SAN ANTONIO, TX, November 1—“From Palestine to Mexico, These Border Walls Have Got to Go” chanted over 50 public health workers and local organizers at a rally on the opening day of the American Public Health Association (APHA) national conference. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have provided leadership in the APHA for more than 40 years against racism and police violence so clearly we wanted to mobilize with our fellow public health workers against racist ICE terror. Democrats and Republicans alike have built a deportation machine that has been the tip of the spear for a fascist movement that seeks to divide immigrant workers from U.S.-born workers.  New detention centers and aggressive kidnapping tactics by ICE/CBP thugs have led many workers across the country to fight back and San Antonio is no exception. To this energy we brought in revolutionary communist politics by distributing 450 copies of a special four-page APHA CHALLENGE that explained how important racism is to the capitalist class and how a mass multiracial communist party is needed to destroy capitalism and the exploitation of all workers. 

We met many of the San Antonio fighters by reaching out to groups on the internet and met together to plan the protest to bring public health workers into the struggle.  Workers in San Antonio have been in multiple actions against the infamous Dilley detention center (which holds families and is just over an hour outside the city. But their current fight is against the planned opening of a new detention center in the city of San Antonio. They have organized large marches to the proposed center and have raised legal barriers such as environmental and economic impacts at city board meetings. They were excited to have public health join the struggle. Several sections of the APHA were supportive. Our flier, “Racist ICE Terror is a Public Health Crisis”, included seven local groups, PLP and two APHA sections and was shared electronically. Hand to hand at the conference we distributed 630 flyers to conference attendees before the rally. 

The rally reached over 200 public health workers who listened, cheered, filmed, and joined us in chanting and singing during the rally. Local speakers attacked the 287G  law that is applied throughout Texas and allows local police to act on behalf of ICE and detain workers. They demanded that the city and county act to block the new detention center. They called out the politicians for cutting the health department’s budget by 50 percent. A leading mutual aid organizer spoke about the sexual assaults that happen to women workers who are detained and deported and poignantly asked the audience to think about these women as if they were our own mothers. A speaker for PLP compared ICE with Nazi concentration camps in WWII and showed the similarity of the Border Patrol in the US to the illegal and brutal kidnappings and murder of Palestinians by the Israeli army. He reminded the public health workers of APHA’s own attacks on members who supported Palestine (CHALLENGE, 11/26/2025). Another PLP speaker described the organizing we are doing against ICE and detention centers in other states.  A local minister ended the rally with a powerful summary of the way ICE is destroying individuals, families and neighborhoods.  The grassroots organizers were then invited to join the panel at the Peace Caucus session on “Children’s Health at Dilley Detention Facility”.  Thus, this became a dynamic session with 45 attendees brainstorming on how to fight back.

Building a base in the working class remains critical to a revolutionary party. Dinner with two of the local organizers and a lively “Lunch with Comrades” event gave us the opportunity to socialize and have longer political discussions with eight new public health workers. It is now up to us to keep in touch and make plans for future actions.  

PLP fights for a world without borders and for a communist world of equality. This will require the destruction of capitalism and strong multiracial unity –not voting for capitalist politicians.   Meanwhile, at their official session on immigration, APHA’s executive director started out by saying that borders are needed for security, immigration policies are necessary, and the midterm election outcomes were a big success. As always, the leadership of APHA continues to be obsessed with polite, respectable politics, identity politics, and the Democratic party. It is clear with every conference we attend that the liberals continue to mislead public health workers and students into pacifism and electoral politics. No wonder we consider them to be the main danger to working class liberation, real public health and revolution to fight back and build for an egalitarian communist society. However, clearly this bankrupt system is quaking. Just fighting back is not enough. We must ultimately get rid of the system that allows billionaires to accumulate wealth that is really created by workers and leaves workers in wage slavery with worsening quality of life.

