Letters of May 6

When Auto Workers Fought Racist Police Terror
On April 17, 2015, the New York Times ran a front-page story on the racist police murder of 10-year-old Clifford Glover in Queens, NY. Clifford was walking to work with his Dad on a Sunday morning. His Dad had just been paid the day before and had a lot of cash in his pocket. An unmarked police car pulled over and a plainclothes cop got out and told them to stop. Fearing they were being robbed, they ran and cop Thomas Shea shot Clifford in the back, saying the five-foot tall, 100-pound 10-year-old fit the description of a robbery suspect. He also said Clifford turned toward Shea and pointed a gun at him. Clifford never turned, never had a gun and was shot in the back. This was in 1973. Sound familiar?
At the time, I was working at the Ford Assembly Plant in Mahwah, NJ. Our small PLP club had a regular CHALLENGE readership among our co-workers and 1973 was a contract year. We were trying to organize for more militant action against Ford and the UAW union leadership since Ford had us working tons of overtime in order to build up a huge stockpile of cars so they could sit out any possible strike. There was a Black caucus in the plant, loosely tied to DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. They were trying to address racism in the UAW, hoping to elect more Black union officers (there was only one at the time).
Then the NYPD murdered Clifford Glover. We brought that issue to the factory floor. We distributed a flier about the racist murder and circulated a petition, demanding that our UAW local union take a public stand against the police and in support of the family, and demanding that Shea be indicted for murder. The workers’ response was electric. It far surpassed their response to all the contract and “bread-and-butter” issues we’d been organizing around.
We literally circulated the petition on the Ford assembly line. We placed the petition in the frame of the car and as it went down the line, workers would take off their work gloves, sign the petition, and send it to the next person. We did this in a few departments. Even among those workers who didn’t sign, no one ratted us out to the bosses. (Or if they did, it was after the fact.) In a couple of hours we’d collected over 350 signatures. The mood of the workers and our relationship to them had made a qualitative change for the good.
The May union meeting had an overflow crowd as the union leadership, the Black caucus and PLP mobilized our respective bases to attend, each group either advancing or sabotaging the fight against racist police terror. The union leadership was outnumbered but had more of a plan and maneuvered to successfully adjourn the meeting with no action taken. We had no Plan B to take over the meeting after it was adjourned, to plan action with the workers who were there. But rather than being dejected and cynical, the workers were even angrier.
The struggle in the plant accelerated. PLP members were targeted. I was suspended for three days for having CHALLENGE and PLP literature in my locker. But by early June, when the temperatures exceeded 100 degrees in the plant, we were able to lead a wildcat strike that shut down Ford for a week. This was big news, and it helped our comrades in Detroit to organize the Mack Ave sit-down strike against Chrysler just two months later. Workers seized the plant, the first such auto strike in nearly 40 years.
There’s a lot to be learned from these struggles, positive and not so positive, but mainly that we have to take the fight against racist police terror to our shop floors and inside our unions. The fight over the racist murder of Clifford Glover helped workers to see things more clearly. Many of them knew it could have been them and their children. And that raised political consciousness, making them more willing to take bold action against Ford and the union misleadership.
Bringing the fight against racism and police terror to our jobs and unions will help steel us, help build a mass PLP and make us a Party worthy of leading the working class to power.
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Ayotzinapa: Your Struggle is Our Struggle
On March 25, Lili, a new member of our PLP club here in Chicago, received a text that a caravan from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico would be here April 3—6. Very little to none was mentioned in the Latin and English media. Two other caravans were already hitting the Pacific and East coasts the earlier part of March. These three caravans, representing students friends and family members of the 43 Normalistas (students attending the teachers college) who were attacked and disappeared on September 26—27, were coming to cities throughout the U.S. and ending in Washington, DC.
The purpose of the Caravana 43 was to expose the lies of the Mexican government and to seek political support from workers in the U.S. and finally from president Obama himself. Obama is no friend of these families. Only the international working class can show solidarity with workers in Mexico.
