Letters of June 17

The following two letters are written by high school students in Baltimore who led walkouts following the
racist police murder of Freddie Gray.
The First Walkout
The first high school walkout was on Friday, April 24.  It was liberating to take a stand with many other like-minded students, leaving school to protest and march for all the lives unjustly and brutally snuffed out by the racist cops. Some students and I met in the basement of the school to discuss what we would do and how we would do it. I told them that we had to be quiet and disciplined when exiting the building. We discussed the importance of walking out against racism. Anyone who just wanted to avoid going to class was dismissed.
 We all walked out of the front entrance of the building. Many began chanting and marching around our school’s campus and holding up CHALLENGE newspaper.
Along with other students, I helped lead the chants. We made two stops so that everyone could talk and say how they felt. At each stop, I gave a speech about racism, sexism, corruption and hate crimes that are bred by the capitalist system. At the last stop, a student led everyone in a prayer to finish off the protest. Before they went back in the building, I told everyone what PLP was about and invited them to May Day!
The expansion of the Progressive Labor Party will continue, and this unjust system will crack!
The Second Walkout
The following week, I heard students were planning to protest the PAARC exam, which is part of national Common Core standards.
I felt it was my responsibility as an elected student leader at our school to support my fellow classmates in a fight against an unfair school system. The test was postponed after a number of students refused to take it. An administrator lied, claiming the test was being postponed for “technical reasons.” It was the bold refusals that were the real spark.
The next day, Friday May 1, students walked out again for Freddie Gray, and also against injustices in Baltimore City Public Schools. Before walking out, we chanted boldly while marching through all four floors of our school’s main building. 
On our minds was the thought of “productive protesting.” Once outside, after we stopped the first time, we told the students that we needed to take our protests to the next level. I reminded students that the administration knows we can take the power out of their hands and into ours! But they don’t stop us because they think we don’t have the ability to articulate our demands.
I reminded us that even if the school system refuses to teach us those skills, there are other places and organizations where we could go to learn how to fight! At the end of the protest, the group of about 40 decided to make demands — in addition to our solidarity struggle for justice for Freddie Gray — that related to educational, emotional, and productive issues. Now, we move forward to write-ups, petitions, conferences, and much more. On the initiative of two young Black male students, a club named Students Taking Action was born out of the march.
The events in Baltimore during the earlier citywide uprising have sparked the beginnings of an unstoppable long-term rebellion. It was not a “riot,” as the capitalist media, politicians, and some clergy have falsely characterized it. We will continue to fight back!
★ ★ ★ ★
Struggle and Learn
At the meeting of my retirees union chapter this month, a labor leader from the AFL-CIO came in to give us the general picture of labor and politics. His position was that politically the labor movement was in terrible trouble and that we have to ensure that the next time that democrats were voted completely in — but Democrats who completely support the positions of labor. In other words, same old, same old. But in laying out his position and talking about all the problems in  the country for working people, it became a dirge that upset many of the members. During the question time for him, the questions clearly illustrated their concerns and what could be done. In each case it came down to getting out the vote.
In the “Good and Welfare” part of the meeting, I put together a picket line chant to start a song I wanted to sing. I chanted the chant “The bosses can’t profit when the workers unite. Shut it down. Shut it tight,” and then sang “The men and women on the line”.  I normally get a good response from the 200 or so members who attend these meetings. But this time the applause was thunderous, and I was surrounded by people who wanted to talk to me. There was a line of them. I was given some telephone numbers and I gave the song sheet to someone and was asked to send a song sheet to someone else.  I was a little overwhelmed. People sitting in the seats around me pointed to their CHALLENGE and told me they had it.
After the event, when I was walking with one of my retiree friends, I tried to think through, and talk through, what had happened. I have been an activist in the union for 29 years and have been involved with struggles on the union floor during meetings and in my workplaces.  I often brought members from my workplaces to the meetings and I usually get out 100 or so CHALLENGEs at all of the meetings. I have had limited success at winning people into the PLP from amongst the workers. I have often had raw anticommunist comments thrown at me and I have been threatened on numerous occasions, but I have always carried on. Especially at May Day or at the month of May, I would make a special project of insuring that May Day (the workers’ holiday) was well understood.
Between the discussion and thinking over what had happened, it became clear to me that this was a perfect storm. I had done consistent work for 29 years. I have been singing at the retirees’ meetings for almost 3 years now, while raising issues of the working class – among them racism and sexism. The world in the last 29 years has been changing dramatically for the working class. Things are getting a lot worse, and workers have become somewhat confused. But over the last two or three years, the different struggles against racism and inequality have been growing in people’s minds. Then a well-known labor leader made a speech telling people that all we can do is vote and organize other people to vote while the politicians fritter away the lives of the working class, things begin to happen.
In our pamphlet, “Build a Base in the Working Class” there is a point in the early pages where we are told that we should constantly raise the line and struggle with people. It may seem like we’re not getting anywhere, but we can never tell.  In fact, we are getting somewhere.  The consistency of raising the ideas and getting to know people and the changing world situation (Ferguson, Baltimore, unemployment, wage disparities, the fight to raise the minimum wage) will make people more ready to listen. The lines to the song I sang at the end say, “This song is for the workers of the world. Their banners come unfurled. Sisters, brothers break your chains — let the fight begin. We have the whole wide world to win”.  Some of the working class are beginning to see light in the dark night. The battle is long, but the end is clear. We have a communist world to win!
★ ★ ★ ★
CHALLENGE Error
There’s an error in the picture caption “May Day in France” (CHALLENGE, page 6, 5/20). According to the caption, “‘The Time of the Cherries” refers to a revolutionary song about the Paris Commune of 1871. The “Time of Cherries” was referred to as a metaphor for what life will be like under a communist society, but the story is more complex.
“The Time of the Cherries” was originally a popular love song written in 1866. In the original lyrics, a broken-hearted man warns young men to avoid beautiful women, if they fear the cruel pain of breaking up. He adds that he will always cherish cherry-picking time because it reminds him of the memory he stores in his heart, which is like an unhealed wound. Several years later, after the author participated in armed revolution, new verses were added.
In 1871, workers in Paris staged the first working-class revolution and established the first dictatorship of the proletariat: the Paris Commune. The song’s author, Jean-Baptiste Clément, fought for the Commune against the combined armies of the French and German bosses.
During the final stage of the bosses’ victory over the world’s first proletarian government, during the “bloody week” of May 21-28, 1871, the bosses murdered 20,000 to 30,000 members of the Commune after they had surrendered. In particular, they slaughtered the nurses, who were supposedly recognized under capitalist law as “noncombatants” by the bosses. Then as now, when threatened with revolution, the bosses broke their own law. Killing noncombatants was explicitly forbidden by the bosses’ first Geneva Convention of 1864, which the French bosses had signed, and established the Red Cross. On May 28, the very last day of the Commune, a young woman and ambulance nurse serving with Clément’s group somehow became separated from them, never to be seen again.
In 1882, Clément published a book of his songs and dedicated “The time of the cherries” to this young ambulance nurse. He wrote: “All we knew was that she was named Louise and that she was a working class woman. … What became of her? Was she shot down, with so many others, by [the bosses]? Wasn’t it to this obscure heroine that I had to dedicate the most popular of all the songs that are in this book?”
Ever since then, the working class in France has associated “The Time of the Cherries” with the Paris Commune. It is less about “what life will be like under a communist society” than it is about unforgettable sorrow and anger at the bosses’ crimes against the working class. Crimes that the international working class will one day avenge.
★ ★ ★ ★