Power to workers, smash ICE and US imperialism. Let’s ally with Jewish and Palestinian workers to smash the racist Zionism of Israel and the U.S. We have a world to win! Thank You! AND CHECK OUT OUR NEWSPAPER: CHALLENGE-DESAFIO.

This is an abridged version of an article first published on the back page of the November 25, 2009 issue of CHALLENGE, updated with current examples.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is sold as a holiday of family, food and gratitude. But the story taught to schoolchildren across the country is a racist, patriotic lie that buries the genocide of millions of Indigenous people.

Colonial Puritans held days of thanksgiving to thank god for the slaughter of Indigenous peoples by sword and disease. There were many such bloody thanksgivings. Indigenous workers have since endured more than 1,500 wars, stolen land, broken treaties, repression, and confinement on racist reservations (Equal Justice Initiative, 09/20/2019). Today surviving indigenous workers face high rates of unemployment, suicide, drug addiction and alcoholism, the wreckage capitalism leaves behind.

In May 1637, colonial militias from Connecticut and Massachusetts, aided by Mohegan and Narragansett allies, surrounded a fortified Pequot village at Mystic and set it ablaze before dawn. John Mason and John Underhill, who took part, wrote their own accounts of the attack. Historians estimate the dead at anywhere from several hundred to 700, mostly women, children and elders. Within weeks, the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a day of thanksgiving for its victory over the Pequot.

That is the truth the bosses want buried, and exposing it helps us expose their other lies. The Progressive Labor Party aims to smash their grip on our minds so we can build a fighting, mass, antiracist communist movement that ends their sexist, racist and genocidal system for good. The roots run deep. The colonization of the Americas helped birth capitalism, which could not have existed without the genocide, enslavement and displacement of workers around the world. Imperialism—capitalism in its most developed, competitive form—still feeds on all three.

In Gaza, Palestinians are being slaughtered by Israeli forces armed and backed by the U.S. An analysis of 60,199 recorded deaths through July 31, 2025 calculated that more than 3.08 million years of human life have been stolen, an average of 51 years from each person killed, including over a million years stolen from children under 15 (The Lancet, 11/15/2025). In Sudan, about 14 million people have been forced to flee since 2023, the world’s largest displacement crisis (UN, 11/6/2026) in a war fueled by imperialist jockeying among the U.S., China and Russia and their junior partners, the UAE, Turkey, Iran and Egypt (Euronews, 01/22/2025). In the Amazon, oil, mining and big agriculture are killing Indigenous peoples and driving them off their land (Genocide Watch, 10/18).

As the crisis of capitalism deepens and the U.S. bosses struggle to keep their sinking empire afloat, they will need to build fascism. They are divided over how. A major fight is how to balance their war plans with their grip on workers’ minds, through nationalism and patriotism, and it starts with what our youth learn in school, which has become a battleground for the U.S. rulers.

The Trump MAGA wing, the domestic-capital wing of U.S. gutter racists, prefers cheap racism. It wants to erase the history of colonialism, genocide and slavery by attacking universities and schools over DEI. Trump’s January 2025 order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” prioritizes “patriotic education (National Archives, Executive office of the President, 01/29/2025),” and his March 2025 order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” directs the Smithsonian to remove exhibits deemed to contain “improper ideology” (NPR 03/27/2025). The liberal finance-capital wing, the Big Fascists, promotes a different history, built on decolonial theory, intersectionality, critical race theory and feminism, that separates antiracist and antisexist history from class struggle and working-class history, and that promotes anti-communism. As both wings distort and whitewash the past, our job as communists is to arm the working class with real history and the truth.

The truth about the “first” Thanksgiving

The “first” Thanksgiving dinner between “pilgrims” and “Indians,” reenacted by the ruling class in schools and TV specials, was a 1621 harvest gathering at Plymouth between about 50 surviving English colonists and the Wampanoag, a confederation of Native groups based mainly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Half the colonists had died of disease and hunger.

