Black workers key to communism

CHICAGO, February 26 – Around 50 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends gathered on the city’s south side today to celebrate our fifth annual Black and Red event. The multiracial, multi-generational and international crowd in attendance engaged in an interactive program that highlighted the invaluable leadership and contributions of Black communists in past, present, and future revolutionary struggles.
Our local collective began organizing this event five years ago as a response to the many anti-communist distortions and outright lies by the bosses that falsely claim communism to be a political movement limited to white workers. The truth is that Black workers have always given key leadership to the fight for communist revolution, correctly understanding it as the only force to destroy the racism, sexism, and exploitation inherent in the capitalist profit system.

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Part 10: Black communists in Spanish Civil War Crawford: ‘I fought fascism with bullets’

If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism, the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, Crawford Morgan.

Crawford Morgan was born in 1910 in Rockingham, North Carolina. After high school, he became an apprentice printer. He moved first to Norfolk Virginia, then to New York City. During the Depression, he became involved in organizations of the unemployed in New York City and was arrested in a demonstration at the Home Relief Bureau.
Morgan joined the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1932. The YCL was the vibrant youth wing of the Communist Party, which he joined four years later. Despite anticommunist lies in the bosses’ media, communism was held in high regard among masses of Black working women, men, and youth.

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Part 9 of Black communists in Spanish Civil War: Milton connects Scottsboro struggle to Spain

Milton Herndon was born on March 10, 1908, in Wyoming, Ohio to Paul Herndon, a coal miner, and Harriet Herndon, a maid. After completing two years of high school Herndon went to work as a steelworker. He also served 18 months in the National Guard. Herndon exemplified the internationalism of the communist movement and the importance of Black workers leading the class struggle, not just against the U.S, capitalists, but for the international working class.
He joined the Communist Party in 1934 and became an organizer in Chicago. In July, 1934, Herndon wrote of the struggles of the Black, single, jobless workers of Harlem in the magazine Hunger Fighter, published by the Communist-led United Action Conference on Work, Relief, and Unemployment (price 3 cents). Other articles exposed Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia’s cops who clubbed and jailed demonstrators on May 26, 1934.
On September 1, 1934, Herndon was arrested with three other Black and white workers while picketing the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue and 125thStreet, in Harlem. The demonstration was organized by the Young Liberators Club of Harlem, a Communist-led group. They protested the refusal of Empire Cafeteria’s bosses to hire Black workers in any other job except porter.

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Black women key to class struggle & revolution

CHICAGO, February 20—A Progressive Labor Party study group about sexism led to a mass anti-sexist action of supporting nursing home workers on strike. Both study and action affirmed the line that Black women leadership is key to communist revolution.
To create a fighting communist Party, theory needs to lead to practice, and that practice needs to influence future theory. Comrades and friends here have been holding a study group about the roots of sexism and the history of struggle against it. Our goal is to win more workers to the truth that capitalism has no solution for sexism and exploitation. Only mass international communist revolution can abolish the inequality that class society creates between women and men.   

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