CHICAGO, February 18—Class struggle is in session at one racist high school. Black and Latin working-class youth are teaching a lesson in fightback.
Students refused to stand during the national anthem, causing some teachers to react with gutter racism. In protest, students organized a sit-in, got a racist teacher removed, and exposed the liberal misleaders. In short, they provided the kind of working-class leadership needed to change the world.
The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) extends a giant salute to these bold multiracial students for the antiracist example they are setting. It is working-class youth all over the world that are providing leadership and energy to the struggles against racism, sexism, environmental destruction, mass shootings, and deportations. Their revolutionary potential can hardly be understated.
Communist need to support, learn from, and offer leadership to these working-class youth. Connecting the struggles they are leading to an international movement and mass Party fighting to destroy racism and capitalism brings us all the closer to communist revolution and our collective liberation.
Stand for a racist anthem? Hell no!
On January 30 at Senn High School, students refused to stand for the national anthem during the  school’s Hispanic Heritage Assembly. At least three multiracial students, including the daughter of two PLP comrades, remained seated in order to protest the flag of the imperialist U.S. bosses and its racist symbolism. Specifically, they were protesting racist police terror, ICE raids and deportations, and the 500 years of racist oppression of Black workers.
This protest caused a physical education teacher, Robert Spurlin, to spew racist ideas at the students. He told a Black student that if she gets free lunch, then she “should be standing.”
He told a Latin student that she “should go back to her country.” This enraged the surrounding students. Other teachers, apologists for racism, intervened and threw the students out of the assembly.
Students organize a sit-in
The students exposed the racist nature of schools under capitalism, where racism against Black and Latin students is the norm, not the exception. For two weeks, the principal stalled and sat on the numerous complaints she received from students and parents.
The students were fed up and took matters into their own hands. They organized a mass multiracial sit-in on February 12, which received local and national coverage. Over 150 students chanted, “this is our school.”
The principal and the district were forced to remove the racist gym teacher from the building on paid leave as they “carry on their investigation.” The principal also reached a written agreement to several demands put forward by the students:

• More town halls to hear student voices
• Better information on how to report offending teachers and staff
• More signs and posters communicating “our” values
• Cultural training for all staff

To make the fight a mass issue, students also plan to circulate a petition online to other schools and workplaces. Fighting for these demands can build a culture of fightback for future attacks at the school, as well as expose the limits of antiracism under capitalism.
Liberal bosses try to smother fightback
The liberal capitalist misleaders will only ultimately steer their struggle into deadends, if not smother it entirely. The liberal principal is already trying to stifle and control the antiracist anger of these working-class rebels.
A clear example of liberal racism at the school is the demographics of the elite International Baccalaureate (IB) program teaching staff, which is mainly white. The majority of the student rebels come from the other programs at the school.
The rebels are told that they are not as smart as the IB students and consequently they are treated worse. Every day all students go through metal detectors and some have their possessions searched. In reality, the rebels demonstrate a greater understanding of capitalism. Their leadership at the school can attest to that. Meanwhile, the IB students are more likely to be brainwashed and bought into the racist divisions of the system.
Worthless words from union misleaders
Be it metal detectors, racist teachers, or union leaders and politicians who enforce deplorable learning conditions, Black and Latin students get attacked by racism on the daily.
In response to the attack on the antiracist students, the supposedly militant leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) could only meekly offer through their spokesperson that the union expects “tolerance and inclusivity” from its members and all CPS staff (Block Club Chicago, 2/13).
Mayor Lightfoot stomps on past fightback
New racist liberal mayor Lori Lightfoot is carrying on the ruthless tradition of her Democratic predecessors as she attacks the working class of the City. Whatever her self-proclaimed “progressive” credentials, she fought tooth and nail during last year’s education worker strike against increasing funding and staffing in the mostly Black and Latin public school system. Meanwhile, she was more than happy to hand out over a billion dollars in workers taxes to finance private real estate developments in the City.
By attacking the strikers, Lightfoot attacked the ones who will get hurt the most—students.
We can never count on liberal politicians and union leaders to give the kind of anti-capitalist leadership and communist education that the international working-class needs and deserves.
All the more important to win working-class youth such as these Senn students to fight to abolish racism, something impossible under capitalism.