The colonists did not share their food with the Wampanoag; they had too little to share. Edward Winslow, who was there, wrote that the Wampanoag leader Massasoit arrived with about 90 men, and that his people brought five deer. Historians note that the colonists never called it a thanksgiving.

Without Squanto and Samoset, the colonists might not have survived. Squanto, a Patuxet man, was kidnapped in 1614 and taken to Europe, where he learned English. When he returned in 1619, he found indigenous peoples devastated by plague. He and Samoset, an Abenaki sachem from Maine, taught the colonists to fish, hunt and grow crops. The Pilgrims, religious separatists who shared the Puritans’ belief that they were god’s “chosen” people, saw Squanto as “god’s instrument” and the Wampanoag as “heathens.”

Diseases spread by colonizers, killed up to 90 percent of some Wampanoag communities in the years before Plymouth. The Puritans, like the Spanish, French and English occupiers, believed that “god” cleared the Indigenous workers out of the Americas for colonial settlement. Christianity, religion that endorsed genocide and slavery, backed them up.

In 1675 the Wampanoag leader Metacom, Massasoit’s son, led a war to stop the colonists’ land grab. In 1676 colonial forces murdered him and then decapitated him. As historian Jill Lepore documents, his head was displayed at Plymouth for two decades, and the minister Increase Mather read it as god’s gift. The colonies proclaimed days of thanksgiving for the victory. The colonists did not wipe out the Wampanoag. They still live in New England, and each Thanksgiving they gather at Plymouth for the National Day of Mourning.

Bosses still lying about “Thanksgiving”

The ruling class has spent centuries whitewashing this story. Amidst the disarray and turmoil of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln had declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, and his proclamation mentioned neither the Pilgrims nor the Wampanoag. Less than a year earlier, on December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were lynched in Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass execution in U.S. history, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.

Teaching lies about “generous” Puritans props up today’s racist, patriotic lies about democracy. The bosses want us to believe in the government’s good intentions while they use state power to strip away workers’ few gains. But none of those gains were graciously handed down by the successors of the Puritans. Workers won them with militant strikes, demonstrations and, at times, guns.

And much like the Native Americans cut down by early capitalists, workers across the Middle East, Africa and Asia have been slaughtered in the bosses’ “war on terror.” An estimated 906,000 to 937,000 people have been killed directly in the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. Add deaths from hunger, disease and bombed-out hospitals and water systems, and the toll climbs to at least 4.5 million (Costs of War Project, Brown University, May 2023). Untold millions more have died from war and imperialist sanctions. Then and now, the capitalists’ motive is competition for profit. It is the capitalists, with their genocidal wars, who are the savages, not workers.

As workers in the U.S. gather for Thanksgiving, Progressive Labor Party gives thanks to everyone around the world committed to smashing the bosses’ racist, sexist and genocidal system. We invite the international multiracial working class to join PLP and fight for a world free of racism, genocide and imperialist war: communism, where future generations can one day feast without the capitalists’ exploitation and lies.

Sources: 

“The Hidden History of Massachusetts: A Guide for Black Folks,” http://www.danielnpaul.com/TheRealThanksgiving.html
“Are You Teaching the Real Story of the ‘First Thanksgiving’?” http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr040.shtml
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
Chuck Larsen, “Teaching About Thanksgiving: An Introduction” and “The Plymouth Thanksgiving Story”
Edward Winslow, 1621 letter, in Mourt’s Relation
John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War, and John Underhill, News from America
Jill Lepore, The Name of War
Minnesota Historical Society, U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 materials

Reservations: U.S. concentration camps

Indigenous workers in the U.S. who survived the bosses’ wars and diseases were forced into concentration camps, also known as reservations, on the worst, least irrigable land. Today, racism against indigenous workers remains extreme. In 2024, the median household income for indigenous and Alaskan households was $62,420, nearly 23% below the U.S. median of $80,734 (HHS Office of Minority Health, 2024 American Community Survey). U.S. Indigenous households live in poverty at twice the rate of the general population, 20.9% versus 10% (Economic Policy Institute, 2025).

