NEWARK June 1- One year after the racist kkkop attack on the Rodwell-Spivey family, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the family joined to hold a spirited rally in front of their house, where the attack took place. The year before, undercover officers in Newark targeted and attacked two of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers as they looked at clothes in a van on the dead-end street. The killer kkkops claim they were searching for another Black man wearing a white t-shirt with dreads, but nothing under this capitalist system is coincidental or a mistake when Black workers worldwide are super-exploited and jailed on a mass scale. The phony reform to end cash bail reform in New Jersey is not working in New Jersey. Justin Rodwell, one of the brothers that came to defend their younger ones from police, is still being detained as he awaits trial in Essex County Jail.
On the outside, the family is constantly surveilled and harassed by the police. Even more insidious, this is occurring under the watchful eye of liberal Black Mayor Ras Baraka, son of the famous poet Amiri Baraka. Baraka uses his father’s legacy, Black nationalism, and art-for-profit partnerships as a tool to sway one section of workers in Newark to fight for the finance capitalists, while Black and Latin workers are displaced or shoved into the prison system.
Black politicians the Big Fascist trojan horse
It’s not just Baraka. The family has been alienated by the liberal misleaders whose claim to fame is fighting within the system against racial injustice. Since the worldwide, antiracist Ferguson uprising under former liberal Big Fascist (see glossary page 6) U.S. President Barack Obama, and the George Floyd uprisings, under the gutter racist presidency of Donald Trump, the liberal Big Fascist wing of the ruling class has ushered in Black municipal leadership to squelch working-class rebellion. They feed workers phony radical faces in high places as a win, and dupe many into believing a sliver of the decaying American pie is the best our class can do for survival. PLP cautions workers that the rising volatility between imperialist bosses in China, Russia and U.S, will continue to fester and explode into world war, and Black and Latin youth will be missile food forced to die for the bosses profits. The only hope the working class is to build a class conscious multiracial movement to smash capitalism and fight for communism, freeing the world from starvation, exploitation, racist politicians and their kkkops.
Fight racist kkkops with communism!
To learn how to turn these racist wars in the streets into a class war, we turn struggle into communism by building with anti-racist fighters and exposing the sharpest line possible. At the one year-anniversary rally, the mother of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers, Monique Rodwell, spoke out against Baraka sending kkkops to the block to ticket cars while ignoring the piles of neglected garbage bags. Other organizations like the New Afrikan Black Panther Party tried to deflect the attention from Baraka by blaming the “state and federal governments.” The reformist People’s Organization for Progress (POP) and the NAACP didn’t even show up to the rally but instead co-opted the idea by holding their own press conference, without even notifying the family. Each time we took the mic, PL’ers exposed the role of capitalism, explaining how suave Black political figures like Baraka and Obama are instrumental in winning workers to stay passive against attacks on the working class –from education to housing to police terror.
Liberal reforms trap our class in cycle of violence
Body cameras and training were proposed under Obama in 2014, and in 2022 Mayor Baraka and POP reformists are pushing for a Civilian Review Board and reparations. Yet, we see with the Rodwell-Spivey family, Amir Locke and Patrick Lyoya, reforms could never extinguish racism. One teacher connected struggles against racist police terror to attacks against educators, students, and parents in Newark's predominantly Black and Latin schools. Even before the pandemic, Newark struggled to hire and retain teachers and is now exploiting substitute teachers, academic specialists, and administrators to fill the gap of managing  classrooms of multilingual students (Chalkbeat, 4/22).
A teacher connected how school administrators in one of the most crumbling schools in the city, citing one disciplinary letter as a reason for letting him go, is the same as a prosecutor potentially manipulating body camera footage against the brothers in court. The same way this teacher made the humanistic decision to allow students in from the cold during the winter months before security arrived, is similar to the human decision the brothers made to not quietly comply with a police attack. Under a capitalist-driven system, the bosses will always wield any tool in their power to discipline the working class whenever we break their rules. This capitalist state is racist to the core, and we should not expect these institutions to work for us - even when we make a human choice, with the lives of workers at the forefront of our minds.
After the rally, we were all thrilled to see photos from a PLer in Canada working with the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in Canada, which is fighting racist displacement by the Canadian police and oil companies. The photo is with Unist’ot’en matriarchs who were all raided and arrested last year and continue to fight racist police harassment while defending a river from the capitalist oil pipeline. As we continue to build with the Rodwell-Spivey family and workers in Newark, our main goal is to win workers to have a long term outlook of fighting for a communist world. A better world  is possible where workers use multiracial unity and collective decisions to resolve our conflicts. Relying on profit-driven systems under capitalism to fight for and save us will only divide us into racist, nationalist factions and kill many of us.
Our next steps are to build strong connections with workers in the neighborhood where the Rodwell-Spivey family lives, and connect the struggles of this anti-racist family to families fighting police terror based in L.A., Brooklyn and beyond through this year’s summer project. From Newark to British Columbia, the international working class can only smash racist, sexist terror when we fight racist kkkops and politicians with multiracial unity and communism! Onward we march!