We are pausing the luminous four-part series on the Scottsboro Boys to bring you the first of a four part series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in the struggle against local Nazis and their racist political allies from attacking young Black youth who were being bussed in effort to desegregate, all-white schools in Boston. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.
The Boston ’75 Summer Project had broken the back of the fascist ROAR movement but 50 years later, the fight against racist state sponsored violence is not over. Like the Black workers in Cincinnati militantly organizing their against Neo-Nazis and multiracial groups of workers standing against ICE in L.A., Chicago, and Newark, to smash racist attacks and any far-right movement, we need Progressive Labor Party (PLP)— a mass internationalist communist Party, committed to militant fightback and revolution.
The Boston ’75 Summer Project
The capitalist ruling class and the media and academic pundits that serve them often distort history to hide the truth of working class struggles against oppression. They seek to convince us that any improvement in the lives of working people is a result of enlightened liberal capitalist politicians, judges, foundations, and philanthropists, not the class struggles of workers, students, and soldiers. In this way, the capitalist rulers promote a sense of powerlessness and cynicism within our class.
Sometimes the history of a working class struggle is simply erased. Such is the case with the 1975 Boston Summer Project to fight racism and support desegregation of public schools. Fifty years ago, over 150 college students and young adults came to Boston for the summer to fight the segregationist anti-busing movement ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). This was more than a struggle for civil rights. It was a fight to check the rise of a fascist movement among the white Boston working class. Inspired by the Mississippi Freedom Summer, which 10 years earlier had mobilized 600 volunteers to register Black voters, the Boston ‘75 volunteers sought to unite Black and white workers to demand quality, integrated public schools and to defeat racism. Officially sponsored by the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) and its ally Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the Boston Summer Project held daily rallies and demonstrations throughout the city. It collected 35,000 signatures on an anti-racist petition, ran a multiracial Freedom School in a Black church, defended Black families that moved into segregated white neighborhoods, led the effort to integrate a public beach, and physically confronted the ROAR fascists in street battles. More than 250 InCAR members and friends were arrested. Three received prison sentences.
Putting fear into racists
The last official action of the Summer Project was to welcome Black students who were bussed to South Boston High School on the first day of school. A year earlier, when busing in Boston began, a racist mob of thousands had stoned the buses carrying Black students to this school. The police arrested few if any of these racists and made no effort to protect the Black students. But 1975 was different. There was no racist mob at South Boston High. The cops had no one to arrest except for the hundred InCAR members who’d come to the school to welcome the students. The Boston ’75 Summer Project had broken the back of the fascist ROAR movement. It broke it by speaking to tens of thousands of white and Black working people on the streets and convincing them that bad schools and poor living conditions weren’t caused by other workers with a different skin color, but by the greedy capitalists and their corrupt politicians. The Project broke ROAR by canvassing door to door with antiracist literature at poor white workers’ housing projects in South Boston. It broke ROAR with multiple militant confrontations, with a bold and multiracial group of InCAR members squaring off against the ROAR racists and the cops who protected them. While other forces played a role in the downfall of ROAR, the role of InCAR and PLP was critical.
In many ways, the ROAR anti-busing movement was a trial balloon for U.S. fascism. The United States had just lost the war in Vietnam after spending $4 trillion and killing 2 million Vietnamese and 60,000 U.S. soldiers. Japan and West Germany and their revived economies were challenging the U.S. manufacturing base. But when former President Richard Nixon experimented with fascism with his FBI COINTELPRO program aimed at antiracist and antiwar activists, he mostly succeeded in turning millions of working people against the U.S. government.
Liberals behind fascism
For fascism to succeed, it needs popular support among the masses. In Boston, a propaganda campaign was aimed to mobilize white racist support for fascism by promoting the racist myth of Black crime and attacking “forced busing” (school integration) and affirmative action. South Boston, with its impoverished Irish-Catholic population terrorized and controlled by the Irish Mafia, was a perfect venue for the bosses. If a popular fascist movement could be built inside Boston, a bastion of liberal antiwar activism, fascist populism might spread across the country. Both the liberal and openly racist factions of the U.S. ruling class backed this racist campaign. The Boston ‘75 Summer Project succeeded in blocking this fascist movement and set back the development of U.S. fascism for years, if not decades. That is the legacy of Boston ’75 that both the liberal fascist and gutter fascist rulers wish to bury.
Today we face yet another concerted effort to build fascism in the U.S. While immigrants are the main focus of the bosses’ scapegoating attack this time around, Black workers and other oppressed groups are also targets, as indicated by the aggressive elimination of DEI and affirmative action programs. Once again, the U.S. capitalist rulers are deeply divided, with the gutter fascist Donald Trump administration attacking the liberal fascists at Harvard University as part of a bitter dispute over how to manage the declining U.S. empire.
There is much that the anti-fascist fighters of today can learn from Boston ’75. How racism is used to build populist fascism. How the liberal establishment manipulates the mass movement to promote their own version of fascism to defend the U.S. imperialist empire. How a relatively small group of militant antiracists can affect the course of history. This series will provide examples to illustrate these lessons. While the rise of U.S. fascism may be inevitable, so too is growing opposition to it—and the potential for mobilizing the working class to fight for a communist revolution.
Stay tuned for Part II in our July 30th issue.