The racist oppression of indigenous workers is also written into health statistics. In 2023, the alcohol-induced death rate was 61.5 per 100,000, nearly five times the national rate of 12.6, and their drug overdose death rate, 65.0 per 100,000, was the highest of any group (Trust for America’s Health, May 28, 2025). A Lancet study found that midlife deaths among indigenous workers rose about 30% while deaths among white workers rose 9%, and that the gap has only widened since (NPR, February 1, 2023).

A worker on an Arizona reservation reported to CHALLENGE that Homeland Security harasses and attacks workers on reservations, much like police brutalize Black and Latin workers in neighborhoods forced into racist neglect. Not until 2005 did Massachusetts repeal a law, on the books since 1675, banning indigenous workers from entering Boston. It was passed in the year war was raging between the colonists and the Wampanoag (Massachusetts Acts of 2005, ch. 25, May 20, 2005).

The following is a speech  given by a PL’er  at the American Public Health Association (APHA) rally in San Antonio:

It is an honor to be here today with these other speakers and everyone here. We are on the right side of history. I have been a member of APHA for decades as well as the Progressive Labor Party.  PLP is a communist party. We are fighting to ultimately get rid of the capitalist system entirely and replace it with an egalitarian society in which workers worldwide share equally in the wealth they produce without billionaires.

APHA’s annual meeting is here in San Antonio which is on the front lines of a fascist onslaught. The Dilley detention center is close by. While Dilley is not quite at the level of a Nazi concentration camp, it is comparable in many ways. People are dying there from poor or nonexistent health care, lousy food and crowded conditions. The use of racism and dehumanization helps make it happen. I saw the result of this racism some decades ago on a visit to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany. Many thousands died there but the principle is the same. 

Ordinary Germans living near the camp denied knowledge of what was going on in Dachau right under their noses. It took the intervention by U.S. soldiers at the end of the war for it to stop. While Dilley is not quite Dachau, it is moving in that direction. The difference is we are not waiting for the cavalry to come into Dilley and end this despicable camp. We in the APHA are here to declare our opposition to what’s happening in Dilley and all the detention centers.  APHA talks a lot about guaranteeing the health of people and preventing illness. Unfortunately, its actions to this goal are very limited. We must engage APHA to take strong stands against detention centers like Dilley. Without trying to do that, the APHA comes off as a paper tiger. 

While ICE is going after many thousands of workers, there has been a genocide going on in Gaza and Palestine, backed by the U.S.  Support for the racist regime in Israel was also, lest we forget, a part of the Democrats' program for many years.  It’s important to understand that no matter what candidate, Republican or Democrat, Palestinian workers will continue to have their homes bulldozed or bombed and maybe die as well.

Tactics originated by the Israelis to attack Palestinians have been used by ICE. 

We have attempted for years to engage APHA in taking a stand against Israel ‘s attacks on Palestinians that are causing thousands of deaths, illness and amputations of limbs of children. We have met with a brick wall with the shoving into our faces a treatise called “Codes of Conduct.” A long time APHA member, Amy Hagopian, was thrown out of APHA for demanding that APHA stand up to the genocide in Gaza/ Palestine.  APHA has tried to quell these voices for years by taking Israel‘s side without exception. If APHA wants to retain any legitimacy in the struggle for health worldwide, it will have to start listening to its anti-imperialist non-Zionist members.  The cat is out of the bag. The world is much more aware of the horrible conditions of living for Palestinians in Gaza and also the way that Israel is also making life hell for Palestinians in the West Bank. They are beating and killing journalists and many others there as well as cutting down and burning down olive trees along with bulldozing homes.

The struggle goes on. It’s inspiring to see workers here in the U.S. standing up to detention centers and the fascist murder or kidnapping of their neighbors. It’s also inspiring to see the people of Palestine (Jewish and non-Jewish) allying together to stand up to attacks by the fascist IDF/IOF and the super racist settler population. We really can’t elect our way out of fascism or end imperialism with a vote.

