Pandering politicians represent and manage this racist capitalist system.

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Red presence matters: Brooklyn teachers go extra mile with antiracist commuter plan

BROOKLYN, March 29—In early March the bosses’ media finally reported a year-old wave of anti-Asian violence in a serious way and the antiracist reflexes of dedicated staff at the mostly-Asian Brooklyn Technical High School sprang into action.
The school's equity team organized a schoolwide response which included devoting time in all classes to solidarity lessons and setting up travel groups from Chinese immigrant neighborhoods to the school.  
Then came the horrific Atlanta shootings targeting young Asian women. Asian students shared stories of families afraid to leave the house. The week’s lessons and a town hall organized by the sophomore class took on increased urgency. In a promising sign of potential class-consciousness most students who spoke up have resisted the twin poisonous ideas of anti-Black racism (since some attacks on Asian workers have been carried out by Black workers or youth) and reliance on the heightened police protection as a source of safety. 

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Black and Red Celebration

PLP and friends gathered virtually for our annual
Black and Red Celebration, giving tribute to the leadership
of Black communists. CHALLENGE readers are invited
to view the event by clicking here.

1930s: Langston Hughes, major poet of the communist movement

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.

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