Carrying on the fight
These students are correctly protesting the racist nature of capitalist society and the Party must win them to continue their struggle. These liberal rulers run a devastatingly racist society and system. The students at Senn are carrying on and helping build a spirited movement led by working-class students from major U.S. cities such as Brooklyn and Los Angeles, to the schools of Paris and New Delhi and all over the world that are fighting back.
One more red salute to the Senn students! Stay tuned to this struggle!

NEW YORK CITY, February 16—At least 30 were arrested in Times Square as antiracists protested against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the tech companies that profit off of the racist terror against undocumented workers.
Nearly 500 antiracists protested in a march sponsored by Close the Camps/Cosecha against the Thomson Reuters Corporation. One protester said, “We will not remain silent as corporations profit from human suffering” (NY Post, 2/16). Such is the nature of a system defined by profit, exploitation, and theft of labor.
They chanted, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, we will make the system fall.” That system is capitalism. It will fall when we smash it with communist revolution under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party.
Passersby looked on; many chanted along. Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), some active in Close the Camps/Cosecha in New York and New Jersey, played an active role in the march. Nearly two hundred people took the communist newspaper, CHALLENGE.
The protest occurred just as Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump announced he will unleash ICE SWAT teams, units from the Southern border, on the workers and youth of New York City and other metropolitan hubs across the U.S.
Against such gutter racism, workers can and will fight back. We can beat back this racist attack, as long as we expose both Republican and Democrat leaders for the misleaders that they are.
Tech serves gestapo
Thomson Reuters and its subsidiaries give ICE access to numbers of databases in exchange for tens of millions of dollars. According to ICE, Reuters provides license plate scanning data and “continuous monitoring and alert service that provides real-time jail booking data to support the identification and location” of immigrant workers (VICE, 11/11/19).
This data feeds the gestapo deportation machine that tracks, captures, and terrorizes immigrant workers—many of whom are children—like animals. These are similar tactics used by slave catchers and the Ku Klux Klan who hunted down escaping enslaved workers in the 1800s. What the capitalist state did to Black workers then is what they are doing to mainly Latin workers now.
By collaborating with ICE, Thomson Reuters is following the same grisly racist path of IBM, which powered the Nazis. The U.S. tech company played “a pivotal role in the Holocaust —all six phases: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination” (Huffington Post, 2/27/2012).
Of course, Thomson Reuters is just one of numerous technology companies using their innovations to serve bipartisan state terrorism. “Hewlett Packard Enterprise…Microsoft, Motorola Solutions…Palantir [Amazon, Dell, Canon, UPS, LinkedIn, and more] all have active contracts with…ICE” (NBC News, 6/20/2018). And yes, IBM continues to upload its legacy as a fascist collaborator, with the Border Patrol this time.  
Capitalism is the crime
The U.S. gestapo criminalizes workers and children, destroys lives, breaks families, and sheds blood. The raids also succeed in terrorizing and pacifying countless more workers.
Workers and children who risk their lives to cross a capitalist-made border are not criminals; they are refugees. They are our sisters and brothers who have the same aspirations as all other members of our class—to get our needs met against an impossible system.
The real crime is committed by the U.S. imperialists who created borders and the economic situation forcing workers to escape in the first place. The countries—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador—that workers mostly hail from “provide the cheap labor to cut the sugar cane, haul the coffee and bananas, and slave in sweatshops and the kitchens of tourist resorts” (Huffington Post, 6/24/14).
Know your enemy
Workers and youth who stand up to this racism must be encouraged. The challenge is to turn the antiracist rage of protesters into recognizing the need for an international movement and revolutionary Party against capitalism. If the antiracist protesters unite under the banner of the racist Democratic Party, the working class is under greater danger (see page 2). Liberal politicians and bosses are not friends of the working class. They seek to exploit the desperation of workers in order to build allegiance to the very system that oppresses us.
Smash borders and profit
To eliminate racist deportations, we need to abolish borders once and for all and create a society that is run by and for the working class. No politician can do that. Only a communist party, Progessive Labor Party, can.
As Langston Hughes wrote, the fight is the same everywhere (see page 8). PLP fights for multiracial unity among all workers across all borders. Divisions by race and nationality, economically and politically weaken the entire working class. Only a united class under the leadership of Black and Latin workers in the international PLP has the power to break this system, brick by brick. Join us.

He was an antiracist, a fighter, and a Black communist. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) both reflected and shaped the history of his time. Promoting multiracial unity and internationalism, Hughes serves as an inspiration for antiracists and communists everywhere.