These fights are happening in the context of a system known as capitalism that thrives on racism and the exploitation of labor and that is faltering worldwide.   Witness: French, Spanish, Italian, and Albanian workers and students fighting back recently.  We in Progressive Labor Party believe that it is essential to fight back and build for an egalitarian communist society. However, clearly this bankrupt system is quaking. Just fighting back is not enough. We must ultimately get rid of the system that allows billionaires to accumulate wealth that is really created by workers and leaves workers in wage slavery with worsening quality of life. Power to workers, smash ICE and US imperialism. Let’s ally with Jewish and Palestinian workers to smash the racist Zionism of Israel and the U.S. We have a world to win! Thank You! AND CHECK OUT OUR NEWSPAPER: CHALLENGE.

NEW YORK CITY, Nov 1— Enraged workers had planned to march from Washington Square Park on the eve of the Day of the Dead to denounce the deaths of two precious children: Kohen Wiley, a Black 1-year-old killed by Mississippi kkkops, and Nolan Wells, a Black teen who allegedly drowned in a river while out with friends, a group of mostly white male teens.
Workers are furious that Wells’ death was ruled an accident because no water was found in his lungs. The police and the coroner are covering it up.

The march was canceled because of the New York City Marathon, which runs through all five boroughs. Instead, a large crowd, mostly Black workers, built a traditional Day of the Dead altar and placed photos of the two children, along with photos of others killed by police and ICE. They defied the cops who had denied the organizers’ permits. The crowd shouted militant slogans and gave speeches denouncing police abuse and killings.

A multiracial contingent of PL’ers joined the action. We handed out dozens of copies of CHALLENGE  to people at the altar, to passersby, and to people sitting in the park. Even without a march, our presence advanced the Party’s line, as several of us spoke with workers in attendance.

Don’t forget their names!

Mississippi kkkops murdered 1-year-old Kohen Wiley and called it “justified.” He died in his mother’s arms after a bogus shoplifting claim led cops to open fire on her car as she drove away. 

It should enrage us all that a precious child’s life is cheaper than a pack of diapers under this racist system. Over the summer, Nolan Wells’ body turned up after a boat trip with friends off the Mississippi coast, under mysterious circumstances. The “justice system” insisted that a Black teen vanishing with no logical explanation was perfectly logical, and found no “evidence” of wrongdoing.

Both children died in a state with a vile history of racist violence and segregation. But New York is no “progressive” paradise. This city runs one of the most segregated school systems in the country and has a long  history of racist terror of its own. Last month, Victor Romero, a retired kkkop, gunned down Con Edison worker Koran Irvine, a Black father of two, in a road-rage incident on the George Washington Bridge as Irvine drove home from work. Then Romero went home to eat dinner with his family as if nothing had happened. The NYPD rushed to shield one of its own, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani hasn’t said a single word.

These killings aren’t isolated. They are part and parcel of a rotten capitalist system that attacks us 24/7, here and worldwide. ICE thugs are shooting immigrant Latin workers in the Bronx while the U.S. bankrolls the genocide in Palestine. Black youth and workers are at the center of this gutter racist repression. As many as 83 suspected modern-day lynchings of Black workers occurred between 2000 and 2026 (JULIAN, Crimson Record, 2000-2025).

We can’t vote or pray this away. The system is working as designed, and it means permanent death and terror for our class. Under capitalism, Black babies’ lives don’t matter, and it doesn’t matter who we vote for. Not the openly racist Republicans led by Donald Trump. Not the Democrats who smile in your face while dropping bombs. Not the DSA, whose support carried Mamdani into office. This is the same mayor who fired Haitian immigrants after their TPS expired and who kowtows to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heiress whose cops have carte blanche to terrorize workers to their heart’s content. No “blue wave” will fix anything. We must always be present in mass movements to grow the ranks of the PLP and build a massive international party for the struggle for communist revolution and the seizure of power by the working class.