The 43 young men attended college in Ayotzinapa to become teachers with the sole purpose of going back to teach the kids in the towns they came from. The students were on their way to the town of Iguala, Guerrero to raise funds for their college when armed military local, state and federal cops stopped their bus. Six students were killed and some injured — two of whom are still in a coma. One student had his face cut off!
The story is that the 43 students were handed over to a drug gang in Guerrero, Mexico. There are still rumors that the 43 disappeared students were killed and their bodies burned, or that the students are still alive and are being used to pick crops somewhere in the mountain region.
The Caravana 43 committee, made up of several lefty community organizations and four Roman Catholic Churches in the Spanish-speaking communities, organized the activities here. The first one began with a folk dance until the visitors’ arrival at the plaza. A student visitor Beto spoke. He survived the attacks back in September. He and the two other visitors, Esperanza and Lolo, were taken to a nearby restaurant to be interviewed by a local TV station. Esperanza is the mother of one of the 43 disappeared students. Lolo is a teacher and uncle of one of the 43 students.
On Saturday, April 4, a rally was held in front of one church. It was here that I gave a DESAFIO, CHALLENGE’s Spanish counterpart, to the three visitors. We then marched through the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago.
We chanted, “Alive you took them. Alive we want them back.” A comrade and I took turns distributing 120 CHALLENGEs and holding two posters (see photo). The posters (the Spanish versions) read “Brothers/Sisters — your sadness is our sadness, your anger is our anger, your struggle is 100 percent our struggle. Fight for Communism” and “From May Day to Ferguson, MO. to Ayotzinapa: Fight to Destroy Capitalism.” Esperanza, Lolo, and Beto marched with a contingent of nearly 100.
At the community forum, Esperanza spoke first. She and her family are poor farm workers, as are the rest of the Ayotzinapa families. She spoke of watching a TV soap opera at the time her son and others were attacked. “Never in my wildest imagination would I have thought of such a horrific thing happening to my son. And me, [I was] watching a soap opera. Can you imagine that?!”
The mothers are no longer watching soap operas. They are in the thick of the struggle giving leadership to find their loved ones. One of the slogans of the Ayotzinapa struggle is, “They took everything from us. They even took away our fear.”
More residents participated at the evening forum. Because of their struggle to get the disappeared students back, 600 more families joined the fight. Beto spoke. He felt that before trying to change the “macro” (the system), the “micro” had to be changed. He identified the “micro” as the children that aspire to be either drug-traffickers or soap opera stars when they grow up.  Since 2006, the racist U.S.–fueled drug war in Mexico has led to the disappearance of more than 30,000 people. From 2007 to 2012, there were officially over 121,000 homicides, with over 50,000 under the current government under president Enrique Peña Nieto.
Terrorism, disappearances, and murder of youth are an everyday occurrence for working-class families throughout the world. In the U.S. alone, 1.5 million Black men (this includes only ages 25 to 54) are missing due to death or jail. On top of unemployment, sexist and racist working conditions, this is what capitalism means for billions of workers!
A press conference at the Workers United Hall on April 6 concluded with a protest in front of the Mexican Consulate down the street. Esperanza and Lolo spoke. As the Chicago police moved in to defend the front doors of the consulate, Esperanza and Lolo were whisked off. I found out later that Beto had received threats and didn’t make it to Monday’s protest. I circulated about another 45 CHALLENGEs to the protesters and those going in and out of the Consulate.
I spoke briefly with Esperanza, Lolo and Beto at the weekend events. Self-critically, I should have been much bolder in getting to know them. Lili has family members in Mexico who are involved in the struggle to bring justice to the disappeared students. Our club has been in contact with them.
The committee organizers weren’t able to get as many residents out as I expected. Most of those involved that weekend were young political organizers, several of whom I had known when we were involved together in the La Casita sit-in about three years ago. (Working mothers occupied La Casita, an elementary school field house, for 43 days to protest its demolition.) I had also seen three women friends who used to be in PLP, one who participated in the Boston Summer Project along with her (now deceased) 17-year-old sister and me in 1975! I will make it a point to renew our friendship.
The struggle in Ayotzinapa is an international one. It is up to PLP to link the mass terrorization and disappearances of youth in Mexico to youth in the U.S. and worldwide as part of this destructive capitalist system.
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