A fighter
A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes moved to the left during the “red decade” of the 1930s, when he worked tirelessly with the Communist Party (CPUSA) to free the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women—from legal lynching (“Scottsboro, Ltd.”). He hailed Communist Party led multiracial unionism (“Open Letter to the South”), praised the uprooting of racism in Soviet Central Asia, and reported on the multiracial Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (I Wonder as I Wander).
He later nurtured the militancy of the Civil Rights Movement (“Freedom Train”) and the emergence of post-colonial African literature. While Hughes’s political organizing was primarily in his writing, his life was threatened when he toured the U.S. South giving poetry readings in support of the Scottsboro Boys, and he was almost killed by a fascist-fired mortar shell in Spain.
Poems of communist virtues
The first Black U.S. author to make a living entirely from his writings, Hughes published some 35 books, ranging from novels and short stories to plays, autobiography to journalism, musicals to children’s books. His Chicago Defender newspaper columns featuring the forthright opinions of the fictional Harlem worker Jesse B. Semple (e.g., Simple Speaks His Mind) cemented his popularity.  Above all, Hughes was known for the hundreds of poems he penned voicing the anger, bravery, and wry irony of Black U.S. workers.
He also promoted the necessity for multiracial working-class internationalism. “Dreams” are, for Hughes, not idle imaginings, but expressions of actual human need.  If indefinitely “deferred,” however, a dream either “dr[ies] up like a raisin in the sun” or “explode[s]” (“Harlem”).  (The poem inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun.) What is needed is a world “Where black or white, / Whatever race you be, / Will share the bounties of the earth/ And every man is free” (“I Dream a World”).
Bosses censor his revolutionary side
What most people know—or think they know—about Hughes, however, has been warped by anticommunism. Grilled about some of his revolutionary poems of the 1930s (“Goodbye, Christ,” “Good Morning, Revolution!”, and “Put Another ‘S’ in the U.S.A.”) he was hauled before Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in 1954. Hughes never “named names” or repudiated the Communist Party.  But he increasingly engaged in self-censorship, ventriloquizing his sharpest criticisms of ruling-class red-baiting through the sardonic commentary of Jesse B. Semple and excluding all his Depression-era pro-communist poetry from the 1957 edition of his Selected Poems. Both Hughes the man and Hughes the poet were victims of the Cold War.
The political censorship of Hughes’s pro-communism still continues in the selection of Hughes’s works in the textbooks used in high school and college classrooms.  The standard anthologies feature almost exclusively his 1920s blues- and jazz-inflected poems, such as “The Weary Blues,” and works affirming the value and beauty of Negro identity, such as the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the short story “The Blues I’m Playing,” and the poems “Mother to Son” (“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”) and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“My soul has grown deep like the rivers”).  
The effect of selecting such texts and excluding his pro-communist, anti-capitalist works is to convert Hughes’s revolutionary, class-based politics into a politics of Black cultural nationalism that overlooks the grounding of racism in capitalist social relations. The pro-communist Hughes is then made safe for the capitalist classroom. The Hughes who celebrated the achievements of Soviet socialism is expelled.
Weaknesses of old movement
Because of his closeness to the CPUSA, however, Hughes’s works reflect not just its strengths but also its shortcomings. For instance, his ambiguous relationship to U.S. patriotism is linked to the CPUSA’s view (especially pronounced during the era of the Popular Front Against Fascism (1936-1945)—of communism as “twentieth-century Americanism.” In the frequently anthologized “I Too,” the “darker brother” proclaims that he’ll eventually be invited to the table from which he has been excluded because “they’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed . . . I, too, am America.”
In “Let America Be America Again,” there is a tug-of-war between two speakers, one readily assimilated to the American Dream, the other voicing the standpoint of those historically excluded (“the Negro . . . the poor white, . . . the red man . . . the immigrant”) who proclaim, “America never was America to me.” But the poem ends, “And yet I swear this oath—America will be!”
Here a liberal politics of inclusion—premised upon the extension of U.S. “democracy”—substitutes for the revolutionary view that U.S. capitalism is founded upon racist exploitation and division, and that only proletarian revolution can produce the “dream” of a better world.
Progressive Labor Party (its founding members broke away from the CPUSA in the early 1960s) has learned from the mistakes of the old  communist movement. It is now clear that in the contradiction between nationalism and internationalism, communists must denounce nationalism in all forms. Nationalist politics only serve the interests of the  capitalist ruling class.
Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration speech is a case in point. Quoting Hughes, he asserted, “I too, am America,” as well as in Martin Luther King’s riffing on “Let America Be America Again” in several key speeches (Miller 2016, 2020).
Clearly, ruling class defenders have no trouble co-opting ideas when it suits them.
Undying commitment
Despite these ideological contradictions, Hughes’s principal legacy is an undying commitment to the struggle against racism and the fight for an egalitarian communist future, one in which the blood-sucking “life robbers” of colonialism and imperialism will be overthrown by the “Red Armies of the international proletariat / Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown . . . / Rais[ing] the blood-red flag that / Never will come down!” (“Always the Same”). Hughes was a poet laureate for the workers of the world.

CHICAGO, February 8—Around 70 people came together on the city’s south side this evening to celebrate Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) ongoing tradition of recognizing and taking leadership from working-class Black communists. A broad age-range of workers attended, from students in their teens to people with four or more decades of fighting this fascist system.
Features of our third annual Black and Red Dinner were heart-felt, personal and political stories from two comrades, and attendance from a greater number of younger people who responded to our message of antiracism and the leadership of Black workers being a key part of our Party’s fight for communist-led worker power.
The program was engaging, and those who joined us for the first time noted that we didn’t just give lip-service to Black comrades leading the work. It is a stance proven by action that we carry out as a necessary part of worldwide communist revolution.
An ongoing tradition of communist Black leadership
For the dinner’s keynote speech, a comrade presented the history of the antiracist line of the Party, and recognition of the continued importance of leadership from Black workers to our movement. He talked about the how early communist theorist and revolutionary Karl Marx was very much influenced by communal societies he studied from all over the world. Marx was outspoken about the enslavement and continued oppression of Black people in the United States, noting in his influential book Capital that “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”
The comrade went on to highlight the leadership of Black workers here in Chicago, and around the world. Writers and activists, noted communists and those influenced by communist theories/theorists, such as Franz Fanon, Angela Davis, the founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and more. They all wrote about recognizing that the fight for liberation from racism is linked to class oppression internationally.
The second speaker of the night talked about her influences to both join the Party in college, and now taking on further responsibility for leading the work. Noting the mentoring she received from another Black comrade, she said she was made more confident in her abilities because of the example set by the people who won her to PLP. She dedicated her speech to her teenage daughter—herself a maturing antiracist fighter—passing encouragement through the generations.
Working-class inspired music and games
One of the highlights of the event was the contagiously-enthusiastic participation of about twenty youth present. During an entertaining songwriting activity, a mixed group of teens, comrades, and adult workers came up with powerful and inspiring lyrics that were also bilingual, to a tune of artist Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road (Remix):
We got the workers in the front, bosses on their a**, Power to the People, Power to the Working Class!
Fighting for our rights, every day and night, power in our sight, we will all unite…
The bosses can’t tell us nothing, they can’t tell us nothing...
Obreros unidos, ¡jamás serán vencidos! Arriba, abajo — ¡Los jefes al carajo! (Workers united, will never be defeated! Up, down – Bosses, go to hell!)
The entire room erupted in applause!
Another fun activity the event organizers put together was a version of Jeopardy, with all of the categories being about Black communists, including historical events (such as PLP beating down the Nazis and integrating Chicago’s Marquette Park in the 1970s) and personal quotes. Once again, the high school students in the room took the lead, answering the most questions, hands down. It was truly inspirational to watch these youth—the future of our Party—embracing antiracist history and politics.
Antiracist action and theory
During this election season, the liberals who have already been proven to be the main threat for our class, are willing to promise every concession imaginable. What they will never follow through on is true freedom from the continued humiliation and death of racism, sexism, capitalism and imperialism.
In our Party’s document, Black Workers’ Leadership: Key Revolutionary Force (see www.plp.org) we explain the need to fight racism in all aspects of our work: “Racism is the main tool the ruling class has to divide the working class.” We understand that racism and capitalism go hand in hand. Voting for liberals or whatever “lesser-evil” presents itself under capitalism will never free us from their destructive effects. The exploitation of Black workers worldwide had been integral to the growth of this murderous system.
The historical fightback and continued leadership of Black workers in our ranks has strengthened our understanding and actions. Those who have experienced the worst of this system must give leadership in tearing it down. Join us in rising up and fighting back!