This October marks the 167th anniversary of the raid on Harper's Ferry led by John Brown. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown led about 20 men, five of them Black, to seize a federal arsenal in Virginia, hoping to spark an armed rebellion against slavery. The raid failed, but the southern enslaving class was terrified by the raiders' militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. It showed the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle!

Osborne Anderson, the only Black raider to escape, described the unity of Brown's company:

I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown's house, and in John Brown's presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self, no ghost of  distinction found space to enter.

More than a century and a half later, the struggle to free the working class from the chains of racist super-exploitation and violence continues. Workers face rising global fascism and deadly imperialist competition between the U.S. and China. In the U.S., this rivalry is playing out in a ruling-class split that echoes the Civil War: "mask-on" liberals, who manage racism by hiding it behind progressive rhetoric, and "mask-off" KKK racists and Nazis, who openly embrace it. The working class keeps fighting back. In the same abolitionist spirit, underground patrols and ICE watch groups from Minneapolis to Texas to New York City are defending our class against ICE kidnappings, killer cops, and masked racist patrols. The lessons remain the same and are more pressing than before: to defeat this rotten racist system, we need a multiracial, mass movement for communist revolution. 

From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery

This trust did not happen overnight. Brown's father, Owen, was an abolitionist who helped fugitives on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. As a boy of 12, Brown saw an enslaved boy his own age beaten and never forgot it. He came to believe Black and white workers were completely equal and put that belief into action daily. In North Elba, N.Y., his family lived near a community of Black settlers, many formerly enslaved, who were regularly invited to dinner. He addressed them as "Mr." and "Mrs.," sharply contrasting with the era's racist mores, common even among many opponents of slavery.

Tubman guided dozens to freedom, then helped free hundreds

In April 1858, while gathering money, arms, and volunteers in Canada, Brown visited Harriet Tubman, well known there for personally guiding many to freedom. Born around 1820 to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman suffered physical abuse, saw siblings sold away, and in her teens suffered a broken skull from an overseer's blow. In 1849 she fled, walking for weeks, mostly at night, to Philadelphia, then returned to guide family members out. Over the next 11 years, at great personal risk, she made about 13 trips south and personally guided roughly 70 people to freedom, giving directions that helped dozens more. She declared, "I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger." Brown reportedly called her "General Tubman." Both believed in direct action and armed struggle to end slavery.

The raid fails, the fight goes on

Not every abolitionist agreed with Brown's plan. Frederick Douglass, a friend to both, argued against it in August 1859 and declined to join, and Tubman, reportedly ill, did not make it to Harpers Ferry. Brown had hoped enslaved people nearby would rise up and join him, but they did not, and the small band was quickly surrounded. Then-U.S Army Colonel Robert E. Lee, later a racist Confederate general, led the troops that crushed the revolt on October 18. About half the raiders were killed in the fighting, and seven, including Brown, were later hanged. The failure teaches something too: a small, brave group cannot win without a mass base, which is why we build one today. Tubman's fight continued. In 1863, during the Civil War, she helped lead the Combahee River Raid, which freed more than 700 enslaved people.

Black rebels petrified slave-owners

The slave-owners, although talking of "docile" Black workers, knew better. They were petrified of Black rebels and "outside agitators," and patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate enslaved people and keep abolitionist literature away from them. Today the "outside agitators" are antiracist, militant workers and communists in Progressive Labor Party (PLP), fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us the working class is too ground down to fight back, yet they organize cops, plant security, racist white supremacist vigilantes, Black nationalists, and sellout union "leaders" as attack dogs to keep communists out, and fire them when they're discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if workers are supposed to be so passive? The fight against racist terror rages on today, as the ruling class relies on it to keep workers in line.

Lesson 1: Militancy

Militancy was foremost in Brown's and Tubman's thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to slavery and would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Bloody Kansas in the 1850s, concluded that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people could not be citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. The fight against police brutality is a class war still being waged, the same one left unfinished by Tubman and Brown. PLP joins the militant antiracist fightback against ICE and the kkkops who killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Shantel Davis and Bryan Bostic (see page 3). The multiracial character of these protests offers glimmers of the working class's revolutionary potential.

Lesson 2: Multiracial unity

Multiracial unity is essential in any fight. Black people escaping enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists, and thousands of workers, Black and white, donated money, harbored fugitives, and defended them from slave-catchers. Among Black and militant white abolitionists, unity developed over years of working together and struggling over differences. Brown and Tubman showed that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one's head; it takes a material change in the way one lives.

Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds overcome the "natural" segregation capitalism promotes. Workers still often live in neighborhoods separated by "race," but many are integrated in workplaces and schools, where the bosses try to divide us with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture (e.g., soul "versus" country music). Class-conscious workers in PLP must turn everyday acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.

Join PLP

PLP does similar things today. We discuss the need for multiracial unity with friends, coworkers, and neighbors, urge them to join militant antiracist demonstrations, and donate to CHALLENGE. Every such act is a political commitment against racism, capitalism, and imperialism, just as thousands of antislavery workers made against slavery. We invite all workers, soldiers, and students who participate in these struggles to join PLP. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other's needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.